| Tadeusz Kosciuszko: Poland’s National Hero in British Art and Literature by Thomas McLean, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, University of Otago, New Zealand.
Most Australians know Kosciuszko as the name of a mountain. But Tadeusz Kosciuszko was one of the most important figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This lecture will offer a brief overview of Kosciuszko’s remarkable life—his youth in Poland, his service in the American Revolution, his attempts to bring a similar revolution to his homeland, and his life in exile after the failure of the Kosciuszko Uprising. But its main focus will be the literary and artistic works created in Great Britain to commemorate the Polish general.
Some of the greatest writers of the era, including John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, praised Kosciuszko in verse, and he became the subject of a fascinating series of paintings and engravings produced after a brief visit to London in 1797. This lecture will examine these works and consider how they helped create images and stereotypes of Poland that remain with us today.
About Thomas McLean
Thomas McLean is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is the author of The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the British Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011) and editor of Further Letters of Joanna Baillie (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2010). A recipient of research fellowships from Harvard, Yale, UCLA, and ANU, he is currently working on a biography of nineteenth-century British novelist Jane Porter. His scholarly work appears in many journals, most recently the Keats-Shelley Review, Harvard Library Bulletin, and Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.
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Lecture Details
Date: Thursday 29 September 2011
Time: 6pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre (G.21), ground floor, Geography Building, UWA
View Map: http://www.uwa.edu.au/campus_map
The nearest carparks are 18 and 19 via Fairway entrance No 1.
The lecture is free and open to the public, no RSVP required.
Institute of Advanced Studies,
The University of Western Australia
M021, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009
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