CfP: Sanditon: 200 Years

Matthew Sangster September 26, 2016 Comments Off

Please see below for a Call for Papers from Anne Toner for a conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s Sanditon.

‘Sanditon: 200 Years’ is a conference that will take place at Trinity College, Cambridge from March 29-31, 2017. The conference will mark the bicentenary of the composition of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, Sanditon, in a year that also marks the bicentenary of Austen’s death. Austen began to write Sanditon in January of 1817. The manuscript closes with the date of March 18. Austen died four months later.

The manuscript of Sanditon is held at King’s College, Cambridge and will be available for participants in the conference to view, along with items from the Dorothy Warren and David Gilson Jane Austen collections, also held at at King’s. To coincide with the conference, Austen exhibitions will take place at the University Library, Cambridge and the English Faculty, Cambridge University.

Proposals for twenty-minute papers on any topic relating to Sanditon are invited. The conference warmly encourages a diverse range of approaches to the work, including papers that are thematic, stylistic, biographical, socio-historical, or in any way more broadly contextual or comparative in their focus. The manuscript of Sanditon will be a subject of particular interest and we welcome papers that address subjects relating to Austen’s composition practices; revisions; the material text; manuscript culture; the fragment; posthumous publication. Papers addressing the reception and later textual history of Sanditon—its editions, completions, and adaptations —are also very welcome.

Confirmed speakers:

Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press)
Emma Clery (University of Southampton)
Claudia L. Johnson (Princeton University)
Michelle Levy (Simon Fraser University)
Peter Sabor (McGill University)
Kathryn Sutherland (University of Oxford)
Clara Tuite (University of Melbourne)

Please send proposals of about 300 words to: sanditon200years@gmail.com by Friday November 11, 2016.

For further details, see the conference website: https://sanditon200years.wordpress.com.

Conference organizer: Dr Anne Toner (Trinity College, Cambridge)

Romantic Antiquarianism: A Conference Celebrating Scott’s The Antiquary, 26th November 2016

Matthew Sangster September 20, 2016 Comments Off

Fiona Robertson and Peter N. Lindfield have organised a one-day conference at the headquarters of the Georgian Group in London to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Antiquary by examining at the multi-faceted nature of antiquarianism in Georgian Britain; this will take place on Saturday November 26th 2016. The full line-up and registration details can be found here.

Conference Report: Part II of the Coleridge Summer Conference 2016

Anna Mercer September 19, 2016 Comments Off

Report from the 15th Coleridge Summer Conference (Part II)

Thank you to Jonatan González (@jonatangonzg) for this report from the Coleridge Summer Conference in Bristol. Jonatan is a first-year PhD student at the University of La Rioja researching Anglo-Spanish literary relations and the reception of British Romantic poetry in continental Europe. His thesis examines the afterlife of William Wordsworth in nineteenth and twentieth-century Spain. Part I of the report can be found here.

On Wednesday the conference moved to Goldney Hall, recently featured, as many delegates were quick to point out, in the BBC series Sherlock as the venue for the wedding of John Watson and Mary Morstan. Though no crimes took place here on this occasion, the new location did entail a change in the pace of the conference, with no parallel sessions taking place that morning, and a gala dinner awaiting for us in the evening at Goldney Hall’s own orangery. Jessica Fay opened up the first panel with a top-notch discussion of Sir George Beaumont’s illustrations to The White Doe of Rylstone and the 1815 collected edition of Wordsworth’s poems, arguing that Beaumont provided something more than illustration and that Wordsworth’s poetic responses to his paintings constituted, in turn, a form of ekphrasis. This was followed by Jeff Strabone’s thorough study of Coleridge’s, Southey’s, and William Taylor’s 1790s writings in dactylic hexameter; and Jennifer Jones and her remarkable examination of Wordsworth’s musicality and metrical innovation in his translations of Chaucer, began in the winter of 1801, though revised and published over the course of his lifetime.

In the next panel Kim Wheatley offered an exploration of the extent to which questioning the substantiality of rocks in British Gothic fiction and Romantic poetry is compatible with ecocritical approaches. This was followed by Tom Clucas’s engaging paper on the ways in which Coleridge’s experiences of collaborative publishing in Cambridge and Bristol prior to Lyrical Ballads helped to shape his subsequent expectations of the conversational nature of multiple authorship. Julia Carlson closed the session with a riveting discussion of the poetic configurations of tactility as a mode of knowledge, comparing Thomas Blacklock’s configuration of tactile maps to the formation of mapping and tactility in Wordsworth’s “The Blind Highland Boy” and Coleridge’s poetics of tact in Omniana, Biographia Literaria, and his Notebooks.

