This is a call for papers for a small symposium on Romanticism, which wil form part of the larger Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) Conference on Literature that is held in Athens in June each year (this year June 1-4).
The Symposium on Romanticism will be hosted by Professor William Davis of Colorado College.
Anyone interested should follow this link for all pertinent information, including the call for papers, fee structure, and housing options: https://www.atiner.gr/litrom. Registration, fees, housing, etc. are all handled by ATINER.
Anyone wishing to make a proposal will also need to use the form provided by the ATINER website (available also through the link above).
Feel free also to direct questions regarding the symposium to Professor Davis (wdavis@ColoradoCollege.edu).
This is a Call For Papers for a session at MLA 2021
This bicentennial panel, which will be held at the MLA in Toronto and sponsored by the Byron Society of America, will examine Byron’s work written or published in 1821, including Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, Heaven and Earth, Cain, and Werner.
Please submit 250 word abstracts by 26 March 2020 to Omar F. Miranda, at the University of San Francisco (ofmiranda@usfca.edu )
The 2021 MLA Annual Convention will be held in Toronto
from 7 to 10 January 2021.
In Charlotte Lennox’s 1752 novel, The Female Quixote, an eighteenth-century Countess is horrified when she is asked by the romance-obsessed heroine to relate her ‘adventures’, professing: ‘The word adventures carries in it so free and licentious a sound in the apprehensions of people at this period of time, that it can hardly with propriety be applied to those few and natural incidents which compose the history of a woman of honour.’
The idea that during the long eighteenth century virtuous wives were increasingly relegated to the domestic/private sphere, their legal and economic identities subsumed into that of their husbands, is a long-standing one. However, recent and ongoing research is challenging the orthodoxy of this narrative and demonstrating that the roles available to married women were more complex, nuanced and dynamic than mainstream assumptions have generally allowed. For example, Elaine Chalus has explored women’s engagement with politics and the electoral process; Joanne Begiato’s examination of the divorce process has shed light on the lived experience of married women; Amy Louise Erikson has interrogated the laws relating to women’s property ownership; and Briony McDonagh has examined inter alia how landowning wives managed the combined duties of married life and estate management. However, research specifically relating to ‘wives’ is often buried amongst the wider topic of ‘women’, and cross-disciplinary patterns and conclusions relating purely to married women may be lost or go unrecognised.
On Friday 19th June, Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCECS) will host a one-day conference to bring these revisionist narratives together and examine the role(s) of the wife as seen through the fields of literature, social and economic history, law, art history and material culture. Papers are invited on the following topics:
• The economic and financial autonomy of women following marriage • Feme sole traders • The visibility of single versus married women in the literature of the period • Wives’ involvement in politics and public life • Working wives • Women and the divorce process • Inheritance and the transmission of property through the female line • Trusts, property ownership and separate estate • Wives as educators • Conduct literature and wives • The married woman as literary heroine • Quasi-marriages and kept Mistresses • The married female body • Material culture, fashion and taste • Housewifery • Wives as guardians of morality and social order • The historiography of the wife: change or continuity?
Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words with a short bio to the conference organisers Kim Simpson & Alison Daniell adventurousc18wives@gmail.com by 1 March 2020. For future updates follow @AdventurousWiv1
Since 2015, attendance at BARS conferences has grown to around 250 and delegate feedback has been very positive. We are very much looking forward to working with institutions in continuing to build on and to diversify the successful BARS model. Please consult the programmes for Cardiff, York and Nottingham as guides for your proposal.
A decision will be made by the BARS Executive at its next meeting in March 2020 and the successful applicants will be invited to submit a report for the following Executive meeting, which will be held electronically in July 2020. The successful applicants will also be expected to make a presentation at the next conference, Edge Hill 2021.
Host institutions are expected to take account of the following in preparing their Expressions of Interest:
Venue location, capacity and accessibility
We expect numbers could range between 250 to 275 delegates: please bear this figure in mind when bidding. You will need a plenary lecture hall large enough to accommodate these numbers, plus a sufficient number of breakout rooms and catering facilities (BARS conferences can normally have around ten parallel sessions). For North American colleagues in particular, the distance from a major airport and transport links will be an important factor, so please bear this in mind.
