Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form (Routledge, 2024), edited by Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling. This event is hosted by Queer@Kings, with support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Resonating with contemporary ecological and queer theory, The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature pioneers the theorisation of the Victorian idyll, establishing its significance as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-century British culture across media and genres. Approaching the idyll through three intersecting categories ― subject, ecology, and form ― this book reshapes thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century in art and literature. Though typically accompanied, on the surface, by experiences of calm and pleasure, the idyllic was characterised by ambivalent and frequently unresolved undercurrents relating to contestations over gender and sexuality, temporality, the urban, and the colonial. The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature will be of interest to scholars working in art history, English literature, Victorian studies, British history, queer and trans* theory, musicology, and ecocriticism, and will enliven debates pertaining to the environmental across periods.

This event concludes with a wine reception.