2024-25 S. J. Stubbs Lecture in English Literature

White Gold: Extractive Logic and Seriality in the Nineteenth Century uses the pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner’s career as a case study to ask conceptual questions about the role of ‘global’ serial publications, long-distance communications, and compressive forms in the establishment and maintenance of white colonial authority in the mid-nineteenth century. Woolner travelled to Australia to dig for gold in 1852 and then stayed on to start a successful sculpting business before returning to England in 1854 to continue his artistic career. With Francis Palgrave and Alfred Tennyson, Woolner curated a poetry anthology, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which became widely known as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Using sculpture and poetry, White Gold will consider the emergence of an extractive imagination in both material and literary terms, continuing the investigation into nineteenth-century seriality in Pettitt’s recent monographs.

*Please note that this lecture will contain references to racism and colonial violence in the nineteenth century and viewer discretion is advised.