We expect organizers to offer a range of accommodation from traditional student-type lodgings through to hotel-level facilities. Sufficient cheaper accommodation to allow postgraduate participation is desirable: such accommodation should be within reasonable walking distance of the conference venue or the organizers should make suitable travel arrangements to take delegates to and from the venue.
The venue is expected to meet the usual requirements for facilities in academic meetings, including Wi-Fi and PowerPoint/projection facilities in all rooms. It is desirable that the meeting rooms are in reasonably close proximity to each other and that there is a communal meeting area or foyer, preferably with refreshment facilities so that delegates can socialize and browse publisher stands.
In order to comply with BARS’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, conference organizers should ensure that the venue, accommodation and transportation are fully accessible.
Conference theme
This should be of sufficient scope and significance to allow the Association’s members to take part. Recent themes have been ‘Romantic Imprints’, ‘Romantic Improvement’, ‘Romantic Facts and Fantasies’ and ‘New Romantics’. The full list of previous conferences can be found on the BARS website.
Timetable
The conference has typically run from Thursday to Sunday in the second half of July, with the conference commencing on the afternoon of the first day and finishing on Sunday afternoon. However, this is a flexible schedule and proposers are encouraged to deviate from this model, for instance proposing a Monday-to-Thursday event (indeed, BARS 2021 will be running from Tuesday to Friday).
The BARS Executive normally meet on the evening before the conference begins: organizers will need to arrange a suitable venue for this (two-hour) meeting. The meeting typically concludes with a short tour of the conference venue for the Executive members in attendance. In fixing on a date, it is especially important organizers should check which conferences are already scheduled for what is often a busy time in the calendar and liaise with conference and society chairs in order to avoid clashes wherever possible and facilitate attendance at all events. Conferences which run during summers and are likely to be attended by BARS delegates include those hosted by the British Association for Victorian Studies, the International Conference on Romanticism, the International Gothic Association, the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.
The CFP is usually circulated by October of the preceding year (2022) and the outcome of the refereeing process confirming speakers is usually made by the middle of January.
Vetting of papers
It is usual for members of the BARS Executive to serve on the panel which referees the proposals for panel papers, though the local organizers have the final right of veto. (It is desirable that papers are refereed not only for the integrity of the event, but also to help delegates secure financial support from funding bodies and institutions.)
Programme
The programme usually takes the form of parallel sessions consisting of panels where delegates deliver 20-minute papers. BARS welcomes convened and themed panels that reflect cutting-edge projects and collaborative research, and other formats such as roundtables and workshops. In addition, there are usually four or five plenary lectures, one of which is designated the Stephen Copley Lecture and another the Marilyn Butler lecture in memory of BARS’s founding members and much-loved scholars. Plenaries are chosen by the local organizing committee, though BARS expects this to reflect a gender balance and a mixture of national and international scholars. In the arrangements of the panel sessions and the timing of the plenary lectures the organizers are asked to consider seriously the responsibility of offering all speakers a reasonable size of audience (it is now standard practice to end the conference on the final day with a keynote). BARS expects panels to incorporate postgraduate and early career researchers opportunities alongside more established academics. The programme should also include specific sessions targeted at professional development for ECRs.
Reception, Book Prize, Banquet, PGR/ECR reception
The BARS conference includes a reception (normally on the first night), a slot for the BARS First Book Prize awards (this can be done at the reception or can be separate), and a banquet on the third night. It has increasingly been the case that informal meals are offered on the second night, although this depends on local factors such as whether the conference venue is campus-based or near a well-provisioned civic centre. Payment for the banquet is optional and can be purchased during registration. There should also be an evening slot for a reception aimed specifically at postgraduate and early career researchers: this typically takes the form of informal drinks and/or dinner, and often runs on the second night but should not be scheduled against the Banquet, in case PGRs/ECRs wish to attend.
Refreshments and lunches
BARS expects the conference registration fee to include refreshments (before the firstsessions each day and regular 30-minute coffee breaks), buffet food for the reception, andlunches on Days 2 to 4 (one of these can be a brown bag lunch on the excursion day). Pleasebuild this into your costs.
