Sibylline Leaves: Chaos and Compilation in the Romantic Period

By Anna Mercer

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.’

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Source:: http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=1670