Jeffrey Cox

Julia Carlson

A short coffee break and a stroll through the grounds of Goldney Hall were followed by the second keynote speaker of the Coleridge Summer Conference, Jeffrey Cox. His remarkable lecture, “Thinking Rivers: The Flow of Influence, Wordsworth-Coleridge-Shelley”, took on the view of the later poetry of the Lake poets as responding to the so-called “second generation” of romantics, tracking the flow of influence through a series of river poems, including Coleridge’s “Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni”, Wordsworth’s The River Duddon, and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”.

Such an intellectually stimulating morning gave way for a more relaxed afternoon. We were treated to a visit to the site of Thomas Beddoes’s and Humphrey Davy’s infamous Pneumatic Institution, an exciting boat trip around Bristol, as well as an on-board book launch, which prompted several puns that Coleridge himself would have been proud of, including “a book launch on a launch” and “the boat that launched a thousand books”. Following the gala dinner and a poetry reading featuring a considerable number of delegates and a wide spectrum of poems, a group of Coleridgeans opted for an improvised post-banquet cider tasting in The Coronation Tap, and some late-night star gazing back in the grounds of Will’s Hall.

Delegates at the Pneumatic Institution

Coleridgeans at The Coronation Tap

With Thursday came a return to Will’s Hall and the format of parallel sessions. An intense morning packed with papers, it featured, on the one hand, Dometa Brothers’s and Lance Sacknoff’s thorough examination of the influence of Coleridge’s philosophy and poetry upon William Rowan Hamilton’s revolutionary ideas on the approach of algebra as a discipline; followed by Aimee Barbeau’s paper on Coleridge’s and Benedict Anderson’s versions of nationality, grounded on a comprehensive study of Biographia Literaria and On the Constitution of the Church and State. Edmund Downey opened up the other parallel panel with a terrific discussion, grounded on new archival findings of a number of Coleridge’s early poems originally published in reformist publications in the light of the wider context of the 1790s political poetics and the popular press. This set the mood for Katy Beavers’s fantastic paper on the poetical responses to the evils of the Slave Trade in the works of Coleridge, Southey, Hannah More and Anna Barbauld.

The next parallel sessions of the morning featured, firstly, Philip Aherne and a fabulous close reading of James Marsh’s 1829 American edition of Aids to Reflection, published with his accompanying “Preliminary Essay”, and Rev. John McVickar’s 1839 “rival” edition, containing a new “Preliminary Essay” that deliberately supplanted Marsh; followed by Timothy Whelan’s in-depth analysis of the friendship between Coleridge and Joseph Hughes. The panel closed with Lisa Lappin’s stimulating take on the sexual ambivalence of the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. In the other panel, Ali Al Saffar offered a discussion of how Coleridge’s early “pathological dilemma” yielded the unique creative imagination and philosophical depth ascribed to him in the present day; followed by Jacob Risinger’s remarkable examination of the origins and far-reaching implications of Coleridge’s strange position within the studies on Romantic Stoicism; and closed by Peter Cheyne’s enthralling reading of Coleridge’s water-insect as an analogy that depicts the mind both relaxing on the stream of association, and resisting it with foresight, thereby emphasizing the willed dynamic between passivity and action.

In the next session, Adam Walker brought to life Coleridge’s “The Lover’s Resolution” with an examination of its narrative form through three interconnected approaches dealing with the multilayered topographies of the poem; whereas Catherine Ross focused on the remarkable productivity of the Romantics by exploring the ways in which they were taught in school and university to think and work. This was followed by the last keynote speaker of the conference, Margaret Russet. Her extraordinary lecture, “A Vision in a Dream-Machine: ‘Kubla Khan’, Xanadu and Hypertopia”, explored the Coleridgeanism of the Xanadu Project, the first-ever hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson, arguing that it is best understood as the vision of a perfected – hence impossible – literary history.

