AVSA Conference Abstract

There is a definite art to writing conference abstracts: fitting the conference theme and its audience, making something sound exciting - and more importantly, plausible - when you might not have really started researching the topic yet, leaving yourself a clear sense of direction as well as space for alteration and improvisation when you do come back to write the paper.

Today I'm reading out my abstract for the Australasian Victorian Studies Conference to the Nineteenth Century Discussion Group, and I thought I would share it here as well. The conference theme is 'Victorian Beginnings', and it is being held here at UWA in early February.

Cameras on Camelot: Medievalism and (Victorian) New Media

Victorian photography, Jonathon Crary argues, formed part of a ‘vast systemic rupture’ generated by a ‘new cultural economy of value and exchange’. Yet while photography may have represented – literally – the new, the ephemeral, and the beginnings of a culture based around simulacra and spectacle, it also allowed the imaginative reconstruction and evocation of the past. An examination of the medievalist photographs created by Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron, among others, suggests the dual approaches to beginnings manifested in these images: they capture both the beginnings of Victorian new media and a revisitation of the beginnings of British national identity. As both ‘certificates of presence’ and obvious fictions, Victorian medievalist photographs engage with the paradoxical process of representing the past, a paradox made more obvious through the medium in which the representations are created.  These photographs bear obvious signs of artifice and are tied to the present by the novelty of the medium, yet they attempt to offer visual access to the past in a way not previously possible. As a record of a moment of reality, they present a vision of the past that carries a weight of presence despite the temporal gap between the production of the image and its constructed content. As part of a circulation of medievalist images across media – primarily painting, writing, and photography – medievalist photographs provide one venue in which to examine the continuities and changes generated by new forms of media, exemplifying the contradictions of modernity in their appeal to new and to old beginnings.

 I'm not really happy with the title, but I am looking forward to giving the paper (it has already been accepted). The pictures themselves are fascinating and they open up productive avenues of investigation and interdisciplinary scholarship. I'm looking forward to feedback from the discussion group - and any comments any reader might have!