Provincial Poets and the Making of a Nation

Presenter	Associate Prof Valentina Gosetti (UNE)
Date	6 October 2022
Time	3:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Contact person	E: research.degrees@cdu.edu.au
Location	Online and Casuarina campus, Blue building 01.1.01 - Lecture Theatre
Open to	CDU staff and students, Early career researcher, HDR candidates, Public, Researcher

This talk aims to rediscover, document and analyse prominent regional voices swept aside by the powerful forces constructing national identity in nineteenth-century France. This provides a more positive view of provincialism and challenges the division between central and peripheral cultures.

Dr Valentina Gosetti’s work leads to a more inclusive and representative literary canon and highlights a new awareness of the crucial role of regional poets and poetry. She uses a new ‘transregional’ theoretical framework to revalue the potential of locality and place. Additionally, she provides a wealth of novel evidence in support of public debates aimed at bridging the urban-rural divide in Australia, France and beyond.

Dr Valentina Gosetti is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (DE200101206: Provincial Poets and the Making of a Nation) funded by the Australian Government.

Abstract

I love a sunburnt country

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges

Of droughts and flooding rains…

When I moved to what we now call “Australia” from the other side of the world, I realised that virtually everyone could recite these lines by heart. Poetry and songs have traditionally played a crucial role in conveying and fostering strong feelings of attachment to a particular place and sentiments of shared belonging. The aim of my project is to rediscover prominent regional poetic voices swept aside by the powerful centralising forces constructing national identity in nineteenth-century France.

In doing so, I hope also to reach a more positive and empowering view of provincialism and to challenge the dated division between central and peripheral cultures. The rich potential of locality and place as expressed through poetry will provide novel evidence in support of public debates aimed at bridging the urban-rural divide in Australia, France and beyond.

- Associate Prof Valentina Gosetti

Registration link

About the speaker

Associate Professor Valentina Gosetti

Originally from Collio di Vobarno, a small town of the province of Brescia, in the north of Italy, Valentina Gosetti recently received a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council to examine provincial poetry. She completed a Diploma di Laurea in French and English languages, literatures, and cultures at the University of Bologna (Italy); and then an MSt and a DPhil in French at Balliol College in the University of Oxford (UK). She has also been a pensionnaire étrangère at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, rue d’Ulm, and an intern at UNESCO (Headquarters, Paris). Before joining UNE, she held the Kathleen Bourne Junior Research Fellowship in French and Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College (University of Oxford, UK).