What's wrong with wrongdoing?

Wed 23 October 2013

Institute of Continuing Education

A free public lecture at Madingley Hall by Professor Alison Sinclair, Professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge.

The ongoing popularity of crime novels and crime drama on television attests to our interest in the wrongdoings done by others. This lecture looks at the dynamics of the reader (or viewer) and the cultures of wrongdoing. It does so not through contemporary examples but via popular literature of the 19th century. Simple in form, and directed towards a reading public that in general lacked sophistication, these popular texts allow us to think about how we engage with victims, perpetrators, those who lament (or moan) and those who are braggarts. A central question is that of why we take pleasure and interest in these texts. If we think along the lines, 'What's in it for us?', is there anything 'wrong' in what might be in it for us?

The examples are drawn from Spanish and English popular literature currently on display at the Cambridge University Library exhibition 'Read all about it! Wrongdoing in Spain and England in the long nineteenth century'.

Alison Sinclair is Professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Intellectual History in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Her research and teaching range covers 19th-century and early 20th-century Peninsular literature, culture and intellectual history.

Her publications include articles on Alas and Unamuno, and on the intellectual history of the early 20th century. She is the author of The Deceived Husband (Oxford: UP, 1993), Dislocations of Desire: Gender, Identity, and Strategy in 'La Regenta' (North Carolina, 1998), Unamuno, the Unknown, and the Vicissitudes of the Self (Manchester: UP, 2001), Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform (2007), and Trafficking Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Centres of Exchange and Cultural Imaginaries (2009).

This talk is part of the Madingley Lecture series of free public talks given by leading authorities in their fields. The lectures take place at Madingley Hall, home of the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education (ICE).

Cost: Free