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Call for reviewers: BARS Review

The BARS Review is the review journal of the British Association for Romantic Studies, providing timely and comprehensive coverage of new monographs, essay collections, editions and other works dealing with the literature, history… Read more »

Romantic Poets in the Wild #8: Brenna Lopes

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For our last RPW of the year (we’ll pick it up again in January 2025!) we are delighted to feature the visual art of Brenna Lopes. Brenna Cameron Lopes is a Massachusetts-based artist whose work centers on the naturalistic and fantastic. She is inspired by the way that mythology, folklore, and fairy tales forge a connection between the self and the natural world, and her art often settles at the meeting point of empirical observation and imaginative contemplation. She is forever chasing a sense of softness in her work, and trying to weave the tangled threads of her interest in history, literature, mythology, esotericism, and natural sciences into facets of her personal artistic tapestry. 

Having studied English Literature at the graduate level, her work is informed by the poetry and writing which has colored her academic interests — specifically that which focuses on natural minutiae and mythical interpretation.

She works primarily in oil paint and pencil. Her stream-of-consciousness-style sketchbook pages form the foundation of her creative practice, and are the roots from which her oil paintings grow.

Brenna submitted both sketches and oil paintings (some of which you might find on her Instagram) so I have been able to pick some out to feature here. I almost never get to write about visual art, so this is a lot of fun for me!

Brenna Lopes (not) in the wild.

Brenna was kind enough to tell us more about how her MLitt in Romantic Worlds (University of Glasgow) has helped shape her interest in intersections between literature and art:

I wrote my masters dissertation on Charlotte Smith’s botanical poetry, specifically on how her unique approach to botanizing, poetry, and natural history arose from her engagement with the work of contemporary male writers Erasmus Darwin and Gilbert White, yet developed into a unique style that merges timely discussions of natural history with her own distinct poetic voice. After the masters, I found that my work became informed by the elements of Romantic Literature which focus on natural minutiae and mythical interpretation, with an emphasis on emotion and imagination. I enjoy depicting people, particularly women, interacting with their environments, both physical and emotional. I am particularly attached to ideas of entanglement and interconnection, thus the environments in my work are often tangled up in various disciplinary interests, archetypal imagery, memories, and dreams. Nature as a symbol of hope, constancy, and comfort is a theme I absorbed from Smith’s work, and something that persists throughout mine. While my literary interests are wide ranging, Romanticism is ever at the core, and I feel that echoes of it are evident in my artistic work, whether directly or tangentially.

Sketches

This piece from Lopes’s sketchbook features a quote by Dorothy Wordsworth:

“It was a sweet morning – Everything green and overflowing with life, and the streams making a perpetual song with the thrushes and all the little birds”

This piece tries to capture, I think, something of the feeling of the wide net that Dorothy Wordsworth’s observations about nature tends to cast in her prose writings. The “perpetual song” seems to draw into it flowers and leaves, the lightness of hummingbirds’ wings (“chasing a sense of softness”), but also the parts of architecture that we can see, and what is not there–a bit of darkness cupping the statue in the top left corner, or settling around the plants in the lower right: as if things emerging and disappearing into the pressure behind the pencil were a force surrounding the world. Even the pencil shavings themselves seem to be arranged in contrast to the rest of the scene, making a three-dimensional representation that moves into and out of the paper as well as across it. The pencil also completes (if I may be so bold) the triangulation of the hummingbirds, as if it were a third bird; and this draws the eye to a blank spot near the top of the page, and to the sense that the unfinishedness of these objects is part of what makes them whole.

“it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished”

This sketch invites us to think about some comparisons: between a forest lane, on the one hand, and the gothic architecture of a place of worship; between a drooping hand–I see a hand that is clinging to life, but you are welcome to see it in a different light–and a branch of leaves that works its way up the page as if navigating interior space; and between two swans, curled in a protective pose, and a person looking “off screen” whose features fade away into ghostliness. Perhaps the “astonishment” is that life contains or might contain all of these things together, moving instinct, intellect, nature and design into the same contemplative purview.

