The call for papers is now open for an exciting conference in Rome this December, hosted by the Keats-Shelley House.

The Revolt of Islam: Texts, Subtexts, Contexts

December 15, 2017

A conference celebrating two hundred years of P. B. Shelley’s poem

This conference will mark the bicentenary of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam, first published in 1817 as Laon and Cythna. Papers are invited which will explore critical interpretations and reactions, or which provide close readings of the text itself. Papers focusing on historical and contextual considerations and which explore contemporary resonances will also be welcomed.

The afternoon of 15 December has been chosen, for it was on this day in 1817 that publisher Charles Ollier met up with Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Shelley himself to discuss the potentially controversial and contentious nature of Shelley’s poem.

The conference is being organised by Giuseppe Albano, Curator of the Keats-Shelley House, and Maria Valentini from the University of Cassino, who will take over as Chair of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association in Rome from June 2017.

Papers may be given in English or in Italian, and abstracts accepted in either language.

Deadline for submission of abstracts (c. 200 words): 31 August 2017.

Registration fee: €25.

For further information on registration, and to send your abstract, please contact:

Dr Giuseppe Albano, Curator,
Keats-Shelley House, Rome

or

Prof.ssa Maria Valentini, Dipartmento di Lettere e Filosofia,
Università di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale

The full programme and registration details for ‘Sibylline Leaves: Chaos and Compilation in the Romantic Period’ (Birkbeck, London: 20 & 21 July 2017) are now available. Details can be found here.

About the conference…

‘This conference invites participants to investigate the play of papers between fugitive snips, scraps, and scattered verse, and the promise of the great work, complete edition, or philosophical system. We ask why Coleridge – poet, ‘scrapster’, and would-be encyclopaedist – turned to Virgil’s Sibyl and her scattered leaves, ‘borne aloft in liquid air’, to frame his 1817 collection of poetry Sibylline Leaves; what is at stake in reading the fragments and detached pieces which escape beyond the bound volume; how do the metaphors and materialities of these ‘leaves in flight’ interact; what mediates the ‘phantasmal chaos of association’; how does compilation inform the practices, ideals, anxieties and temporalities of romantic authorship, and the cut-and-paste fervours of its readership? Please join us to discuss all this and more over two days, in the summery environs of Bloomsbury.’

The Call for Papers for the next Wordsworth Summer Conference has now been released. See below for further details, and follow the links for details on how to apply for a bursary/submit an abstract.

The 46th Wordsworth Summer Conference, 2017
Monday 7 August to Thursday 17 August at Rydal Hall, Cumbria

Keynote Lectures, 2017:
Gillian Beer   Matthew Bevis   James Engell
Richard Gravil   Meiko O’Halloran   Nick Halmi
Alexandra Harris  Felicity James
Michael O’Neill
Fiona Robertson   Fiona Stafford
Heidi Thomson   Kasahara Yorimichi

http://www.wordsworthconferences.org.uk/3.html

and the link to our bursaries for postgraduate students

http://www.wordsworthconferences.org.uk/10.html

Key Features:

• The conference is in two parts, of five nights each, with a changeover day
• 7 excursions, 7 fell-walks, and some lower level walks
• 13 keynote lectures and 30-34 papers
• Either 4 or 9 full days in Rydal 
• Excursions to places of Wordsworthian connections or general cultural interest 
• Up to seventy miles of fell walking

CfP for the Second International Conference of the John Thelwall Society which will be held in Derby in July 2017 (deadline 31 January).

Call for Papers:

John Thelwall: Radical Networks and Cultures of Reform 1780-1820

July 21-23, 2017

For its second international conference, the John Thelwall Society, in collaboration with the University of Derby, invites papers on Thelwall within interlinked regional networks of activism, sociability, dissent and reform in Britain 1780-1820.

Recent years have seen increased interest among scholars and local historians in the“conversable worlds” (Mee) of the Midlands Enlightenment and its groundbreaking intersections of politics and poetry, religion and science, doctors and dissenters, pedagogues and visionaries. As a radical polymath and itinerant lecturer, John Thelwall moved between and spoke to all of them, not only in the Midlands.  From Devon to Wales, Norfolk to Scotland, Ireland to France, Roman history to elocution, he planted the liberty tree by other names, giving voice to hope and binding together scattered communities of reform. At a time of war and repression, in the face of nationalist dogma, Thelwall championed egalitarian connections and transnational solidarities that continue to offer a way forward in our own dark times (Poole).

