ROMANTIC CITIES
2027 Paris Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar
Paris, Sorbonne Université / École Normale Supérieure
Friday 14 May-Saturday 15 May 2027
As recent criticism has increasingly recognized, Romanticism was in part an urban and even a metropolitan phenomenon, however much associated with Nature in the popular imagination. The Romantic era, contemporaneous with both the French and the Industrial Revolutions, also coincided with the dawn of a new, urban modernity, when the ‘increasing accumulation of men in cities’ (Wordsworth) made for unpredictable eddies in the cultural as well as in the sociopolitical world. In Romantic Metropolis, the landmark collection of essays published by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin in 2005, London, in particular, emerged as the epicentre of a diverse and contested public sphere: a restless space of sociability, political activity and artistic enterprise without which Romanticism in its full glory would have been unthinkable. While urban Romanticism has since been the object of other important essay collections such asLarry H. Peer’s Romanticism and the City (2011) and Jens Peter Gurr and Berit Michel’s Romantic Cityscapes (2013), this is a topic that continues to yield fresh discoveries. This two-day international conference aims to extend current work and open up new areas of investigation and comparison, examining Romantic cities of all kinds as well as the Romantic construction of the ‘urban’ itself, as manifest in the literature of this period.
A key contention of Romantic Metropolis was that London, rather than Paris, deserved to be seen as, in Walter Benjamin’s well-known phrase, the true ‘capital of the nineteenth century’. While it might ultimately be difficult to establish absolute anteriority claims in either case, London and Paris had certainly long been aware of each other as Western Europe’s foremost Early Modern cities, and one working hypothesis for the conference is that Romanticism (despite or because of obstacles to circulation raised by the wars and Continental blockade) marked a particularly intense phase in the history of such competitive awareness. Potential axes of inquiry include cross-Channel urban representations, such as those deployed at length in John Pinkerton’s Recollections of Paris in the Years 1802-5 and other expatriate memoirs; the persistence in Romantic-era urban writing of earlier bodies of representation, such as the Grub Street mythology of Augustan satire and the ‘town eclogue’ tradition, which themselves belong to a broader history of literary emulation and cultural transfers; the representation of urban trades organized into complex economic systems; the thematization of the city as par excellence a site of momentous, world-historical hermeneutics (a ‘capitale des signes,’to use Karlheinz Stierle’s term); the impact of English ‘models’ on nineteenth-century French city literature.
The Benjaminian anatomy of the modern city still holds valuable insights that can help us make sense of the Romantic metropolis – as the space of flânerie, for instance, and of new types of sense-perception, but also as the site of impending catastrophe or apocalypse of the kind Wordsworth hinted at when he superimposed onto the chaos of the living metropolis the ‘forms / Perennial as the ancient hills’ that had pre-existed it and would someday outlast it (Horace Smith’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, written in competition with Shelley, employs a similar apocalyptic trope, imagining a future hunter discovering a fragment of the now ‘annihilated place’ that was once London). Such intimations lent an edge to the new, and at times oneiric beauty that the Romantic city became invested with as it began its transformation into, in Donald J. Olsen’s phrase, ‘a work of art’. They induced a fashion for the panoramic sublime in an age reaching for ever-bigger, vaster effects, as in the monumental domes and colonnades crowding the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and John Martin, or the architectural designs (for real or imaginary buildings) of John Soane and Joseph Gandy.
The Romantic city, however, is not merely monumental: it also has its quiet areas and quaint recesses, like the South Sea House or the Old Temple in Lamb’s Elia essays. It creates Benjaminian ‘shocks,’ effects of deterritorialization and defamiliarization, as in the London books of Wordsworth’s Prelude, but also, at times, of reterritorialization, morphing into a system of favoured spots, a space of symbolic em-placement crucial to Romantic writing strategies. The Romantic city is, indeed, eminently a site of dialectical complexity, of irony and yearning – ‘simultaneously the best and worst place in the world,’ as Gregory Dart says of Hazlitt’s London. And it is significant, as Jens Peter Gurr pointed out, that the modern ideal of the rus in urbe, or garden suburb, should emerge during the Romantic period: most conspicuously, perhaps, in Hunt and Keats’s Hampstead, but also, for example, in Unitarian Newington Green, or in the glorified Lambeth of Blake’s imaginings, later absorbed into his mythical city of ‘Golgonooza’. Not simply opposites, the country and city were overlapping spaces, and many inner cities of this period retained traces of country life such as farmsteads, village greens and livestock movements (Hunt’s essay on ‘The Graces and Anxieties of Pig-Driving’ in central London captures some of the incongruity and comedy of this co-presence of the rural and the urban).
Besides London and Paris, urban Romanticism involved the re-imagining of many other cities. As the number of cities increased, archetypes were redeployed and the vogue of vedute spread, writers delved into the past, looked closer to home or wrote from farther afield: Babylon and Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, Florence and Venice, Memphis, Baghdad and Xanadu, Hamburg, Lisbon, Naples and Ferrara (among others) are all welcome topics for this conference, as are also the capital cities and urban centres of the Four Nations and the great boomtowns of the British Industrial Revolution, such as the Birmingham of the Lunar Society or the Liverpool of William Roscoe and his friends, both of which were in specific ways ‘Romantic cities’ before they became the Victorian ones of Asa Briggs’s classic study.
The conference will be an opportunity to expand the geographical and imaginative range and sharpen our understanding of the Romantic forma urbis – shaped as that was, perhaps like never before, by contradictory hopes, desires and fears. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of this broad theme. Papers with a transnational, comparatist or transdisciplinary dimension would be especially welcome. Topics may include but are not confined to:
- Places of sociability
- Entertainment, spectacle, performance
- Grub Street and the Augustan legacy
- Revisiting Romantic agrarianism
- Representations of urban economic complexity
- Parameters of cultural production
- Shopping, commerce and the fashion system
- Urbanity and urbaneness
- Navigating urban spaces/The semiotics of the city
- London and Paris, and other paired cities
- Ancient and modern cities
- Imaginary cities
- Nostalgia and apocalypse
- Sophistication/irony/primitivism
- Literary mapping and cartography
- Urban beauty and sublimity
- The aural and tactile city
- Flânerie and the aesthetics of shock
- Deterritorialization and reterritorialization
- Metropolitan sexualities and romance
- Perceptions of the forma urbis
- Representations of suburbia
- The dialectic of ‘capital’ and ‘provincial’
- The new industrial city
- Continental and faraway cities
Please send title and abstract (about 300 words), along with a brief CV, to Laurent Folliot (lfolliot@yahoo.fr) and David Duff (d.duff@qmul.ac.uk) by October 31, 2026.
For further information, contact: info@londonparisromantic.com or visit: London-Paris Romanticism Seminar http://londonparisromantic.com/
Scientific committee: Camille Adnot (École Normale Supérieure/Paris Sciences Lettres); Caroline Bertonèche (Université Grenoble-Alpes); David Duff (Queen Mary University of London); Laurent Folliot (Sorbonne Université); Jean-Marie Fournier (Université Paris Cité) ; Sophie Laniel-Musitelli (Université de Lille); Marc Porée (École Normale Supérieure/Paris Sciences Lettres – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
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David Duff