Our first event for the academic year will be taking place in person in Senate House, London – Room 37, Ground Floor on the 12th October 2021 6:00pm – 7:15pm. We encourage those who attend to wear masks.

Abstract

On the 13th June, 1791, the ‘queen of the bluestockings’ Elizabeth Montagu threw open the doors of her new home, 22 Portman Square, to public view. A ‘numerous and splendid company’ arrived to witness the unveiling of Montagu’s ‘feather room’, which had taken twelve women a decade to complete. Contemporary accounts record that ‘the walls are wholly covered with feathers, artfully sewed together,’ and that ‘the most brilliant colours, the produce of all climates, have wonderful effects on a feather ground of a dazzling whiteness.’

Lucy Powell will explore the meanings of Mrs Montagu’s feather hangings through the poetry of William Cowper. What can Cowper’s writings reveal about fashion and feathers in the late Georgian capital, and their unlikely pairing with poetic endeavour? How do the poet and the public intellectual frame London in a newly global context, and what part might the materiality of birds play in such a staging? With reference to Cowper’s earlier poem The Task, and to recent critical writing, this workshop will interrogate relationships between nationhood and gender, self and other, and idea and object, asking how late eighteenth-century formations of globalism continue to shape the ways in which we navigate the city.

About the Speaker

Dr Lucy Powell is an ECR Leverhulme fellow and a JRF at Trinity College, Oxford. She was awarded her PhD at UCL. Her first book, British Prison Fictions, 1718-1780, examines the preponderance of prisons in the novels of the eighteenth century, and enlightenment thinking about the self and the social that these reveal. Her new project looks at the ways in which new knowledge about birds enabled British writers and artists to reconfigure themselves in a global context. She is currently compiling the biographies of seven birds or feathered objects, and analysing their literary incarnations, as a way of mapping the material and ideological pathways to Empire. She is a New Generation Thinker for the BBC and has made radio programmes across the network on everything from the social history of the privy, to, earlier in the year, a series about the siblings of very famous men: Shakespeare’s Sisters. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times and Tank and Trade magazines.

Reading

William Cowper, “On Mrs Montagu’s Feather-Hangings” in The Poems of William Cowper, III Vols, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Rykamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Vol. III, pp. 23-4.

William Cowper, The Task, Books I and II, ibid. Vol. II, pp. 115-161.

Étienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’ in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. by Étienne Balibar and Maurice Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1990) pp. 86-106.

Homi Bhabha ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’ in Nation and Narration, ed. By Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990) pp. 1-7.

Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey, “Some Answers to the Question: ‘What is Postcolonial Enlightenment’”, in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. by Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) pp. 1-33.

Catherine Hall and Sonya O’ Rose, “Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire” in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World ed. by Catherine Hall and Sonya O’ Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) pp. 1-31.