Conference excursion
It is usual to arrange an excursion or choice of excursions with laid-on transport within the schedule, to take place usually on the Saturday (i.e. Day 3) afternoon, and to a ‘Romantic’ venue with general relevance to the conference e.g. a museum, estate, birthplace, gallery. We are keen to explore offering the excursion on another day (e.g. the final day of the conference, or before the main activity of the conference commences), for reasons of inclusivity. The excursion is always an optional extra in terms of costings and can be purchased during registration.
Biennial General Meeting
The conference organizers are required to find a central time (at least one hour, which can be the lunch hour) within the schedule to host the BARS BGM. Key aspects of the BGM are: presentation of reports from the Executive to Membership; election of the new BARS Executive for 2023–2025; presentations on the PGR/ECR conference in 2024 and BARS 2025.
Cost
Organizers are asked to keep costs as low as possible without compromising the quality of the event. Please provide as much information as you can about the predicted registration fee, including a day rate and discounted rates for PGRs, ECRs, retired and unwaged, as well as whether you propose to include discounted ‘early bird’ rates. In order to maximize inclusion,day rates must feature as part of the package offered to delegates.
BARS is willing to provide an appropriate level of support to its international conference; any profits are expected to be shared 50/50 with BARS.
The selection committee strongly encourages proposers to include indicative budgets with projected income and costings, in order to confirm the event’s viability and affordability for delegates.
Liaison
Organizers will maintain contact with the BARS Executive throughout the planning process. This is usually managed by the co-option of a local organizer onto the BARS Executive for a period of two or more years. A delegation from BARS will also make a site visit in 2021 or 2022 to check through logistics, run through the programme and offer general advice. The BARS Executive will also approve the final programme.
An interdisciplinary symposium exploring paratexts in writing from and about the Pacific
Plenary lectures: Rod Edmond (University of Kent); Anna Johnston (University of Queensland)
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, November 7-8 2020
This two-day interdisciplinary symposium investigates the role and status of paratexts in the mediation and representation of Pacific cultures, geography and history. “Paratext” is the label coined by theorist Gerald Genette to describe those threshold devices that help shape a text’s reception, including annotations, blurbs, cover design, epigraphs, fonts, format, front and back covers, glossaries, illustrations, indices, introductions, maps, prologues and epilogues and titles.
Paratexts have been a frequent presence in Western literary representations of the Pacific. Consider, for example, the “Preface”, annotations and glossary that accompanies Louis Antione de Bougainville’s Voyage Autour du Monde (1771); John Hawkesworth’s paratexts for his edition of Captain Cook’s An Account of the Voyages (1773); the famous marginal gloss that accompanies Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817 version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Edgar Allan Poe’s deconstructive “Preface” and footnotes for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838); Pierre Loti’s epigraphs, notes and parallel transcriptions of Tahitian and French for The Marriage of Loti (1880); and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ethnographic annotations for his Polynesian Ballads (1890). In
translations, travel writings, missionary accounts and ethnographic studies, paratexts have provided a crucial site for the mediation of Pacific cultures and the establishment of scholarly authority. Pacific writers such as José García Villa and Albert Wendt have used paratexts to create a space for their voice and assert their identities in conditions that suppress and exclude indigenous and hybridic voices. On the other hand, Patricia Grace has argued that writers from “small population cultures” should not have to “other” their languages and cultures by providing glossaries and other explanatory information in footnotes for readers.
This symposium will explore how paratexts facilitate the juxtaposition of different writings, the crossing of generic and cultural boundaries, the collision of different languages and intersections between the factual and the fictional, the creative and the imaginary and the historical and ethnographic. These devices can operate legalistically to provide documentary evidence of economic, historical, legal and political claims asserted in the core text. They can be deployed to make manageable the foreignness of a text by either domesticating it or intensifying those aspects that are considered foreign via exoticization. In some cases, paratexts are utilized to assert dominant racist paradigms and contain indigenous voices within boundaries considered acceptable. In others, they provide a surreptitious means of authenticating and archiving indigenous perspectives. Multiple paratexts also offer a means of staging contestatory and contradictory views of the Pacific and the position of the speaker in relation to it.