Thursday’s social programme featured a walk through Leigh Woods National Nature Reserve, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and Durham Down, once again led by the brilliant and knowledgeable Robin Jarvis. Delegates were able to get some exercise done in this lovely part of Bristol, while getting to know more about the connections of these places with the Coleridge and Southey circle. The last full day of the conference finished with delegates having a late night at the pub, where the intellectual discussion gave way to more informal conversations, pool and foosball battles. Some Coleridgeans even pushed the limits of networking further, once again, with some late-night star gazing back in the college grounds in a pure Romantic style.

Leigh Woods National Nature Reserve

Deven Parker, Daniel Larson, and Grace Rexroth

Though the conference drew to end on Friday afternoon, that morning was still crammed with thought-provoking papers. The first parallel session opened with an introduction by Kerri Andrews and Sarah Crofton to the impressive work completed so far in their current research project, the editing of Hannah More’s 2,000 surviving letters, and a discussion of how their content might inflect our understanding of Coleridge as a Bristol writer in the 1790s; followed by Emma Povall and her remarkable use of the letters and diaries of William Godwin and Coleridge to question whether the latter’s close reading of Godwin’s second novel, St Leon, helped to renew and bring about a time of intimacy to their friendship. In the other parallel panel Jacob Lloyd offered an in-depth discussion of Coleridge’s pantheistic expressions being the result of an attempt to synthesise his reading of Ralph Cudworth with Joseph Priestley’s ideas; followed by Linda R. Reesman’s proposal to expand on critical interpretations of Coleridge’s literary theory and poetic style drawing from an anthropological study on the liminality of a tribal African society.

Delegates then had to chose between Gabriel Cervantes’s comprehensive paper on Coleridge’s critical assessments of Daniel Defoe’s fiction and the particular versions of the Defoe canon he and his contemporaries inherited; and Travis Chi Wing Lau’s thorough analysis of the Pneumatic Institution’s scientific writings alongside the works of Southey and Coleridge to explore how the concept of immunization became radicalized during the Romantic period. In the next session, Ramazan Saral offered a close reading of Coleridge’s “Limbo” and “Time, Real and Imaginary” in relation to his idea of space and time reflecting the alteration between reality and dreams; whereas Emily B. Stanback remarkably delved into the key features of Tom Wedgwood’s metaphysics by exploring his thoughts on the origins of love, sympathy, and vanity. Though not generally considered by scholars of British Romanticism, in a true romantic style Wedgwood did seek to trace the feelings and tendencies of adults to their experiences in childhood. The discussion that ensued paved the way for the final paper of the conference, delivered by Dahlia Porter, and focused on Tom Wedgwood as well, with an eye towards the way in which his experiments with perception influenced Coleridge’s own practice of minute observation and self-experimentation.

Dahlia Porter

Will’s Hall, University of Bristol

After lunch it was time to say goodbye to friends old and new, and everyone departed Will’s Hall, many to begin their summer holidays, whereas others were fearless enough to join on Monday the Wordsworth Summer Conference in the Lake District, thus making it three consecutive weeks of conferencing. That, however, is a different story.

The academic director of the Coleridge Summer Conference, Tim Fulford, and the members of the organizing committee, Kerri Andrews, Michael Gamer, and Joanna Taylor, are to be congratulated and thanked for putting together this impressive five-day conference characterised by the high calibre of papers and the intellectually stimulating discussions that ensued, as well as by a superb balance of scholarly work and a Romantic-related social programme. This is a biannual event, so it will be back in Bristol in two years’ time, though to make the wait more bearable, in April 2017 Tim Fulford and Dahlia Porter will host/organise a Southey conference that is likely to attract a similar crowd of Romanticists.

Conference Report: Part I of the Coleridge Summer Conference 2016

Anna Mercer September 16, 2016 Comments Off

Report from the 15^th Coleridge Summer Conference (Part I)

Thank you to Jonatan González (@jonatangonzg) for this engaging account of the 2016 Coleridge Summer Conference. Jonatan is a first-year PhD student at the University of La Rioja researching Anglo-Spanish literary relations and the reception of British Romantic poetry in continental Europe. His thesis examines the afterlife of William Wordsworth in nineteenth and twentieth-century Spain.

This part of Jonatan’s report covers the first two days of the conference.

Hosted by the Friends of Coleridge (@FriendsofSTC) at Will’s Hall, University of Bristol, and held from the 1^st to the 5^th of August 2016, the 15^thedition of the biennial Coleridge Summer Conference aimed at bringing together cutting-edge research on the literature of Coleridge’s circle in Bristol and beyond. A tightly scheduled week that boasted fifty-three papers distributed over twenty-six panels and three keynote lectures, it made for an engaging, inspiring and friendly conference that bears witness to the fact that Coleridgeans are a warm and welcoming breed amongst Romanticists.

