Join us on Friday, 10 January for a creative conversation on Revolutionary Afterlives: Why Do We Continue to Care about the French Revolution?

10:15–11:30 a.m.

Presiding: Margaret Anne Cohen, Stanford Univ.

Speakers: Katherine Astbury, Univ. of Warwick; Julia V. Douthwaite, Univ. of Notre Dame; Mary McAlpin, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville; Ronen Steinberg, Michigan State Univ.

The literature of the French Revolution generated later developments in fiction and politics, yet it remains unknown. Two new books fill that gap in radically different ways: The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France and Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution. Session contrasts Douthwaite’s new positivism with Astbury’s trauma theory.

keywords: Revolution, Fiction, Terror, Trauma, Romanticism