Colloque | “Networking May Sinclair / Les réseaux littéraires de May Sinclair ”

Many reviewers and critics have shown that May Sinclair’s modernism was not so much a derivation of other contemporary aesthetics but was rather a product of her idiosyncratic articulation of her many research interests and experiences. In addition, “the interdisciplinarity of Sinclair’s output […] eludes straightforward categorisation and this has arguably contributed to the traditional critical neglect of her writing” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 1). As May Sinclair is now gaining critical legitimacy, this conference seeks to explore Sinclair’s texts and contexts and aims to shed light on her place in literary history and on her contribution to “the radical modernist challenge to traditional assumptions about what it means to be human” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 14).

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Program :

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Thursday 24 June

10:15 : Welcome Address ("Paris time - UTC/GMT +2 hours")

10:30-12:00: May Sinclair between the Victorians and the Modernists
Chair: Florence Marie
Georges Letissier (Université de Nantes) – “The Innocence of the Eye”: May Sinclair’s Reversed Case Study of the Brontës
Maria Juko (University of Hamburg) – Jessie Boucherett’s Smilesian Gentlewomen in May Sinclair’s Three Sisters
Isabelle Brasme (Université de Nîmes) – May Sinclair, Modernist Critic

14:00-15:00 Memory and Aftermath
Chair: Isabelle Brasme
Andrew Frayn (Edinburgh Napier University) – “Odd how the War changes us”: May Sinclair, domesticity and war
Jana Funke (University of Exeter ) – “Nothing is lost”: May Sinclair, Inherited Memory and Impersonality.

15:15-16:15 Mysticism
Chair: Claire Drewery
Christine Battersby (University of Warwick) – With Schopenhauer at the Belgian Front: May Sinclair's War Journal and Related Texts
James H. Thrall (Knox College) – Agency and the Modern Mysticism of May Sinclair

Friday 25 June
 

10:00- 11:00 Woman in/of letters
Chair: Rebecca Bowler
Suzana Zink (Université de Neuchâtel) – “Miss Sinclair’s Sparkles”: May Sinclair in Contemporary Newspapers
Sanna Schyllert (University College London) – “‘Don’t have anything to do with them,’ she said”: May Sinclair as a fictional character

11:15-12:45 Aesthetic Networks
Chair: Sanna Schyllert
Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University) – Women writing the uncanny in the 1920s: May Sinclair, Clemence Dane and Elizabeth Bowen
Shalini Sengupta (University of Sussex) – Broken Gifts: May Sinclair, Modernism, and the Motif of Exchange
Khalid Chaouch (Sultan Moulay Slimane University) - May Sinclair and her Illustrators/Co-Authors

14:00-15:00 Treading New Ground
Chair: Georges Letissier
Milena Schwab-Graham (University of Leeds) – “Sharp, queer, uncertain happiness”: Walking as feminist “affective militancy” in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier
Faye Pickrem (York University) – The Anatomy of Agency in May Sinclair

15:15-16:45 KEYNOTE LECTURE
Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery – Transtextual Mysticisms: Editing May Sinclair
Chair: Leslie de Bont