By sophiecoulombeau Registration is now open for ‘Scandal and sociability: New perspectives on the Burney family 1750-1850′, an international symposium to be held at Cardiff University on 1 September 2015. Registration (which is free for postgraduate students) closes on 30 July. All information about the programme and registration process can be found here: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/newsandevents/events/conferences/burney/index.html In recent years, much scholarly interest has moved beyond […] …read more
The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a fully searchable electronic edition of Blake’s water color illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Archive first published these in January 2005 in our Preview mode. This republication substantially increases the number and range of Blake’s pictorial motifs available for searching on the Archive. The 7 engravings illustrating Dante’s poem continue to be available in the Archive in Preview mode.
Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, obj. 66, “Antaeus Setting Down Dante and Virgil in the Last Circle of Hell”
Along with the illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the poetry of Thomas Gray, and John Milton’s poems, the 102 Dante water colors are among Blake’s most important series of illustrations of another poet. They were commissioned by John Linnell, the chief patron of Blake’s final years. Although Linnell did not begin to pay for the designs until December 1825, at the rate of about 1 pound a week, Blake probably began work on the drawings by the fall of 1824. They were left at Blake’s death in 1827 in various stages of completion, ranging from pencil sketches to highly finished water colors. Most show an expressive …read more
The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery. Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm The House of Illustration, London Peter Otto (Melbourne), David Worrall (Roehampton/Nottingham Trent), Kate Heard (Royal Collection), Susan Matthews (Roehampton), Bethan Stevens (Sussex).
Supported by the University of Roehampton and the Bibliographical Society. Organised with the assistance of House of Illustration.
This session follows two themes:
1.Miniaturization: Drawing on Peter Otto’s work on virtual culture in the Romantic period, is the illustration a form of virtual gallery? How does visual meaning change when an image is resized?
2.The Art of Quotation: How were literary quotations used to conceptualise visual images? How important are framing devices to the meaning of an image?
…and other related questions.
Registration is free, and includes free entry to the main exhibition. You can download the full programme here.
To register, please email Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk, giving your name, job title, and institution (if applicable).
The Blake Quarterly published its spring issue recently. It includes our annual “Blake in the Marketplace” feature by Robert N. Essick (who’s also one of the editors of the Blake Archive). “Marketplace” is always hefty on details but light in tone; there are lots of illustrations and the illustration captions, often in the form of mini-essays, are legendary. Elsewhere in the issue, Paul Miner explores Blake’s attitude to royalty (George III, Charlotte, and Marie Antoinette) and Jeff Mertz reviews Karl Kroeber’s Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies, written at the end of his life and brought to fruition by his former student Joseph Viscomi. Lastly, Joseph Wittreich uses two recently published books about William Hayley (one a collection of essays and the other a selection of his poetry) to discuss not only Hayley but also the reception history of Milton.
Please see below for a Call for Papers for a conference commemorating the life and work of Marilyn Butler, which Linda Bree and Gillian Dow are organising at Chawton House Library in December.
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Marilyn Butler and the War of Ideas: A Commemorative Conference at Chawton House Library
December 11-12, 2015
Keynote Speakers: Professor Jim Chandler (University of Chicago) and Professor Heather Glen (University of Cambridge)
Professor Marilyn Butler (1937-2014), leading scholar of English literature, and latterly Rector of Exeter College, University of Oxford, was the author of paradigm-shifting books and articles, and a patron of Chawton House Library, which will host this conference in her honour. Butler’s research set up new directions in literary criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and her editions of women writers enabled subsequent generations of scholars to access these important texts in newly fruitful ways. Marilyn Butler’s important work on Maria Edgeworth – biographical, critical, editorial – seeded new scholarship in the field of Irish romanticism.
In this fortieth anniversary year of the first publication of Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), we invite papers that both commemorate her scholarship, and move discussion forward in the twenty-first century. We welcome papers on any aspect …read more
The site is going to be a bit peculiar over the next few days as I start publishing some major new sets of annotations and begin reorganising the menu structures to incorporate these. There will be a number of blank and semi-functional pages while this process is underway, but fairly soon there should be a lot more content available for exploring London at the turn of the nineteenth century, including both its grandest locations and its more insalubrious sides.
If any readers can make it to Grasmere on June 6th, you might want to check out this exciting series of talks at the Wordsworth Trust on the legacies of Waterloo.
As we approach the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo (18th June), join us for a day to prepare for the international celebrations to come. Join us for five hours of talks, readings, music and refreshments, or just part of the afternoon as you like. Attendees of the event will have free entry to the Wordsworth, War & Waterloo exhibition.
The first part of the afternoon looks closely at the battle and its immediate aftermath, in particular, how news of it reached Britain and its people. Brian Cathcart, award winning author of The Case of Stephen Lawrence, Were You Still Up for Portillo? and The Fly in the Cathedral, will describe how the most momentous news of the battle took three days to travel from the blood-soaked battlefield of Waterloo to the decorous dining rooms of Regency London. In his new book, The News from Waterloo, The Race to Tell Britain of Wellington’s Victory, Brian reveals how news was …read more
By Anthony Mandal A statement from Professor Emma Clery, University of Southampton. As chair of the panel judging the BARS First Book Prize, I am delighted to announce the following shortlist: Jeremy Davies, Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature (Routledge, 2014). Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Maureen McCue, British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian […] …read more
By Alison Harvey This year’s final CRECS event departed from the traditional written text, instead exploring the world of popular entertainment, in both public and domestic spheres. Sophie Coulombeau started off the proceedings with a talk titled ‘Life is a Magic Lanthorn’. Magic lantern, or phantasmagoria, shows were the forerunners of slide shows, cinema (and PowerPoint). They projected […] …read more