15th Coleridge Summer Conference

Will’s Hall, University of Bristol

Following a special welcome address by the Academic Director of the conference, Tim Fulford, the first panel kicked off to a superb start. Focused on Coleridge’s symbolic imagination, it featured two absorbing papers by Michael Raigner and R. D. Hedley, which made for an engaging discussion about the impact of the Coleridgean concepts of imagination and symbol in the Romantic era. After that, the conference split in parallel sessions, with delegates having to choose, firstly, between Stuart Andrews’s comprehensive examination of the representations of the Duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo in the poetry, prose and correspondence of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth; and Kiran Toor’s discussion of the coincidences between the damned voyage of Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche in 1769 following the transit of Venus, and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

The closing parallel sessions of the day included, on the one hand, Grace Rexroth’s close work on the influence of James Beattie’s writings on “artificial memory” upon Wordsworth’s practice of associating poetry with architectural space, mediated through Coleridge’s readings of the former; Gregory Leadbetter’s remarkable paper on the connections between Thomas McFarland and Coleridge’s thinking on education as the cultivation of the mind; and Tom Duggett’s thorough consideration of the links between Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State and the historical fiction of Walter Scott and Ann Radcliffe. The other final panel of the day featured Joanna Taylor’s superb discussion of the use of grammatical symbols in Coleridge’s private correspondence concerning his infamous climb down Broad Stand on August 1802 to illustrate how, for the poet, the body’s reactions to and impact on the landscape have the potential to alter his imaginative responses to it; Kimberly Page-Jones and her fascinating examination of melancholia in Coleridge’s 1803 autumnal fragments written after a nightmarish 263-mile Scottish walk; and Robin Jarvis’s remarkable account of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s adventuresome Rhine Tour of 1828 as an example of the persistence of their wanderlust in old age.

After a brief coffee break came Peter Manning’s engaging first keynote lecture of the conference, “Edward Irving: Coleridge, Sign, and Symbol”, which kept all delegates glued to their seats with an excellent examination of the Scottish’s clergyman’s gain of influence over Coleridge and his loss of it over the course of the years. The programme for the first day closed with an official reception sponsored by the University of Bristol Centre for Victorian and Romantic Studies, followed by dinner in the college’s premises, and the first of many nights spent at Will’s Hall pub.

Tom Duggett

Peter Manning

After a hearty English breakfast on Tuesday morning, the conference crew had to make the choice between heading to the Conference Hall for Brandon Chao-Chi Yen’s examination of the iconographical presence of trees in the poetry of Coleridge, Hannah Dow’s close reading of Dorothy Wordsworth’s later journals in relation to Modernist poetry, and Bethan Roberts’s enthralling exploration of the relationship between poetry, science and the environment, literary and natural history, manifest in Coleridge’s “The Nightingale”; or going to the Lounge of Will’s Hall for Monica Bushling’s paper on the theme of guilty love in “The Pains of Sleep” and Christabel, Daniel Laron’s thorough engagement with Coleridge’s 1798 fragment “The Wanderings of Cain” to uncover the relations between burial practices and state power in early-nineteenth century England, and Paul Cheshire’s paper on the connection between William Gilbert’s The Hurricane: a Theosophical Western Eclogue and Thomas Taylor’s Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries.

With the discussion of the second parallel sessions of the morning this conference report becomes slightly biased, as the first panel featured my own paper, which engaged with the afterlife of the Coleridge persona in the nineteenth-century Spanish press. Also presenting were Adam Neikirk, giving a study of Coleridge’s 1796 Poems on Various Subjects, and Deven Parker explaining her remarkable work on the way in which early nineteenth-century live drama performances and mechanical stage technologies shaped the writing and production of Coleridge’s 1813 Remorse. The other parallel panel opened with a discussion of Coleridge’s deployment of the sublime in On the Constitution of the Church and State in charge of Murray J. Evans, followed by Sharon Tai’s on the development of Coleridge’s philosophical theology in the comprehensive paper light of the changes he made over the years in the various versions of ‘Religious Musings’, ‘The Eolian Harp’, and ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’; and Jane Bolin’s close work on the way in which repetition and reflection worked for and against the endings of “Kubla Khan” and Christabel.