This symposium examines the various ways in which paratexts are used to mediate the Pacific in literary and non-literary writing in different languages. Questions for exploration include:
How do writers use paratexts to construct authorial identities? Why use paratexts for this purpose?
Are paratexts a generic expectation? If so, how did they become so? How do paratexts enable writers to place their writings in relation to other forms of writing—anthropology, ethnography, history, literature and so on?
How have paratexts affirmed and undermined the distinction between factual and fictional representations of the Pacific? What does it mean to assert the factual status of a cultural artefact?
How do paratexts differ in versions of the same text produced for different audiences?
What kind of threshold does the paratext offer for agents, creative and scholarly collaborators, editors, participant-observers, publishers and translators?
What do shifts in paratextual practices show us about changing cultural and political ideologies?
How are paratexts utilized to support and contest Eurocentricism and the flow of knowledge from Pacific to Western metropolitan centres?
How are paratexts used to create audiences for indigenous voices? When does mediation become appropriation? What hidden contributors do paratexts reveal and efface? How do cultural differences shape paratextual practice? Does it make sense to use the term “paratext” in a non-Western context? What other terms might be more useful (for instance from parergon or frame theory)?
Epeli Hau’ofa asserted that “our histories are essentially narratives, told in the footnotes of the histories of empires”.2 Likewise, Stevenson famously entitled his polemic against American, British and German involvement in the First Samoan Civil War (1886–94) A Footnote to History (1892). What does it mean to use paratexts as metaphors for the historical situation of the Pacific? How do paratexts situate the Pacific in relation to ideas of World geography, World history and World literature?
When does extratextual material—letters, interviews, book reviews, commentary on the text—fulfill a paratextual function, and how does this complicate Genette’s model? To what extent can non-written material such as conversations, correspondence, records, journals and interviews be considered paratextual?
How do paratexts operate in non-literary texts: comics and manga? ethnographic literature? the frame of the picture and the title of the art-work? music? News, translation and subtitles? Philosophy? Political writing? Religious texts? Travel writing? How does the shift to digital, transmedia storytelling and e-reading devices complicate our understanding of the paratext in the Pacific context?
Research that is still speculative is welcome alongside completed pieces. Please include five keywords in all proposals. The deadline for all proposals is 1 May 2020 with decisions on submissions to be circulated by 30 May 2020. Please send all submissions and queries to pacificparatexts@gmail.com.
Meiji University is located in central Tokyo, with easy access to Tokyo Haneda and Tokyo Narita airport. A list of recommended hotels of different price ranges will be provided nearer the time.
Greetings! You are invited to submit a proposal for the 28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). The NASSR conference, which will bring together 300-400 scholars to discuss literature, philosophy, art, and culture c. 1770-1840, will take place at the University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020.
