We hope you will join us!
Toronto Eighteenth-Century Group Events
Friday, February 28, 2025 | 4:00 pm, refreshments - 4:30 pm sharp, talk | Jackman Humanities Bldg., Room 616
"Screen Performances"
Paper Presentation by Marlis Schweitzer, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, York University
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In Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 film EMMA, Mr. Woodhouse’s aversion to drafts is comically rendered through the actions of two male servants who hasten to arrange a series of folding screens to his liking. In a scene deleted from the film, Mr. Woodhouse, portrayed by the incomparable Bill Nighy, sits in his chair completely encircled by screens, only to complain that “it’s dark in here,” at which point the two servants scramble to bring him a candelabra. This running “screen” gag not only affords Nighy the opportunity to metaphorically “chew the scenery” but also gestures towards the affordances of folding screens in eighteenth-century British life. Taking a cue from Nighy’s onscreen performance, my talk will offer a performance history of the folding screen. Bridging material culture, design history, theatre history, and performance studies, it will analyze a range of performances that transpired around, with, on, and through folding screens. These include performances of comfort and privacy in domestic spaces; performances with screens – perhaps none more famous than David Garrick’s salon performance in Paris; performances of sexual frivolity in public theatres – vividly rendered in She Stoops to Conquer (1773); the documentation of performance practices via portrait prints pasted onto screens; and the corresponding representation of screens in political prints where they function as metaphors for the corruption and lies of political actors. At a time when so many of us spend hours “glued” to our screens, how might a performance history of the folding screen shed light on our own complicated yet deeply personal relationship with objects?
Related Group Events
Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 4:30-6:00 pm | Jackman Humanities Bldg., Rm. 718
Work in Nineteenth-Century Studies (WINCS) Graduate Student Presentation Event
Presentations by--
Gabriel Briex (PhD Candidate), “Melville and the Utopians”
Colleen McDonell (PhD Candidate), "Stevenson’s Strange Case of Servant Witnesses: Incidental Characters and Major Incident in Gothic Fiction"
Philip Trotter (PhD Candidate), "Disinterring James Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs: Revision and Pre-Romantic Authorship"
Friday, March 14, 2025 | 4:00-6:30 pm | Jackman Humanities Bldg., Rm. 616
"River Man: Romanticism and the Myth of the Genius too Sensitive to Survive"
Vincent A. De Luca Lecture with Tim Fulford, Professor of English, De Montfort University. Sponsored by the Department of English, University of Toronto.
Graduate Student Reading Group
Local graduate students in eighteenth-century studies have formed a reading group,
which meets before each TECG talk to discuss a reading recommended by the speaker.
New members are always welcome!
For more information, please contact: Philip Trotter