Decentring and decolonising the literary canon at the University of Minho: an intercultural, interartistic and interdisciplinary approach to Victorian poetry studies

Abstract

The paper focuses on the most innovative features of my twenty-five-year research and teaching of Victorian Literature (from the 1820s to the 1890s) in the Department of English and North-American Studies of the University of Minho – those that may be of interest to a more critical and/or decolonial approach to the Canon. In briefly tracing this academic development, encompassing different projects, publications and lectures, I hope to showcase the many interdisciplinary links (from the sciences to politics) and interartistic connections (with painting, music and drama) that my work establishes and explores, thus reflecting not only the latent modernity of the period but also of Victorian Studies. The paper analyses, in particular, the interesting and productive ways in which Victorian poetry and poetics (my special area) both interacts with the major historical and cultural issues of the period and, as a sophisticated genre, questions traditional values and canonical perspectives. A relevant facet of this research, which indirectly problematises and critiques a mere Anglocentric perspective, has been the one of Intercultural Poetics or the perspective of the Other emerging in several nineteenth-century poems, namely those addressing the Portuguese culture in particular. Besides the notions of Imagology and Representation, another focus of my attention has indeed been the dynamics or interplay of colonial history (nation and empire) with the literary imagination of some Victorian poets, and which postcolonial theories (among others) have proposed new and challenging readings of these texts.