Oil Paintings

Flora and the Country Green (2023)

Inspired by a line from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”:

"O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!"

Portrait of a Dryad (2023)

Looking back on Flora and the Country Green, I think about the way that poetical lines can be autonomous jumping-off points for new creative responses; especially, I think, where they make or suggest a mythological dimension. Mythological thinking means, on one level, that we can derive or extrapolate something new from a piece of our experience, or grow a fragment of thought into a whole idea. We can see it in the cover of Matthew Sangster’s book An Introduction to Fantasy (Cambridge UP, 2023), which uses the line of a river to draw the eye forward into a vista featuring a dragon and a magical castle (and which Lopes illustrated!). Lopes’s work is proof of this way of thinking:

the lightness centered in the dryad's face,
hath found its mirror in the leaves of plants,
and solemn thought, though in a lonely place
might make a tune to which the Heart can dance.

Sweet Remembrancers (2024)

A series of oil paintings inspired by the Huntington Botanical Gardens in California. The title is an allusion to the final lines in Charlotte Smith’s “The Horologue of the Fields”:

"Thus in each flower and simple bell,
That in our path untrodden lie,
Are sweet remembrancers who tell
How fast the winged moments fly."

So long . . . until we meet again!

That’s it for this first series of Romantic Poets in the Wild! You can go back and check out the other featured artists by clicking on the blog’s #romanticpoetsinthewild hashtag–it should bring you to a page where you can peruse the entire series. It sure has been fun meeting the people who responded to the original call for contributors, and working with them to share their work with the world! We already have a few names lined up for next year, including Clay Johnson, John Gallas, Sophia Haywood, and Ezra Shaw. But we need more! So without further ado . . .

Romantic Poets in the Wild: Call for Contributors (2025)

Are you a writer, musician, or visual artist who has been inspired by Romanticism/the Romantics and would like to have your work featured on the BARS blog? Please get in touch with our series editor and Comms Fellow Adam Neikirk by emailing him (adamneikirk@gmail.com) or reaching out on social media. Adam doesn’t use X/Twitter anymore, but is available via BlueSky, Instagram, or Facebook! We love to hear from all creative people, no matter where you are at in terms of your career; and we especially love to hear from academics and scholars of Romanticism who have a creative bone! So please reach out!

Until next time!

Adam Neikirk

Opportunity: Jane Austen Society of the UK Tributes

The Jane Austen Society of the UK (registered charity number 1200422 – https://janeaustensociety.org.uk/) will be celebrating this important anniversary in 2025.  One of the events which the Society is hosting is an online oral record of tributes to Jane Austen, each lasting not more than two minutes, which the Society would make publicly available on its website.

More details about the proposal can be found here: https://janeaustensociety.org.uk/jane-austen/2-minute-tributes/how-to-contribute/

Although we envisage an oral recording, which the trustees thought might be less daunting for our membership, video presentations are also acceptable provided that they stay within the 2 minute limit.

Contributions should be sent by email to 250@jasoc.org.uk.  The content is entirely up to the contributor, but the two minute limit will be strictly applied.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. 

SPECIAL ISSUE: The Scarlet Thread of Murder (Linguæ & – Journals of Modern Languages and Cultures Rivista di lingue e culture moderne)

The Scarlet Thread of Murder. An Album of Victorian Murderers.

Moving from the Newgate Novel tradition at the beginning of the 19th century, through De Quincey’s aesthetic musings on the fine art of murder, to Arthur Machen’s decadent impostors/assassins at the end of the century, via Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational murderers, this special issue of Linguae& will present a gallery of ‘magnificent’ murderers and their representations on stage, in songs and ballads, across the various forms of material culture and, of course, in literature and the popular press. Alongside murder and murderers, we welcome proposals looking at poisoners, torture, sacrifice, monstrous killers, corpses and their representation, gender, body horror at large, and the sundry “ruinations of the human subject” (in the words of Kelly Hurley) that bleed across the Long Victorian Age

Authors wishing to propose a paper for this special issue should register on the journal web site and upload their papers preferably in English, no later than 15 June 2025. See sections: For Authors and Submissions.

