4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Park Hall 261 Sponsored by: English, Department of, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Contact: Chloe Wigston Smith Faculty "Reading Geologically: Particulate Matter and the Novel," Rebecca Stern, University of South Carolina.This paper takes geology as both a model for understanding the conglomerate features of the novel and an historical foundation underlying literary reconfigurations of form, genre, and temporality. Stern argues that late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century geological discovery is both metaphor and cultural context for the novel; that geology is both a figurative analogy for thinking about literary form and the literal ground on which nineteenth-century subjects wrote and read. Through readings of Austen’s Sanditon and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone , Dr. Stern illustrates the congruence between the novel’s formal inconsistencies and nineteenth-century England’s dominant perspectives on geological history. Stern is the author of Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian Culture (Ohio State, 2008), as well as several articles on nineteenth-century literature and culture. Her current project is tentatively titled "Conjugating Victorians: Essays on Time, Grammar, and Other Living Forms."A reception will follow the talk. This event is sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Rodney Baine Lecture Fund. Georgia Colloquium in 18th and 19th C. British Literature