The following parallel sessions featured Anastasia Stelse’s careful reading of Dorothy Wordsworth’s use of aural qualities in her journals as denoting more poetic qualities than her standard verse poetry, followed by Sue Edney’s consideration of William Barnes’s poetry as an application of a Romantic linguistic philosophy to the Victorian cultural and social dilemmas. Anna Mercer opened up the other panel with a terrific examination of the complex nuances that feature in the poetical dialogue between Coleridge and his daughter Sara, focusing on the conversation poems as well as on “Poppies” and “Edith Asleep”, thereby illustrating how though tackling similar themes, Sara’s poetry is marked by her unique perspective and tone. This paved the way for Jeffrey Barbeau’s absorbing account of Sara Coleridge’s usually-forgotten daughter Bertha Fanny Coleridge. His paper argued that a recovery of little-known manuscripts describing her life and death contributes to a fuller understanding of Sara’s obsession with baptism and spiritual regeneration in the final decade of her life.

Following such an intense morning of scholarly work, a chilled out afternoon awaited us Coleridgeans. The social programme featured a Romantic walk around Bristol, led by the wonderful authority on Romantic pedestrianism Robin Jarvis, and the knowledgeable Stuart Andrews, who made us travel back in time and feel as if we were actually walking alongside Coleridge and Southey. Some highlights included visits to the Georgian House Museum, Thomas Chatterton’s House, as well as the former site of Joseph Cottle’s bookshop on the corner of High Street and Corn Street, one of the most important literary landmarks that any Romanticist could think of. The city walk culminated with a visit to the impressive St Mary Redcliffe, where we were granted access to the Muniment Room where Chatterton found, so he said, the manuscripts of the Thomas Rowley poems. The second day of the conference was over, and we all went back to Will’s Hall for dinner, and another evening of networking at the college pub.

Robin Jarvis

Joseph Cottle’s bookshop

Part II will appear on the blog next week.

CfP: Robert Southey and Romantic-era literature, culture and science: 1797, 1817, 2017 – A Bicentennial Conference

Matthew Sangster September 15, 2016 Comments Off

Please see below for a Call for Papers for next year’s Robert Southey conference in Bristol.

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Robert Southey and Romantic-era literature, culture and science: 1797, 1817, 2017 – A Bicentennial Conference

The Clifton Club, Clifton, Bristol 11-13 April 2017

In the 1790s, an extraordinary confluence of poets, scientists, publishers and political campaigners came together in Bristol. An important port city and center for the slave trade, Bristol became a hub for a radical coterie of writers whose work and conversations bridged nascent divisions between humanistic and scientific concerns. By 1817, many of these same writers—including Humphry Davy, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—had emerged as establishment figures calling for radical journalists to be imprisoned and laboring-class inventors to be prosecuted. This bicentennial conference focuses on the transformation of Bristol’s radical writers, doctors, and experimentalists in the aftermath of changes that transformed the city, most importantly the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, and the formation of the Bristol Philosophical and Literary Institution in 1817. The conference will explore several linked concerns: How does our perspective on Romanticism shift when we take Bristol as an evolving center for Romantic scientific and literary culture? What does the 1797-1817 frame reveal about the changing relations between poetry and science, and between both and politics? What questions does the twenty-year trajectory of Southey, Davy, Coleridge and their circle pose for Romanticists in 2017?

Confirmed keynotes include:

Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt, editors of Southey’s Collected Letters, on “Southey in context, 1816-18”

Frank James, editor of Faraday’s Collected Letters, on “Davy of the Pneumatic Institution and Davy of the Royal Society in 1817”

We envisage days of intense discussion in the Regency rooms of the Clifton Club and evenings of relaxed conviviality in the many bars that surround it.

The conference fee – to include dinner in the stunning surroundings of the Clifton Lido – will be ca. £100-120. Five bursaries of £100 each are available for graduate students/independent scholars.

Proposals for 20 minute papers, of no more than half a page, are welcomed on all aspects of Southey and the Bristol circle and its legacy – including, for instance, Thomas Beddoes, Erasmus Darwin, the Edgeworths, Joanna Baillie, Hannah More, William Godwin, Francis Jeffrey, Leigh Hunt, Mary Robinson, Robert Lovell, Joseph Priestley, William Taylor, William Hazlitt, William Wollaston, William Wordsworth; slavery and abolition, medicine, chemistry, experimentalism, political writing, travel and exploration.

