Organised by Caroline Kögler, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies".

Across the political spectrum, historicity has been mobilised as a prized creative and critical lens to make sense of the present. This finds poignant expression in the plethora of twentyfirst-century (neo-)historical novels and TV series that are set in the long eighteenth or nineteenth centuries to reimagine the past through an ostensibly more progressive lens, such as queer neo-Victorian formats or Bridgerton as an example of neo-Georgian cultural production. And yet, reimagining pasts in this way is hardly an insulation against reactionary views. Not only have formats such as the above been challenged for their persisting investment in orientalism or for their reluctance to broach the reasons for multifaceted inequality, but the historical has also been channelled in political narratives across the board. For example, Donald Trump's second presidential campaign has been deemed 'historic' and his proposed policies have been viewed as nineteenth-century revenants. Similarly, the Thatcher government in the 1980s and David Cameron's government in the UK both stylised their policies and terms of office as a return to 'Victorian Values'. Even further in the past, the term 'Gothic' emerged during England's Civil War (1642–49) to bolster pro-parliamentarian positions, referring to a mythologized history that ostensibly predated the establishing of the British monarchy. Rendering explicit both such prizing of particular histories and the creative usage to which historicity itself is put, Zadie Smith's recent novel, The Fraud (2023), collapses different oppositional political ideologies and temporal contexts into one. Via the Tichborne case, the Victorian legal cause célèbre at the centre of the novel, Smith not only challenges Britain's longstanding tradition of abolitionist mythmaking but also illuminates the historical roots of Trump-like populist movements. As these eclectic examples suggest, neo-historicity is a mobile phenomenon malleable and adaptable to a variety of aesthetic practices, historical moments, and to different sociopolitical agendas.

At twenty-five years into the new century, this conference opens up a forum to discuss these manifold currencies, guises, and usages of historical pasts and historicity as such in neo-historical fictions past and present. Our aim is to further understanding regarding how neo-historicity is deployed in cultural productions of different periods to interact with the respective status quo and how these interactions also produce constellations in which some historical reiterations become more prized than others, their symbolic circuits interconnecting historical moments sometimes decades or centuries apart. Such prized temporalities - temporal relations; specific renditions of a particular history - become part of valorising narratives that might be far from progressive, yet rich in aesthetics and political potency. As different historical periods and historical distance/difference collapse in a multiverse of social media, it becomes more pivotal than ever to foster modes of perception that may tease apart the accumulating layers of signification that may point towards progressive futures and yet may lead back into the murkiest of pasts.

Programme

Monday, 2 June (events for speakers only)

10:15 | Meeting of the Research Group

12:00 | Neo-Historical Tour through Berlin

Tuesday, 3 June

09:15–09:30 | Reception

09:30–09:45 | Caroline Kögler (Freie Universität Berlin): Introduction

Panel 1: 1500–1800 in Neo-Historical Fiction

09:45–10:15 | Susanne Gruß (University of Bamberg): In Defence of Witches: Witchcraft and the Scottish Witch Hunts in Recent Neo-Historical Fiction

10:15–10:45 | Laura Schmitz-Justen (University of Münster): Invested in the Past: Distilled Ideality, Trans Archives and the Pressures of the Book Market in Jordy Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox (2018)

10:45–11:15 | Dorothea Flothow (University of Salzburg): Writing Good King Charles's Golden Days: The Restoration Period in Historical Fiction (1820s to 2010s)

11:15–11:45 | Coffee Break

Panel 2: Imperial Hauntings

11:45–12:15 | Lewis Mondal (Royal Holloway University of London): 'More desirable… than money': Womanhood, Whiteness, and the Plantation in Contemporary Narrative of Slavery

12:15–12:45 | Barbara Braid (University of Szczecin) A Hauntological Reading of Afrofuturistic Dyschronia in Antebellum (2020) and Kindred (2022)

12:45–13:15 | Marlena Tronicke (University of Cologne): 'Like Weather': Neo-Victorian Afterimages of Empire and Domesticity

13:15–14:15 | Lunch Break

14:15–15:15 | Julie Taddeo (University of Maryland): Period drama TV, history and presentism: Contested histories in Netflix's Bridgerton (Digital Keynote)

15:15–15:30 | Coffee Break

Panel 3: Neo-Historical Fiction and Postcoloniality

15:30–16:00 | Bivitha Easo (Alliance University, Bengaluru): Cast(e)ing the Community: Family Historical Narratives of Kerala

16:00–16:30 | Nora Pleßke (University of Magdeburg): Prized Futures: Colonial and Indigenous Heritage in Melissa Lucashenko's Historical Novel Edenglassie (2023)

16:30–17:00 | Raisa Inocêncio (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro): Ancestrofuturism: A Culture of Axé and the Resilience of Colonial Legacies

Wednesday, 4 June

09:15–09:30 | Reception

Panel 4: Imperial Hauntings, Continued

09:30–10:00 | Irene Stoukou (University of Thessaloniki): Reimagining the Victorian Past: Neo-Historicity, Posthumanism, and Political Temporalities in Disney's Alice

10:00–10:30 | Peter Löffelbein (Freie Universität Berlin): Challenging Times: Temporality and History in Zadie Smith's The Fraud

10:30–10:45 | Coffee Break

Panel 5: The Long 19^th Century: Gender and Queer Perspectives

10:45–11:15 | Caroline Kögler (Freie Universität Berlin): The Anarchitectural Mediality of Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

11:15–11:45 | Maria Juko (independent scholar): Exploring the mines of Brontëana in 21st century Graphic Literature

11:45–12:15 | Anne Korfmacher (University of Graz): Spectres of Futures Remembered – The Queer Hauntological Ethics of Natasha Pulley's neo-Victorian Novels The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

12:15–13:30 | Lunch Break

Panel 6: (Neo-)Modernism

13:30–14:00 | Andrew James Johnston (Freie Universität Berlin): The Deep-Time Sexualities of Mary Renault's Theseus novels

14:00–14:30 | Anna Girling (Edinburgh University): Arcadians, Utopians, Necrophiles: LOTE’s Decadent Historicism in the Time of 'Immediacy'

14:30–15:00 | Karoline Strauch (Freie Universität Berlin): Fascist Figures & Modern Muses: Queer Neo-Modernism and Ellis Avery's The Last Nude

15:00–16:00 | Coffee & Closing Discussion