Only papers which fully comply with the requirements will be accepted for the double-blind peer review process.

Editors:

Ruth Heholt (Un. Falmouth) Francesca Saggini (Un. Tuscia) Anna Enrichetta Soccio (Un. Chieti)

Linguæ & – Journals of Modern Languages and Cultures Rivista di lingue e culture moderne (eISSN 1724-8698) is a top tier peer-reviewed journal devoted to interdisciplinary research on language and literature, giving voice to a cross-cultural and multi-genre koine. Linguæ & is published twice a year, in June and December, and generally features miscellaneous contributions in the fields of language and culture. Special editorial topics will be advertised well in advance. The Journal is indexed in Web of Science and DOAJ

BARS Open Fellowship 2025 awarded to Dr Christina Morin

In addition to our existing funding schemes, BARS launched a new initiative in 2024: the Open Fellowship, which is available to scholars at any career stage undertaking exceptional work at the forefront of Romantic studies.

We are thrilled to announce that the recipient of the second BARS Open Fellowship is Dr Christina Morin. Christina’s project is titled ‘Irish Gothic in the Global Nineteenth Century’.

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Christina Morin is Professor in English and Assistant Dean of Research for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Limerick. She is the author of The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 (2018) and Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (2011), and co-editor of the collections Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (with Marguérite Corporaal, 2017) and Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes and Traditions (with Niall Gillespie, 2014). Recent publications include a special issue of the Irish University Review on ‘Irish Gothic Studies Today’ (2023; co-edited with Ellen Scheible) and Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2023; co-edited with Jarlath Killeen). Tina is Chair of the International Association of Irish Literatures (IASIL) and co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Ireland. You can find Tina on BlueSky @drtinamorin.bsky.social.

Click here for more information on the BARS Open Fellowship scheme.

Gerard McKeever

BARS Bursary Officer

29 November 2024

BARS President’s Fellowship 2025 awarded to Dr Suchitra Choudhury

In June 2020, the British Association for Romantic Studies announced its unequivocal support of the Black community, its condemnation of all forms of racism and its commitment to practical action. In response to the enduring and systemic damage caused by racism, the BARS Executive commenced a programme of initiatives focused on the histories and literatures of People of Colour. Among these initiatives is the BARS President’s Fellowship.

We are delighted to announce that the recipient of the BARS President’s Fellowship 2025 is Dr Suchitra Choudhury. Suchitra’s project is titled ‘‘Thingy Romanticism: Commodities from India in Visual Satire and Literature’.

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Dr Suchitra Choudhury is a Researcher Affiliate at the University of Glasgow. Her monograph Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture was published with Ohio University Press (2023). While it investigates how Romantic-period authors such as Eizabeth Inchbald, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen engaged with India, its chapter focussing on the Scottish-Canadian writer Frederick Niven received an Honorary Mention in Jack Medal Prize by the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures (IASSL). Suchitra’s wider interest approaches the display of subcontinental objects in museums. Her current research includes book-length projects on shawls in art, and India in Scottish literature.

Click here for more information on the BARS President’s Fellowship scheme.

Gerard McKeever

BARS Bursary Officer

29 November 2023

Incoming BARS Digital Events Officer

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We received a number of very high quality applications for the BARS Digital Events Officer position for the next election cycle. The Executive Committee are delighted to announce that the incoming Digital Events Officer is:

Dr Roslyn Joy Irving

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Roslyn Joy Irving completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research explored method and literary historiography through Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791). Roslyn’s postdoctoral project focuses on topographical poetics from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. She is currently based at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.

