Please join the Method and Madness Premodern Graduate Reading Group in welcoming visiting UCI Fulbright Scholar, Andrew Hiscock, as he leads us through a discussion of Eliza Haywood’s novella Fantomina. This seminar-style discussion is designed to be as inclusive as possible, welcoming students and faculty who are familiar with the eighteenth century and those who may be encountering it for the first time. Fantomina is a short novella and can be easily read in preparation for the seminar. You can use any copy of the text you have available to you, but here is a link to an openly available digital copy of Fantomina:
https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/haywood/fantomina/fantomina.html
Professor Hiscock will be giving some short introductions to the text, but the focus of the seminar will be on group discussion of selected excerpts. We encourage you to come along having read this exciting and racy novella in advance, but pre-reading is not required—please join us regardless! If there are particular excerpts which you would like to propose for discussion just send them along to Professor Hiscock (ahiscock@uci.edu) by midday on May 18th. All suggestions of passages from Fantomina will be warmly welcomed!
RSVP is encouraged but not required: https://forms.gle/MBF6FnssCgLAJuuF8
Andrew Hiscock is Professor of Early Modern Literature and a former Dean at Bangor University, Wales. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique et les Lumières, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry and a former Marie Skodowska-Curie European Research Fellow. He publishes on English, French and Italian early modern literature and his monographs include Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2011) and Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge 2022). In 2026 he is being hosted as Fulbright Scholar by the School of English at UCI.