Emma Clery: "Travel Writing and Sustainable Research: A Proposal Based on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters... (1796)"

Emma Clery, Professor of English Literature at the Department of English: “Travel Writing and Sustainable Research: A proposal based on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796)”

Presentation
At the end of June 1795 Mary Wollstonecraft, the celebrated defender of the French Revolution and proponent of women’s rights, landed in a remote part of the coast south of Gothenburg, accompanied by her one year old daughter and a maid. Wollstonecraft spent the next three and half months travelling across the border in Norway, then to Copenhagen and finally Hamburg, in quest of a missing ship commissioned by her former lover, the American entrepreneur Gilbert Imlay, carrying a cargo of silver. This commercial and legal quest is obscured in her published account of the journey, based on private letters to Imlay. Instead, Wollstonecraft mingles confessional hints with admiration of the landscape and keen observation of the differing social and political characteristics of the places she visits. This talk will outline some thoughts towards a collective research project that would use Wollstonecraft’s text as a map towards understanding and navigating today’s challenges, including the continuing struggle for gender equality and the question of how to conduct research in a zero-carbon future.

About the Lecturer
Emma Clery has just joined us at Uppsala University as a professor of English Literature at the Department of English. She was formerly employed at the University of South Hampton and her recent publications come from her Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowship on ”Romantic-era Women Writers and the Question of Progress”, and include monographs such as Jane Austen, the Banker’s Sister (Biteback 2017) and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (Cambridge UP 2017). She has published extensively within the areas of women’s writing in the long eighteenth century, gothic writing, print culture, and literary engagements with economic debate.