Fashionable looking: costume, hair, makeup, manner, style, taste, places to see and be seen
Visualizing gender and sexuality: identity, performance, politics
Visual and scenic arts: sculpture, painting, illustration, graphic satire, print shops, pornography, broadsheets, dioramas, panoramas, architectural and landscape design
Theatre and performing arts: set design, lighting, visual effects, costume, body movement, dance, pantomime, attitudes, tableaux vivants
Art collection and assessment: museums and curation, connoisseurship, formal and evaluative concerns (e.g. light, color, pattern, shape, scale, proportion)
Visualizing class: social hierarchies and signifiers (e.g. clothing, heraldry, pageantry), occupational and economic segregation
Instruments of looking: lenses, spectacles, quizzing glasses, spy glasses, Claude glasses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, orreries, windows
Forms of illumination and darkness: lightning, electricity, candlelight, lamps, gas light, spotlights, limelight, torches, fireworks; shade, shadow, twilight, gloom, obscurity
Religious vision(s): prophecy, revelation, enthusiasm, sermons and hymns, public and private devotion, natural and revealed religion
The science of the eye: vision, optics, visual anatomy, medicine, pathology, disability, blindness
Data visualization (e.g. land, economy, population studies): mapping, cartography, geography, geolocation, charts, diagrams, categorization, numerical and pictorial statistics
Vision and ecopoetics: seeing nature (vistas, prospects, the picturesque); noticing and reading features of land, water, and sky; watching weather and recognizing climate; the animal gaze
Envisioning space and place: the local and the global, home and abroad, the peripheral and transperipheral
Envisioning (the ends of) empire: imperialism, colonialism, sites and sights of war; decolonization, indigenization
Political and military forecasting, strategy, optics, campaigns, battlegrounds, political theatre
Imagining the future of Romanticism; strategizing its work in the humanities, in the university, and in society
2020 marks the bicentenary of a troubling year. George III had lost his life and the new king George IV was
rapidly losing what little shreds remained of his dignity, lost what little shreds remained of his dignity, pursuing
his errant wife with hypocritical vengeance during the so-called Queen Caroline Affair. The government had lost
the trust of the people, and many politicians would have lost their lives had the Cato Street Conspiracy
succeeded. Meanwhile Byron, now in the fourth year of his self-imposed exile, was rapidly losing his hair, teeth,
famous good looks, and – some might argue – his own dignity. It is against this backdrop that he became
interested in Italian politics, or rather the loss of political authority and national autonomy.
To mark the year of 1820, we welcome papers considering the theme of Byron and loss. Topics could include, but are not limited to:
Grief, familial loss and suicide
Melancholy, weltschmerz, Romantic melancholia
Material and aesthetic losses
Appetite and diet
Loss of status, land, and national autonomy
Loss of love, lovers, and spouses
Religious convictions and anxieties
Idealism and political convictions
Anxieties about poetic reputation and legacy
Writer’s block and poetic inspiration
Financial losses, economic instability and usury
Ruins and degeneration
Submissions by 1st February 2020. Send to Conference Organisers, Dr Emily Paterson-Morgan and Dr Charlotte May, email: newsteadbyronconference@gmail.com
Conference Report by Alice Rhodes, University of York.
On Friday 18th October 2019 members of European Romanticisms in Association (ERA) were lucky enough to gather in the beautiful Italian city of Ravenna for the second meeting of the AHRC funded Dreaming Romantic Europe network, headed up by PI Professor Nicola J Watson (Open University) and Co-I Professor Catriona Seth (University of Oxford). The workshop, which took place in the Antichi Chiostri Francescani, next door to Dante’s tomb and just a short walk from Lord Byron and Teresa Guiccioli’s home in Ravenna, addressed the theme of “Romantic Authorship.” Over two days, delegates explored how the ideology and celebrity of Romantic authorship was supported, elaborated, and transmitted by objects through a fast-paced series of diverse, original, and thought-provoking presentations. We were delighted to welcome speakers working in academia and heritage across Europe, with representation from France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland and the UK.
On Friday, attendees began the day with an introduction to the project from Professor Nicola Watson before making the short walk to Palazzo Guiccioli, home of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, where Lord Byron lived between 1819 and 1821. The building is also the location of the forthcoming Museo Byron, which is currently under construction. Once complete the museum will house material on poet, the countess and their relationship along with further galleries dedicated to the history of the Risorgimento. Delegates were treated to an exclusive tour of the building, led by Professor Diego Saglia before returning to the Chiostri Francescani for the first round of presentations. Using the model of our successful first workshop at Maison de Chateaubriand, La Vallée-aux-Loups in November 2018, the afternoon sessions took the format of ten minute talks on a single object, suitable for exhibit in Romantic Europe: the Virtual Exhibition (RÊVE). What followed was a series of incisive and insightful papers which explored both the objects of Romanticism and their role in shaping the celebrity of those who owned, created, used or encountered them. Clustered around five broad themes – “Placing and Displacing the Author,” “Authorial Affinities Across Europe,” “The Author and Posterity,” “Contact-Relics and Imaginary Conversations” and “Other Arts,” the presentations dealt with a huge variety of objects. From items of clothing and manuscripts, to ballets, buildings and lost objects, speakers explored both the materiality and immateriality of European Romanticisms. With lots to think about following a wonderful first day, delegates were able to continue conversations over the workshop dinner.