The BARS Digital Events Officer will take the lead in co-ordinating our ongoing series of digital panels and roundtables and to contribute to the Exec’s future planning around digital engagement. The Digital Events Officer’s primary responsibility is to be the lead organiser for a regular series of digital events, which can include panels and roundtables solicited via calls issued to the BARS membership as well as collaborations with partners and directly programmed events. BARS Digital Events seek to include a diverse range of voices; all line-ups must feature at least one postgraduate or early career scholar.

Keep an eye on the BARS Blog and social media pages for calls for future Digital Events.

CFP: Plants and Their Perceptions: Vegetal Agency in the Global Eighteenth Century

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Eighteenth-Century Plant Studies

This projected volume is a collection of interdisciplinary humanities essays on how plants were perceived, represented and understood in the long eighteenth century, with special attention to new ways in which texts from this period can be discussed and understood in the light of twenty-first century advances in plant sciences, plant studies, and the philosophy of plants.

Deadlines: Proposals and abstracts for essays of between 5,000-7,000 words by
15th March 2025 (full essays by 31st December 2025).

Details: Email min.wild@plymouth.ac.uk or kathryn.gray@plymouth.ac.uk

For this volume we seek new and current work which puts eighteenth-century plants, as represented by word and picture, under the lens of any aspect of Plant Studies and the ‘vegetal turn.’ We welcome work which understands vegetal life not as a passive commodity for human use, but as being – in Michael Marder’s words – ‘coextensive with a distinct subjectivity with which we might engage’ (Plant Thinking, 2013: 8). Famous stories of European plant discoveries and exploitation – such as that of Captain Bligh’s breadfruit and of deforestation for naval defence – have had some scholarly attention, as has Enlightenment categorisation and instrumentation of plant life, and there has also been attention to the contributions of female botanists in the period, but we are soliciting work which is energised by the kinds of inversions and revisions suggested by thinking through plants and their kinds of agency.

The projected volume is a collection of interdisciplinary essays on how plants were perceived, represented and understood in the long eighteenth century, with special attention to new ways in which texts from this period can be discussed and understood in the light of twenty-first century advances in plant sciences and the philosophy of plants. If the long eighteenth century was really the era in which a plant came to be seen, understood, named binomially, and categorised as an ’efficient assemblage of interlocked cellular constituents’ (Ryan, Plants in Contemporary Poetry, 2018: 67), how do the texts discussed in this volume demonstrate, refute or undermine that claim?

Plants and Their Perceptions: Vegetal Agency in the Global Eighteenth Century

Further information:

We are open to any work which investigates primary material from the long eighteenth century (1660-1832) in the light of recent plant studies and/or vegetal agency. Essays are welcome which may encompass form, content or both, and also those which might ally any other fertile critical perspective with Plant Studies. These may include in various degrees and combinations the following: decolonization; aesthetic or literary theory; eighteenth-century history, politics and culture; rhetoric and literary form; art methodologies and artistic practice; modern and/ or Enlightenment philosophy; network theory; ‘plant thinking’; feminism; ethnobotany; queer studies; posthumanism; plant personhood; individual author studies; vegetal geographies; transatlantic and/or global studies; and eco-criticism including ‘deep ecology.’ We seek work which is ready to make that shift in which what are taken as objects ‘might themselves be thought of as subjects,’ in Malcolm Miles’s useful formula (Eco-Aesthetics, 2014: 3).

A noteworthy feature of this book will be its inclusion of reproductions: the texts under discussion in each essay will be reproduced in the volume alongside them. These could include paintings, drawings, poems in their original publication format, reproductions of periodical pieces, photographs of eighteenth-century objects or artefacts, and more –we are happy to discuss all suggestions. We are already working with a scholarly press who has expressed strong interest in the project.

