Karen Brown was Invited Speaker at International Symposium
Dr Karen Brown, an AHRI Visiting Research Fellow in the English programme, was an invited speaker at the international symposium W.B. Yeats & the Arts, held in August at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Karen’s lecture, entitled ‘Sister Arts Aesthetics in the Early Career of W. B. Yeats: The Case of The Secret Rose’, traced the legacy of Pre-Raphaelitism in Yeats’s career in 1880s and 90s London, and offered a close reading of sister arts aesthetics within The Secret Rose (1897).
Karen discussed how the elaborate book cover by Althea Gyles, the Morris-inspired vignette, and the Romantic-Symbolist illustrations by John B. Yeats, forge fusions between text and image in the imagination of the reader/viewer, and fulfill Yeats’s desire for mutual support between the arts. The Secret Rose thereby embodies a metamorphosis from fin de siècle aesthetics into Revival literature, and heralds a marked tradition of inter-arts collaboration in Irish writing to the present day.
The paper concluded with a comparison between Yeats's 1897 stories, and his The Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose (1927), illustrated by Irish artist Norah McGuinness. Her Byzantine-inspired drawings were compared to Yeats's Byzantium and discussed in the context of his 'modernism'.
Karen is a researcher in the field of word and image studies and joined the English programme in early 2011.
Posted: 7 October 2011
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