A Single Drop of Ink for a Mirror

George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), Adam Bede (Chapter 2, page 1 of 7):

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

This interdisciplinary conference will focus on intersections between literary and visual art in the 19th century. A group of 21 literary scholars and art historians will present new work on the often neglected links between text and image in the long nineteenth century, from Blake to early- twentieth century photography. A small exhibition in the Princeton Art Museum will accompany the conference.

Friday, 4 October 2019
https://princetonartlit2019.princeton.edu/
9:00 Welcome: Deborah Nord and Rebecca Rainof
9:15 Plenary Panel 1
Tim Barringer (Yale University), “Livingstone and the Lion: Image and Text in Victorian African Exploration Literature”
Ruth Yeazell (Yale University), “Words for Vermeer”
Chair: Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton University)
10:30 Break
11:00 Illustrations, Prints, and Prophecies
Rosalind Parry (Princeton University), “Clare Leighton’s British Pastoral”
Joseph Viscomi (University of North Carolina), “Authenticating Blake: Life-time Impressions, Posthumous Prints, and Forgeries; or, Printing Blake: William, Catherine, and all the others”
Robyn Warhol (Ohio State University), “Reading Victorian Novel Illustrations in the Serial Moment”
Chair: Meredith Martin (Princeton University)
12:30 Lunch Break
1:45 Visit to Exhibition, Princeton Art Museum
Rosalind Parry and Ariel Kline, Curators
3:00 Childhood and Self
Aileen Farrar (Nova Southeastern University), “F.D. Bedford’s Childhood in a Drawer: The Illustrated ‘Lost’ Realities of Peter Pan”
Alexandra Neel (Loyola Marymount University) , “Jane Eyre’s Selfie”
Linda Shires (Yeshiva University), “Image><Text: Kipling’s Just So Stories”
Chair: Jeff Nunokawa (Princeton University)
4:30 Break
4:45 Keynote Address
Caroline Arscott (The Courtauld Institute of Art), “Picture Posies: Illustration and the Idyllic Mode, 1860-1875”
Introduction: Bridget Alsdorf (Princeton University)
6:30-8:30 Reception (Chancellor Green Rotunda)

Saturday, October 5
9:00 The PRB: A Family Portrait
Jeremy Melius (Tufts University), “Ruskin Undone”
Natalie Prizel (Princeton University), “Pre-Raphaelite in Black”
Jason Rosenfeld (Marymount Manhattan College): “Family Man: John Everett Millais’s Illustrations of Paternal Affection in the 1860s”
Chair: Anne McCauley (Princeton University)
10:30 Break
10:45 The Condition of England at Home and Abroad
Emily Madsen (University of Alaska, Anchorage), “Ghost in the Palimpsest: Missionary Revision”
David Pike (American University): “Nineteenth-Century Slum Imaginaries Then and Now”
Rebecca Rainof (Princeton University), “Van Gogh and the Victorians”
Chair: Natalie Prizel (Princeton University)
12:15 Lunch Break
1:30 Kate Flint (University of Southern California), “Snails, Slugs, and Scale”
Introduction: Deborah Nord
2:30 Picturing Modernism
Sophia Andres (University of Texas), “Virginia Woolf’s Pre-Raphaelite Incongruities in Orlando”
Maria DiBattista (Princeton University), “Taken from Life: The Modernist Portraits of E. O. Hoppé”
Ariel Kline (Princeton University), “The Minotaur”
Chair: Rebecca Rainof
3:45 Break
4:00 Plenary Panel 2
Elizabeth Helsinger (University of Chicago), “Ekphrastic Questions: Keats, Rossetti, and Field”
Rachel Teukolsky (Vanderbilt University), “Ruskin’s Media: The Cathedral and the Machine”
Chair: Rachael DeLue (Princeton University)
5:15 Summing Up: Jonah Siegel (Rutgers University)

Image credit: William Blake, “Eternally I labour on.” William Blake Collection (GC115); Graphic Arts Collection, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
https://library.princeton.edu/find/all/william%20blake