Dr. Madeleine Callaghan, 14 March
The University of Derby’s Enlightenment and Romanticism Research Cluster are thrilled to announce the return of the Midlands Romantic Seminar.
Our first in-person speaker, Dr Madeleine Callaghan (University of Sheffield), will speak on 14th March at 6pm at the University of Derby’s Kedleston Road campus. Madeleine’s talk is titled, ”’The Magic Circle There”: Inner and Outer Worlds in Shelley’s Lyrics’. A synopsis follows below:
Shelley’s poetry enshrines struggle in terms of how the single self seeks and finds connection. That connection so often seems ‘forever sought, forever lost’, with Shelley writing speakers, selves, ‘I’s that evince an impulse, even an urge, to unity which then precipitates a fall back into the self. The story of the self and its connection to others seems like it, to borrow Adonais’s brilliantly distilled line, ‘Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither’. What we see in Shelley’s poetry are wave-like structures that move between isolation and intimacy. We ride the crest of these waves as if with Shelley to learn the movement between an alienated selfhood and the dream of complete connection, and back again. Shelley’s poetry sways between these two poles. This talk will view the Jane poems as offering a key example of how Shelley constructs the idea of inner and outer worlds. The inner, Shelley’s intensely literary or ‘written’ universe, operates as a textual field of meaning. The outer world stands for the real biographical existence of Jane, Shelley, Mary, Edward, as real people in the actual world itself. In the Jane poems, Shelley places these distinct but connected worlds in touching distance of one another. For in the Jane poems, we seem but only ever seem to know who Jane is in relation to Shelley, how Shelley feels, and what these poems might mean to the man’s life even as we are aware of her as a fully formed person in her own right. Shelley creates inner and outer worlds, where we weave between the textual and the biographical, looking to reconcile planes that Shelley never allows to collapse into oneness in the Jane poems.
Any queries, please get in touch with the Midlands Romantic Seminar convenors, Dr Paul Whickman (P.Whickman@derby.ac.uk) and Dr Amanda Blake Davis (A.Davis2@derby.ac.uk).
We hope to see you there!