Send your proposal by email to timfulford@tiscali.co.uk by 10 November. Be sure to write ‘Southey conference’ in the subject line and your name and email at the top of the proposal. If you’d like to be considered for a bursary, say this at the head of your proposal.

The conference is organised by Tim Fulford and Dahlia Porter. It is supported by the Friends of Coleridge, De Montfort University, and the University of Glasgow.

Five Questions: Andrew McInnes on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Ghost

Matthew Sangster September 7, 2016 Comments Off

Andrew McInnes is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University. His work focuses on Romantic-period women’s writing across a wide range of modes and genres; he has published articles and book chapters on authors including Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Dacre and Jane Austen. At the centre of his research, though, is Mary Wollstonecraft, who takes a starring role in his first monograph, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period, which was recently published by Routledge and which we discuss below.

1) How did you first become interested in the figure of the female philosopher?

I first became interested in the figure of the female philosopher whilst researching Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend and sometime protégée, who received both praise and censure as a female philosopher, especially after the publication of her radical novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). Hays drew on Wollstonecraft’s example throughout her writing career, developing her own philosophy about the importance of balancing reason and passion by synthesizing aspects of Wollstonecraft’s feminism with William Godwin’s political philosophy in her own idiosyncratic manner. Reviews of Hays’ work positioned her as a female philosopher in the mould of Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft herself sends Hays a teasing note after the publication of Emma Courtney, warning her that she has been ‘stygmatized as a Philosophess – a Godwinian’ by the Barbaulds. I became really interested in both women’s wariness about the term – that emphasis on stigma – when critics at the time and after have been happy to label them ‘female philosophers’.

2) To what extent do you see the female philosopher in the Romantic period as being synonymous with Mary Wollstonecraft, and to what extent is she ‘always already partly figurative’, as you contend in your introduction?

Mary Wollstonecraft is celebrated today as the female philosopher of the Romantic period, but I’m convinced that she refused to use the term in relation to herself throughout her writing career. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, for example, she prefers the gender neutral ‘philosopher’ and sympathetic reviewers like William Enfield followed her lead by avoiding the term. After her death, counter-revolutionary writers, led by the Anti-Jacobin Review, positively delighted in labelling her as a female philosopher and in attacking the term and through it, Wollstonecraft’s life and writing. Women writers seeking to engage with Wollstonecraft’s work had to disentangle her from the figure of the female philosopher, treated as an oxymoron in the conservative press.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the term ‘female philosopher’ shifts from referring to real women such as Elizabeths Carter and Montagu, and others in the Bluestocking circle, to representing an avatar of thinking womanhood, embodying Enlightenment ideals of the progress of civilization. Shadowing this celebratory version of the figure is a negative vision of the female philosopher, representing male anxieties about domineering, highly sexed, politically and religiously heterodox women. By the 1790s, this divided figure – both Enlightenment avatar and reactionary nightmare – splits further in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary discourse, with Anti-Jacobin writers adopting the figure as a term of abuse, explaining Hays and Wollstonecraft’s hesitancy in using the term in relation to themselves. So, ‘female philosopher’ is used to refer to real women but, at the same time, accrues a set of mostly literary conventions associated with reason, reading, political engagement, and sexuality. As a literary critic, I am fascinated by how the female philosopher as literary archetype gets used by women writers before and after Wollstonecraft’s death in order to think about the thinking woman.

3) What do you see as being the main gender-specific lines of attack directed at female philosophers in the period?

Counter-revolutionary reviewers of works by Hays, Wollstonecraft, and others poured scorn on the term ‘female philosopher’ itself, questioning the ability of women to think philosophically (or, sometimes, at all) and representing female philosophy as rote-learned pedantry. These attacks mask gender-specific anxieties about women engaging in political debate, which was increasingly viewed as stepping outside of their private, domestic sphere, and female sexuality. In my introduction, I engage with Jürgen Habermas’ work on the eighteenth-century public sphere (split between literary and political aspects but imagined as one and indivisible) to argue that women were able to access the literary side of the public sphere, especially by writing novels, but when their work started to encroach on political discourse they triggered anxieties in male readers and reviewers. In France, female philosophers were linked to the philosopher whore in French pornography – which you can see reflected in the Anti-Jacobin Review’s notorious decision to index Wollstonecraft under Prostitute in their first volume. Wollstonecraft also leads Rev. Richard Polwhele’s crew of ‘unsex’d females’ in his similarly infamous poem, viewing Wollstonecraft, Hays, and others as both disconcertingly unfeminine and dangerously sexy.

