UBC English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to “Why read Sir Charles Grandison?” a visiting speaker lecture featuring Dr. Alison Conway (University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus). Scroll to see the event details below and register to join us in-person on Monday, February 10th, 2025 at 3:30 pm PT.
Attendees are encouraged to read Chapter 2 of Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750-1820. They will not be asked if they’ve read Sir Charles Grandison.
This event is sponsored by the Eighteenth-Century Studies Journal.
Abstract
This paper considers how Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison came to anchor a history of the novel’s (failed) interfaith marriage plot. Grandison, it suggests, provides a map of the British eighteenth century’s religious topography, one that foregrounds minority traditions. How does Richardson’s support of the Jewish Naturalization Act and Jacobite sympathies complicate our account of the central role played by Protestantism in the realist novel’s evolution? What larger claims might we make about the centrality of Sir Charles Grandison to the British novel tradition, in light of its diverse religious investments?
Book cover for Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750-1820 by Alison Conway.
About the Speaker
Alison Conway is Professor of English, and Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, at UBC’s Okanagan campus. She is currently Associate Dean, Research, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her most recent monograph, Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750-1820, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2023. Professor Conway is Past President of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and currently a Trustee for the Women’s Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She serves on the Editorial Board of Eighteenth-Century Fiction and on the Advisory Board of Eighteenth-Century Studies.