Representative of these regional intellectual centres, Derby, the conference location, lies at the heart of the Derwent Valley World Heritage Site, a cradle of the Industrial Revolution. The home of visionary scientists and artists, revolutionary inventors and industrialists, outspoken Philosophical and Political Societies, and the Pentrich rebellion (whose 200^th anniversary the conference also commemorates), it also hosts the Derby Manuscript, the trove of Thelwall poetry whose discovery draws attention to his importance in radical networks, and theirs to an understanding of his career.The conference will celebrate this discovery through a special exhibition of the manuscript. Other highlights include excursions to sites related to the industrial revolution, Thelwall and notable residents of Derby (including Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Wright), and a radical pub night with songs and toasts in the very room where the Derby Political Society delivered its notorious 1792 Revolution Address. And of course, there will be a lively two-day program of talks, panels and keynote lectures.

The JTS invites proposals for papers or sessions on any aspects of, or relationships between, Thelwall, other radical figures like Paine, and/or reform networks in Derby or elsewhere in Britain. Contributions are welcome from all disciplines and need not focus expressly on Thelwall. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Erasmus Darwin and the Derby Philosophers
• the Derby MS and/or the relationship of poetry, politics and performance
• the role of women in radical (and/or scientific, philosophical, artistic) networks
• the relationship of religious and political dissent
• Joseph Wright and/or the role of the arts in philosophic/scientific/radical circles
• The Pentrich Rising
• Paine and/in Derby
• Thelwall’s lectures: politics, history, elocution
• radicalism and reform: continuities and/or schisms 1780-1820
• Toryism, loyalism, reaction
• education and the dissenting academies

Please send proposals of no more than 300words to K.Hindmarch@derby.ac.uk no later than 31^stJanuary 2017.

Please see below (and the website) for a Call for Papers for a conference on the work on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, to be held in London next year.

CFP: The Shelley Conference 2017

Date: Friday 15th September 2017 (9.30am to 5pm, to be followed by a wine reception)

Location: Institute for English Studies, London

Keynote speakers: Prof. Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin University), Prof. Michael O’Neill (Durham University)

A presentation will also be given by the editors of The Longman Shelley (Kelvin Everest, Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Will Bowers) on progress towards completion of the edition, and future plans.

* * *

This one-day conference, held at the Institute for English Studies in central London, and supported by the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, celebrates the writings of two major authors from the Romantic Period: Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS) and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS).

A continuing scholarly fascination with all things ‘Shelley’ is due in part to the unprecedented access we now have to their texts (in annotated scholarly editions) and manuscripts (presented in facsimile and transcript). The Shelleys’ works are more readily available than ever before. Michael Rossington, when discussing the task of editing PBS, emphasises the complexity of the poet’s afterlife, especially in comparison to other Romantic authors:

It will have taken nearly 200 years from his death for complete scholarly editions of his oeuvre to emerge. The absence of such fundamental resources has been, and remains, to student and non-specialist alike, a cause of puzzlement, if not consternation, especially since complete works of other Romantic poets are available in more than one modern scholarly edition.[1]

Similarly, the lack of an annual or even frequent conference dedicated to PBS (comparable to those that exist for other Romantic writers) has prompted the decision to organise this event for 2017. Excitingly it is now, in the first part of the 21st century, that the most detailed comprehensive editions of PBS’s works are in production (The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook is already well advanced, with Vol VII published soon, and The Poems of Shelley ed. Kelvin Everest, G. M. Matthews, Michael Rossington and Jack Donovan is nearing completion).[2]

Previous conferences at Gregynog in 1978, 1980, and 1992 and the Percy Shelley Bicentennial Conference in New York in 1992 have provided a wonderful legacy for future Shelleyan academics, and it is in the spirit of these events that we will present The Shelley Conference 2017. We include MWS in this new conference, as she also does not have her own regular academic event. However, the recent conference ‘Beyond Frankenstein’s Shadow’ (Nancy, France, 2016) focused specifically on MWS, and the emphasis placed on her work at the ‘Summer of 1816’ conference (Sheffield, 2016) indicated that her role on the main stage of Romanticism is increasingly appreciated.