4) How do you see attitudes to female thinkers changing over the chronological span that separates the 1790s texts that you examine in your first chapter and the novels of the 1820s and 1830s that you consider in your fourth?

In the 1790s, attitudes to female thinkers shift from an initially celebratory tone, linking female philosophy to the ideals of the French Revolution, to an increasingly angry discourse, denouncing female philosophers along with French revolutionaries as threatening to the fabric of British society. In the early nineteenth century, women writers seeking to celebrate female thinkers have to disentangle counter-revolutionary representations of female philosophers as dubious, dangerous, and dogmatic from the positive aspects they wish to recuperate for their post-revolutionary moment. In the 1800s and 1810s, this often involved including a character explicitly labelled a female philosopher who tends to meet a sticky end: seduced by malevolent French philosophers, unmarried, pregnant, suicidal, or otherwise mortally sick. Other female characters in their novels could then take on some of the positive elements of female philosophy, whilst avoiding the opprobrium ostentatiously piled on the erring and often dying woman. By the 1820s and 30s, some of the radical sting of the female philosopher had worn off, and elements of the figure find their way into representations of the female artist. My fourth chapter analyses the work of Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, in relation to several popular genres of the time: the Gothic, the historical novel, and silver fork fiction. Shelley manages to work tropes relating to the female philosopher into Frankenstein and her later novels Valperga, Perkin Warbeck, and Lodore, exploring the figures continuing relevance reshaped across several genres. So, by casting the female philosopher back into history in her historical novels, Shelley provides a genealogy for the figure, previous to eighteenth-century and revolutionary debates about her abilities, imagining a historic lineage of female philosophers from Renaissance Italy to her present day.

5) What new work are you planning on moving forward with now that the book’s complete?

I’m currently working on two distinct but related research projects, both more or less Gothic. They sometimes feel quite unrelated to Wollstonecraft’s Ghost, but then I think my choice of title for the book is appropriately spooky. My first project explores Jane Austen’s continuing interest in the Gothic, beyond Northanger Abbey, arguing that Austen continues to make use of Gothic tropes and situations but positions them at a geographic distance from the central concerns of her plots. I’ve recently published an article in Gothic Studies on Emma as a Radcliffean Gothic novel in disguise and have another forthcoming in Romantic Textualities on how Ireland functions as a Gothic space in the novel. My second project analyses twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations of Frankenstein in children’s literature and Young Adult fiction, arguing that modern authors use Shelley’s novel to explore the monstrosity inherent in adolescence (and adolescents).

CfP: BARS 2017: Romantic Improvement

Matthew Sangster September 6, 2016 Comments Off

The Call for Papers for BARS’ 2017 International Conference, Romantic Improvement, is now live on the conference site. I’ve also pasted the text below.

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Call for Papers

Proposals are invited for the 2017 conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies, to be hosted by the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York from 27-30^th July. The theme of this interdisciplinary conference is ‘improvement’, which marks a semantic field also encompassing cognate terms such as ‘innovation’, ‘progress’, and ‘reform’, all with implications across a range of discourses. The aim of the conference is to develop a collective investigation of the different but imbricated meanings of improvement in a period alternatively optimistic and pessimistic about its prospects in literary and other fields. The keynote speakers for Romantic Improvement are Catherine Hall (UCL), Jon Klancher (Carnegie Mellon), Nigel Leask (Glasgow), and Jane Rendall (York).

We encourage proposals for open-call sessions and themed panels as well as individual proposals for 20-minute papers. Subjects covered might include (but are not limited to):

Progress and perfectibility: ‘the march of mind’; universal modernity; ‘four stages’ theory and conjectural history; utopias and anti-utopias; millenarianism; philanthropy; socialism and social security

Languages of reform: the 1790s and the Revolution controversy; popular radicalism; evangelicalism and atonement; innovation/ renovation; utilitarianism

Education and useful knowledge: libraries, readers and reading; dissenting academies, schools, universities; Sunday Schools; clubs, societies, and networks of improvement; ‘home’ and domesticity

The arts and ‘improvement’: genre; adaptation, mediation, performance; legacies and afterlives; ‘crooked roads … of Genius’; ruin writing; nostalgia; the arts as ‘non-progressive’