Saturday got underway with an excellent cluster of talks which together presented a collection of proposed RÊVE exhibits focused on the “Author In/And a Landscape”. The rest of the morning was dedicated to reflections on collaborations, communities, collections and the opportunities for developing the virtual exhibition in these areas. Attendees heard about a number of exciting projects and organisations which could provide RÊVE with future collaborators and models, including: the Museo del Risorgimento, Bologna; The Antique and Romantic Skies in Europe project; the Swiss Guestbook project; the Keats House Museum; Deutsches Romantik Museum, Frankfurt; Maison de Chateaubriand; and the Wordsworth Trust. Lastly, the workshop drew to a close with an activity to create collections, with participants exploring a gallery of images from the virtual exhibition which were displayed around the room, before proposing themed collections into which the objects could be gathered. As the delegates prepared to depart and to make the most of their remaining time in Ravenna, the group reflected on the workshop and RÊVE, recording a virtual audio guestbook of responses to the project.
Overall the workshop was a huge success, generating a wealth of new ideas about and approaches to the objects of European Romanticism. We’d like to extend our thanks to everybody who made it possible through their hard work, organisation, and sponsorship, particularly the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna, Erika Fabbri, the Museo Byron, Professor Diego Saglia and all of our participants whose exhibits we look forward to featuring in RÊVE in the near future.
Explore the virtual exhibition here: www.euromanticism.org/virtual-exhibition
A two-day conference at Hagley Hall, Worcestershire including a tour of the house and grounds supported by Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online [EMCO] and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
8-9th September 2020
Plenary speakers
Dr Stephen Bending (University of Southampton, author of Green Retreats. Women, gardens and eighteenth-century culture (2013)
Professor Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, University of London), author of The Coffee House: A Cultural History (2005)
Dr Joe Hawkins (Head of Landscape at Hagley)
Dr Steve Hindle (Huntington Library, CA) W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research.
Our conference puts centre stage the patriotism and patronage of George Lyttelton first baron Lyttelton (1709-1773), a strangely shadowy figure yet a fascinating eminence grise behind the art and politics of his age. We will discuss the motivation behind his extensive remodelling of his grounds and the commissioning of local architect Sanderson Miller (1716-1780) in designing a new Hagley Hall. How can the ideas of other architects and landscape reformers from the midlands such as Sir Roger Newdigate (1719-1806), Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829) and William Shenstone (1714-1763) be brought into dialogue with Miller’s project?
As EMCO is editing the correspondence of Lord Lyttelton’s friend and literary collaborator, critic Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800), we will equally focus on eighteenth-century women’s management of estates, commissioning of art and architecture and writing associating rural retirement with moral improvement.
We invite delegates to participate in 3 panels on the following themes:
Concepts of Reform and Improvement in Architecture and Rural Life
Female Management of the Country Estate
The Symbolism of the Garden in Eighteenth-century Art and Literature
We also welcome papers on:
Whig Perceptions of the Country and the City
Portraiture, representations of the Country House and Landscape Painting
Domesticating the picturesque: creating the grotto, the wilderness and the waterfall.
Bluestocking Crafts and Collecting
Botany, Gardening and Girls’ Education
Agricultural Reform and the Rural Poor
The Lunar Society, Provincial Salons and Correspondence Networks
The Politics of Patronage
Philanthropy and the Religious Revival
Early career and unwaged researchers
We reach out especially to early career researchers by offering 6 bursaries funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art to doctoral students and unwaged ECRs with promising proposals for papers relevant to the conference theme. Each bursary holder is invited to review 2 x panel sessions for a report on the conference to be published online on
Bursaries covering the conference fee and accommodation are available to 6 postgraduate students and unwaged early career researchers, who have papers accepted for presentation at the conference. ‘Unwaged’ scholars may be retired, unemployed or unable to access institutional support for conference attendance. They are invited to make a personal statement in support of their application.
