Anticipatory Materialisms

This one-day conference will explore literature that embodies or engages with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophies of materiality in ways that anticipate and pre-empt the more recent ‘turn’ to materiality and affect. The conference will seek to unearth earlier philosophies and ideas about materiality that aren’t overwritten by (but may be inflected by) recent theorisations. The conference intends to provide a forum for the dissemination of work and work-in-progress that explores the anticipatory nature of modernist, Victorian and earlier writings. Papers will engage with literature from any period that predates and anticipates the ‘affective’ or ‘materialist’ turn of the late twentieth century.  Indeed, it may be the broader outcome of the conference that such works, in their acts of pre-emptive capture, challenge narratives of a ‘turn’ or ‘discovery’ articulated in many expressions of phenomenological, non-representational, affect theory and new materialism.