Volcanic Romanticism (30 October 7PM UK time)
In the ‘Year Without A Summer’ of 1816, a remarkable meeting of minds took place at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva. Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin), Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori spent much of the time indoors, sheltering from the rain, and engaging in discussions that would lead to some of the most influential works of British Romanticism, including Byron’s ‘Darkness’, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man, and numerous poems by Percy Shelley. The Diodati Circle were unaware that the unusually cold and stormy weather that summer had been largely caused by the massive eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora the previous year. Nonetheless, the anomalous weather, in combination with the sublime Alpine landscape and their intensely speculative conversations, had a powerful impact on their work.
The aim of this panel is to offer a new perspective on the Diodatic Circle by reflecting on the relationship between weather, climate, and planetary volatility in their writings of 1816 and after. It will address, in particular, how they understood the volcanic as a sublime, apocalyptic force, and how it inflected their powerful visions of the future. Attention will also be paid to the longer history of Romantic responses to vulcanism and planetary catastrophe.
Presentations:
· ‘From Diodati to the End of the World: The Volcanic Origins of The Last Man’ – Dilara Kalkan (Ataturk University)
· ‘Before Tambora: Cowper, the Laki Haze and the Emergence of Volcanic Romanticism’ – Katerina Liontou (University of Leeds)
· ‘“The veil of life and death” – The Volcanic Sublimity of Shelley’s Mountains’ – Chloe Melvin (University of Birmingham)
· ‘“Meteorological Imaginations” and the Solastalgic Skies of Percy Shelley’ – Kate Nankervis (University of York)
Chair: David Higgins (University of Leeds)
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Shelley’s Anni Mirabiles: The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (12 November 6PM UK time)
Our Panellists:
Professor Neil Fraistat (Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland)
Professor Nora Crook (Professor Emerita, Anglia Ruskin University)
Professor Stephen Behrendt (Professor Emeritus, University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Dr Madeleine Callaghan (University of Sheffield)
Chair: Dr Amanda Blake Davis (University of Derby)
This roundtable will celebrate the publication of the latest volume, Volume IV, of the acclaimed Johns Hopkins University Press edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, covering the years 1818 to early 1820, the first phase of Shelley’s Italian period. Volume IV contains some of the masterpieces that Shelley produced during the first part of these years: Julian and Maddalo, inspired by conversations conducted on horseback near Venice between himself and the self-exiled Byron; The Cenci, an indictment of tyranny, domestic and political, probably the most actable of Romantic dramas and containing one of the most chilling studies of a psychopathic sexual abuser in nineteenth-century English literature; The Mask of Anarchy, the “greatest poem of political protest ever written in English” (too inflammatory to be published in 1819); Peter Bell the Third, a brilliant satire on Wordsworth; lesser known poems like his eclogue for women’s voices, Rosalind and Helen, and some of his best known shorter poems (“England in 1819,” “Love’s Philosophy,” and “Stanzas, Written in dejection”).
This event also commemorates the late Professor Stuart Curran, who died in October 2024. He described Shelley’s annus mirabilis as the year in which “the poet discovered his genius in the fertile warmth of Italy and produced a series of works which, for diversity and brilliance, have seldom been matched by any writer” (Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision, xiii). Amongst his innumerable scholarly achievements and contributions to Romantic Studies over 55 years, Professor Curran was a major contributing editor to Volume IV, which thus contains his last academic writings.
We anticipate lively conversation and discussion about some of the major works of Shelley’s anni mirabiles, including some new discoveries.
Volume IV of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley is available to pre-order here: https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/9831/complete-poetry-percy-bysshe-shelley