Professor Small is currently at work on a study of the defences for the humanities that have been most influential in the 19th and 20th centuries and still exert some persuasive power. The study has a dual purpose: to provide a historical account of the arguments, and test their validity for the present day. She is also working on on several shorter pieces for delivery as conference papers, in the first instance, and essay publication subsequently:
‘George Eliot and the Cosmopolitan Cynic’
‘Emily Brontë and Degradation’
‘The Double Standard’ (on ageing and gender, with some concentration on the Victorian period, but also a wider theoretical remit)
a piece on uses of literary examples in the writing of philosophers (for a panel at the MLA, January 2012).
The first of these pieces is an opportunity to do some preliminary work towards a monograph on cynicism in its various literary and philosophical guises, from classical antiquity to the present.
