Professor Kitson to Lecture at Re-opening of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill
Professor
Peter Kitson has been invited
to deliver one of four keynote lectures to a international conference
held to mark the formal re-opening of Horace Walpole’s famous Gothic
house Strawberry Hill after a two-year long programme of restoration
costing £9 million.
Walpole's 'little Gothic castle', completed in 1760 has significance as one of the most influential individual buildings of such Rococo "Gothick" architecture which prefixed the later developments of the nineteenth century Gothic revival, and for increasing the use of Gothic designs for houses. Walpole was famous for single-handedly originating the craze for the literary Gothic with his pseudo-medieval novel of terror, The Castle of Otranto (1764), a great favourite with Dundee English students!
The conference is to be held at Strawberry Hill (now owned by St Mary’s University College) on 25-26th March. Professor Kitson’s lecture is entitled “Horace Walpole, Chinoiserie and the Stage” and will discuss Walpole’s ambivalent relationship with the eighteenth-century fascination with China and “cinoiserie”, a talk to related to his current Leverhulme supported research project on Britain and China in the Romantic period.
Further information is available on the conference website at http://www.smuc.ac.uk/romanticadaptations/.
Posted: 24 March 2011
del.icio.us
digg
reddit
facebook
stumbleupon