CFP: 49th International Byron Conference

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“The Years That Followed”: The Afterlives of Lord Byron

In the year after the poet’s bicentenary, the 2025 International Byron Conference to be held in Pisa (30 June – 5 July 2025) will focus on Byron’s richly inexhaustible legacy from the immediate aftermath of his death to the twenty-first century. The Conference aims to investigate Byron’s ideas about all kinds of futurity – historical, political, personal, and spiritual, among others – as well as the place he and his works have held in culture and literature since 1824, both in Britain and overseas. Byron’s long shadow touches many traditions: this Conference welcomes critical explorations of his legacy in all its transnational and interdisciplinary dimensions.

The Organising Committee invites paper proposals of 250 words, together with a short bionote (roughly 150 words), on topics including, but not necessarily limited to:


• Byronic prophesies and/or curses
• Byron and/on Futurity
• Byron and/on posterity
• Byron and/on death
• Byron and/on afterlife celebrity
• Byron on the translation/reception/value of his own work
• Byron and/on the future of politics
• Byron and/on the future of Italy
• Byron and/on the future of Greece
• Byron and/on the future of Europe
• Visions of the future in the Pisan Circle
• Reactions to Byron’s death

• The editing of Byron’s poetry after his death
• Writing the Poet’s lives: Byron and his biographers
• Byron in world literature
• Byronic heroes
• Translating Byron
• Anglo-Italian and Anglo-Greek Byron
• Byron as a cultural icon
• Byron in the media
• Byron and/in music
• Byron and Tuscany
• Byron and Italian tourism

The Committee welcomes submissions for both individual 20-minute presentations and roundtable discussions. Roundtable session proposals should include a description of the topic as well as a list of participants (along with a short bionote for each participant).

You can submit your proposals by visiting http://www.iabsconferencepisa2025.com The deadline for proposals is 20 JANUARY 2025.

For further information, including an extended version of the Call for Papers, General and Academic Program, Venue, and more, visit http://www.iabsconferencepisa2025.com

You can contact the Organizing Committee at info@iabsconferencepisa2025.com

Academic Committee: Madeleine Callaghan,
Gregory Dowling, Roberta Ferrari, Alan Rawes,
Diego Saglia, Jane Stabler

Organising Committee: Paolo Bugliani,
Nicoletta Caputo, Camilla Del Grazia,
Laura Giovannelli, Emily Paterson-Morgan

Call for Papers: 2025 Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (GER)

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2025 Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (GER)
Negotiations of Value in the Romantic Age
25-28 September 2025
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Campus Erlangen)


Keynote Speakers:
David Duff (London), Michelle Faubert (Manitoba), Joanna Rostek (Gießen / Leipzig)