Students’ bursary application forms must be accompanied by a statement from a supervisor which is signed on university headed paper and accompanied by the university stamp.
The bursary award will be paid as a refund following attendance at the conference.
Special Issue
A selection of delegates will be invited to extend their papers into scholarly articles for a book-length special issue of the journal Eighteenth-century Life, to be edited by Professor Markman Ellis.
Please send proposals for papers (no longer than 350 words) and requests for bursary application forms by 14th February 2020 to Jack Orchard by email [j.t.g.orchard@swansea.ac.uk] or by post to:
Dr. Jack Orchard, Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP.
2020 Paris Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar
Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, Paris
Friday 3-Saturday 4 April 2020
The Tennis Court Oath of 20 June 1789 was the first overtly revolutionary act of the French Revolution and marked the beginning of an epoch in which public speech acts took on unprecedented political significance. The ceremonial odes and hymns of the fêtes de fédération were another manifestation of this renascence of orality, restoring the ancient Pindaric tradition of poetry as public performance and giving new meaning to odic conventions such as invocation, exhortation and apostrophe. In the work of André Chénier and others, this new lyric function produced major poetry. Meanwhile, in the halls of the political clubs, in the National Convention and revolutionary Committees, and from lecterns, pulpits and courtroom benches across France, oratory of all kinds shaped the course of history and decided the fate of individuals. Even on the executioner’s scaffold, rhetorical amplification became the preferred mode of address, a grim illustration of Baudelaire’s subsequent observation about ‘the grandiloquent truth of gestures on life’s great occasions’.
The revitalisation of performative language was not confined to the 1789 Revolution, nor to France. Britain experienced what many still consider a golden age of political eloquence, as orators of the calibre of Pitt, Burke, Fox and Sheridan jousted in parliament and extended their orations through the medium of print. Outside parliament, the growth of the corresponding societies, of other political clubs and associations, and of political lecturing created numerous opportunities for public address, the communicative practices and clandestine rituals of certain organisations attracting repressive measures such as the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797. Radical writers mimicked French revolutionary styles in odes to Liberty and on the Bastille, while satirists parodied their efforts in mock-odes to the guillotine and pseudo-songs travestying revolutionary enthusiasm. Sermons, notably in the Nonconformist churches, were another front in the oral war of ideas, fusing religion and politics in provocative ways. Educational lecturing also underwent a remarkable boom, in the new Royal Institution and other fashionable lecturing institutions.
This two-day symposium will assess the literary significance of this mobilisation of orality and public utterance, and explore links between the speech acts of politicians, polemicists and educators and the writings of poets and other authors. How is the Romantic revaluation of the ode which produced the famous lyrics of Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Victor Hugo – and of less well-known figures such as Southey, Hemans, Iolo Morganwg and Peter Pindar – connected with the revival of ceremonial ode-writing and public ritual? How are the ‘speech genres’ of everyday life integrated into the more complex genres of imaginative literature, as Bakhtin postulated? Can speech-writing, sermonising or toast-making be themselves a form of literary activity? What happens when legally, morally binding oaths and commitments are broken, forcing the swearer to recant, in public again – are such disavowals part of the culture of apostasy and disenchantment posited by literary historians of Romanticism? And to what extent do these purposive deployments of public speech enter the literary and rhetorical theory of the period?
We invite proposals on any aspect of the literary and verbal life of Britain and France from 1789 to 1830 that relates to this broad set of issues. Topics may include but are not confined to:
• Oaths, affirmations and other verbal rituals
• Toasts and toasting
• Public lectures and lecturing
• Denunciation, recantation and confession
• Proclamations, declarations and vindications
• Odes, hymns and songs
• Apostrophe, personification and other poetic devices
• Literature and public ceremony
• Dialectic of publicness and privacy in Romantic lyric
• Political, religious and forensic oratory
• Illocutionary acts and performative language
• Gendered eloquence
• Dialogues and dialogism
• Rhetorical theory of the Romantic period
Papers will be 25 to 30 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for questions.
Organised by Marc Porée (ENS), David Duff (QMUL) and the Paris Steering Group of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar. For further information, see http://londonparisromantic.com/