It is for these reasons that the ‘Shelley’ of the conference title is left ambiguous. The Shelleys are increasingly seen as a collaborative literary partnership, and modern criticism reinforces the importance of reading their works in parallel. The nuances of this, however, are far from simple, and this statement does not imply there is anything like a sense of either consistent ‘unity’ or ‘conflict’ when considering the Shelleys’ literary relationship. This is the kind of issue which will be explored at The Shelley Conference 2017.

The conference organisers request abstracts of 200 words for 20-minute papers, sent to theshelleyconference@gmail.com before 1st April 2017. Papers can be on any aspect of the work of PBS or MWS (or both). The conference particularly welcomes papers that consider the task of editing Shelley, and/or examination of the manuscripts of PBS and MWS. Other topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Works by PBS or MWS written or published in 1817 (e.g. the jointly authored History of a Six Weeks’ Tour including ‘Mont Blanc’)
• Shelleyan philosophy
• PBS’s lyrics/lyric art
• MWS’s posthumous editing of PBS
• PBS’s prose works
• MWS’s novels after Frankenstein
• The 1816 Geneva Summer
• The Shelleys & place (Italy, London…)
• The Shelleys’ influences
• The critical history of the Shelleys
• The Shelleys’ translations
• The Shelleys and genre
• The collaboration of PBS and MWS
• Literary communities: Shelley and his circle

Event Organisers:

Anna Mercer (PhD candidate, University of York), anna.mercer@york.ac.uk
Harrie Neal (PhD candidate, University of York), hn553@york.ac.uk

Advisory Board: 

Prof. Kelvin Everest (University of Liverpool)
Prof. Michael Rossington (Newcastle University)

References:

[1] Michael Rossington, ‘Editing Shelley’ in The Oxford Handbook to Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. Michael O’Neill, Anthony Howe and Madeleine Callaghan (Oxford: OUP, 2013) p. 645.

[2] The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 3 vols to date. 2000, 2004, 2012) and The Poems of Shelley ed. Kelvin Everest, G. M. Matthews, Michael Rossington and Jack Donovan (London: Longman. 4 vols to date. 1989, 2000, 2011, 2013).

Please see below for a Call for Papers from Anne Toner for a conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s Sanditon.

‘Sanditon: 200 Years’ is a conference that will take place at Trinity College, Cambridge from March 29-31, 2017. The conference will mark the bicentenary of the composition of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, Sanditon, in a year that also marks the bicentenary of Austen’s death. Austen began to write Sanditon in January of 1817. The manuscript closes with the date of March 18. Austen died four months later.

The manuscript of Sanditon is held at King’s College, Cambridge and will be available for participants in the conference to view, along with items from the Dorothy Warren and David Gilson Jane Austen collections, also held at at King’s. To coincide with the conference, Austen exhibitions will take place at the University Library, Cambridge and the English Faculty, Cambridge University.

Proposals for twenty-minute papers on any topic relating to Sanditon are invited. The conference warmly encourages a diverse range of approaches to the work, including papers that are thematic, stylistic, biographical, socio-historical, or in any way more broadly contextual or comparative in their focus. The manuscript of Sanditon will be a subject of particular interest and we welcome papers that address subjects relating to Austen’s composition practices; revisions; the material text; manuscript culture; the fragment; posthumous publication. Papers addressing the reception and later textual history of Sanditon—its editions, completions, and adaptations —are also very welcome.

Confirmed speakers:

• Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press)
• Emma Clery (University of Southampton)
• Claudia L. Johnson (Princeton University)
• Michelle Levy (Simon Fraser University)
• Peter Sabor (McGill University)
• Kathryn Sutherland (University of Oxford)
• Clara Tuite (University of Melbourne)

Please send proposals of about 300 words to: sanditon200years@gmail.com by Friday November 11, 2016.

For further details, see the conference website: https://sanditon200years.wordpress.com.

Conference organizer: Dr Anne Toner (Trinity College, Cambridge)