Several scholars have proposed that the turn of the 19th century saw a paradigmatic shift
in the understanding of the concept of value. In Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating
Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (2008), for instance, Mary Poovey
argued that, during the 17th and well into the 18th century, aesthetic and economic
conceptions of value were not yet seen as inherently opposed to each other. On the
contrary, one of the functions particularly of what she refers to as ‘imaginative writing’
had been to convey the meaning(s) and mechanisms of the credit economy as it had
gradually developed and gained in importance during the early modern age. With the
economic discourse becoming more and more dominant in the growing consumer
societies of the Western world, however, economic value began to be singled out. At the
same time, those invested in the aesthetic and ethico-philosophical domains also aimed
at distinguishing their respective disciplinary positions, including distinctive notions of
what counted as valuable, as being of worth. According to James Thompson, from the 18th
century, “the concept of value underwent profound transformation and was rearranged
into the various humanistic, financial, and aesthetic discourses that we know today” (1).
Accordingly, it is only at the beginning of the 19th century that the philosophical
subdiscipline of axiology – the theory of value and valuation – began to take shape (cf. e.g.
Krobath). At the same time, writers such as William Wordsworth developed a specific
‘Romantic ideology’ (McGann) of their own with which they sought to offer an alternative
value system: literature was conceptualised as having a value that could not be
measured by the logic of economic exchange. While these writers, especially in their
poetological works, took pains to characterise Poetry – capital-lettered ‘Poetry’ was
understood to include not only poetry in the narrow sense and imaginative literature as
such, but also painting, sculpture, architecture and so forth – as elevated above
materialistic concerns, they did not situate it beyond them in an absolute way either. After
all, as P.B. Shelley famously declared, poets, as “the unacknowledged legislators of the
world”, must aim at “true utility”. Poetry was meant to have its very own use value.
In 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), Brian
Massumi claims that “[t]he dominant notion of value in our epoch is economic” (5). If he
is right and if it is also correct that the turn of the nineteenth century saw the irretrievable
splitting apart of previously cohering conceptions of value, an understanding of the
processes that led to and constituted this epistemic shift will indeed be crucial for
locating ourselves in the present. Accordingly, the conference is inspired by a relatively
recent approach in literary and cultural studies which, amongst other labels, has been
named ‘economic criticism’1 and whose basic tenets and lines of investigation Ellen
Grünkemeier, Nora Pleßke and Joanna Rostek suggest to be the following:
Economic criticism (i) analyses how the economy and what is seen as its constitutive
elements (e.g. money, consumption, economic agents) are represented in literature,
film, visual arts, etc.; (ii) studies non-fiction about the economy (e.g. the foundational
texts of classical political economy or Marxism) as primary literature; (iii) scrutinises
activities and phenomena associated with the economy (e.g. shopping, work, class)
through the methodologies of cultural and literary studies; (iv) investigates how
economic frameworks influence the creation of literary and cultural products as well
as the production of knowledge in academic disciplines; (v) explores points of
convergence between terms, concepts, and methods of economics, literary, and
cultural studies (e.g. circulation, representation, value, utility). (117)

However, precisely because the Romantic conjuncture is complex, it will not be enough
to solely consider the literary and cultural as well as other domains through the lens of
‘the economy’ (which economic criticism does not intend anyway). Instead, the
conference encourages a discussion about various discursive perspectives on value in
the Romantic Age by way of different theoretical and methodological approaches.
We invite you to submit proposals for 20-minute papers that shed light on all aspects that
touch on the notion of value and help to explain its dissemination during the Romantic
Age.
Papers may address but are of course not limited to aspects regarding

  • the value of literature
  • negotiations of value in literary texts
  • the meaning and centrality of value in the economic discourse
  • the value(s) ascribed to the economy
  • political and politicised notions of value
  • philosophical, ethical, and/or religious conceptualisations of value
  • value(s) assigned to and associated with human beings, animals, plants,
    minerals, ‘Nature’
  • the value(s) of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, (dis-)ability etc.
  • the value(s) of aesthetic, political, social etc. form (literary forms, but also forms
    of behaviour, architectural form, etc.)
  • the form of value
  • representational and/versus affective conceptualisations of value.
    Please send proposals of 300-500 words and a short biographical note to one of the local
    organisers by 15 January 2025: Gerold Sedlmayr (gerold.sedlmayr@fau.de), Kathrin Bethke
    (kathrin.bethke@fau.de) or Mona Kammer (mona.kammer@fau.de).
  • Link to GER website: https://www.englische-romantik.de/

    Works Cited:
    Grünkemeier, Ellen, Nora Pleßke, and Joanna Rostek. “The Value of Economic Criticism Reconsidered:
    Approaching Literature and Culture through the Lens of Economics”. Introduction. Proceedings
    1 Cf. https://www.economic-criticism.de/.
    3
    Anglistentag 2017. Ed. Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Jochen Petzold, Katharina Boehm, and Martin Decker.
    Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT), 2018, pp. 117-125.
    Krobath, Hermann T. (2009). Werte: Ein Streifzug durch die Philosophie. Königshausen & Neumann.
    Massumi, Brian. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto. U of Minnesota P,
    2018.
    McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. U of Chicago P., 1983.
    Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century
    Britain. U of Chicago P, 2008.
    Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. 1996.

Call for Proposals: Forum for Modern Language Studies Anniversary Conference

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14-15 July 2025, Parliament Hall, St Andrews

‘Tis sixty years since’

2025 marks sixty years since the founding of Forum for Modern Language Studies in 1965.  To celebrate, review, and renew the founding mission, the General Editors of Forum are hosting an Anniversary Conference, inviting selected speakers from across the subject communities served by the journal to explore ‘sixty’ and ‘the sixties’ envisaged in their many dimensions from the mediaeval to the modern period. 

To focus on sixty and sixties immediately challenges the draw of literary history to ends and beginnings, be it the fin-de-siècle or the year 1200, and provides opportunities for fresh perspectives and connections.  For Walter Scott, sixty years defined limit of living generational memory.  His Waverley narrates events from the Jacobite rebellion ‘sixty years since’, marking a generational turning point that requires the narration of the past. Sixties as decades often mark intensely productive apotheoses: the 1860s are a high point of European Realism (Germinie Lacerteux (1865), Crime and Punishment (1866), Education Sentimentale (1869)); the 1760s sees Rousseau’s major works: La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Emile (1762), Confessions (completed 1769).  The sixties also express the sense of change and conflict in texts ranging from Achebe’s ‘African Trilogy’ (1958-1964), to Grass’s ‘Danzig Trilogy’ (1959-63), to Angela Carter’s ‘Bristol Trilogy’ (1966-71).

In cultural and intellectual history more broadly, the various decades of the sixties emerge as pivotal moments: in literary theory, the sixties take us from Mythologies (1957) to The Death of the Author (1967), from Structuralist Anthropologies (1958) to Writing and Difference (1967); in an earlier age they produced the Geneva Bible (1560).  Taking stock of the productivity, critical reflection and sense of new departures in various sixties leads us to reflect on whether these decades present moments in which a generation of authors can take stock on what has gone before. Do they come of age to reject it and start something new, or arrive sufficiently late in a century to complete its major projects? 

And if the sixties as decades give birth to iconic works, they also launch individuals in Dante (c.1265), Lopa de Vega (1562), Shakespeare (c.1564), Mme de Staël (1766) as indicative influential figures. To mark ‘sixties’ is thus to think of the generations of writers they produced, and to reflect on the significance of ‘sixty’ for them, their oeuvres, and their place in literary and cultural history.  And from births, to biographies: we think of authors such as Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) who began their literary career in or near their sixties, or literary characters in their sixties such as Fontane’s own literary mirror of himself, Dubslav Stechlin.  Sixty as an interpretative lens invites us further to revisit the category of ‘maturity’, or the ‘late’ phase of an author’s work, as in Petrarch’s SenilesLetters of Old Age, begun when the author was 57 and written throughout the 1360s.

The aim of this anniversary conference is thus to explore sixty and sixties for the wealth of ‘cross-fertilization’ and breadth of coverage that Forum set out to foster in its founding statement in 1965.

Proposals should include an indicative title, an abstract of 250 words, your name, and current contract information, and be sent to forum-60@st-andrews.ac.uk by end of November 2024.  Further information on the subjects and languages covered by Forum is available at: https://academic.oup.com/fmls

Authors of selected proposals will present their work in a 20-minute paper scheduled in panels  over two days on 14-15 July 2025 at the University of St Andrews.  Financial support is available in the form of waived conference fee and subsidized accommodation for speakers, and a limited number of travel bursaries for which doctoral candidates can apply. 

Two, peer-reviewed special issues emerging from the conference are planned for 2026-7 and 2027-28.  There will also be the opportunity for contributors to act as guest editors/co-editors to further shape these issues. Forum has therefore made funding available for selected guest editors to host a workshop to bring their issue contributors together when papers are in full draft. Anniversary Editors will also benefit from the expertise of Forum’s general editors (Articles, Special Issues, Forum Prize) in final preparation stages. Colleagues are invited to indicate their interest in guest editing one of these special issues in the covering email with their abstract.