Fiction and romance: the ‘progress of romance’; historical fiction and national pasts; Gothic; didacticism and improvement fiction; children’s literature

Print and material culture: technologies of print and publishing; book history; editing and illustrating; museums; exhibition and display

Empire: the ‘improvement’ of subject-peoples; four-nations Britain; travel-writing and cultural comparison; missionaries; settling, planting, transplanting; abolitionism and amelioration; colonial administration

The city: urban planning and urbanization; architectural improvement; consumer culture, fashion, shopping; interior decoration; policing; assembly rooms, theatres, and spaces of sociability

Land and landscape: estates, parks, gardens; enclosure; farming and agriculture; radical agrarianism; animal husbandry

Commerce and manufacture: political economy; industrialization; machines and machinery; the factory system; steam power; roads, turnpikes, canals

The sciences: botany and botanic gardens; medicine; asylums and mental health; chemistry; public science; electricity; experiment and spectacle

Presentation formats

We welcome proposals for the following:

Individual 20 minute papers. Abstracts of no more than 250 words. Please include your name and institutional affiliation (if applicable).

Panels of three 20 minute papers or four 15 minute papers. Please include an abstract of the panel theme, together with 250-word proposals from each of the speakers, in a single document.

Open-call sessions. Proposals should include a 350-word description of the potential session, outlining its importance and relevance to the conference theme. Accepted open-call sessions will be advertised on the BARS 2017 website from mid-November 2016.

Submissions

The deadline for proposals for open-call sessions is 1 November 2016.

The deadline for submissions of panels and individual papers is 18 December 2016.

Please email proposals to bars2017@york.ac.uk, directing any inquiries to Dr Joanna Wharton.

President’s Report for 2016

Matthew Sangster September 6, 2016 Comments Off

British Association for Romantic Studies President’s Report for 2016

This is an exciting time to be President of BARS. Thanks to a buoyant membership (currently almost 400) and last year’s highly successful conference at Cardiff, we are in a stable and healthy financial state. This means that we have been able to expand our activities in key areas, improve our web presence, digitize The BARS Review, and expand our international collaboration. Here are some of our initiatives:

For Early Career Researchers, there are several new Fellowships: the Scottish Romanticism Award, the Wordsworth Trust Fellowship, and the ‘Nineteenth Century Matters’ award. We also hope to include some new training events and opportunities to work with partner institutions at the next biennial conference in 2017. Our new focus on public engagement was launched with a very successful training session run by Nicola Watson at the BARS PG and ECR conference, ‘Romantic Voices’.
The BARS First Book Prize award will run again this academic year, with the winner announced at the biannual conference in July 2017. We are delighted that Professor Nigel Leask has agreed to chair the panel.
The BARS Blog includes ‘Five Questions’ with authors of recent books, and regular announcements.
The BARS Review is now digital: this has enabled us to include over 30 reviews per issue and to include a ‘spotlight’ on emerging areas of interest.
Despite Brexit, we are exploring the possibility of a new European-wide network of Romantic associations and partner institutions, provisionally known as ERA (European Romanticism Association).
We now sponsor a BARS panel at the annual NASSR conference.
We have commissioned BARS postcards, to be used for publicity purposes.

We have also increased the budget for our current schemes: the Copley bursaries, the regular subvention of conferences, and the BARS First Book award. The PG and ECR conference (held this year in Oxford) continues to be a great success.

None of this would have been possible without the commitment and enthusiasm of the BARS Executive Committee, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank Nicky, Anthony, Jane, the two Matts, the two Susans, Gillian, Helen, Honor, Neil and Dan.

Finally, a reminder that that our next biennial conference ‘Romantic Improvement’ will be held at the University of York, 27-30 July 2017. The CFP will be issued soon, and I look forward to seeing you all there for what is sure to be an instructive and fun occasion.

Ian Haywood
University of Roehampton, London
August 2016

Copley Report: Genevieve Theodora McNutt

Matthew Sangster August 23, 2016 Comments Off

Genevieve Theodora McNutt was awarded Stephen Copley Research Award by BARS earlier this year. Below, she gives an account of the research trip to the British Library that this funding enabled her to complete.

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The Stephen Copley Research Award allowed me to travel to London to visit the British Library. My research addresses the work of the antiquary Joseph Ritson, and I hoped to develop a better understanding of the research that Ritson undertook in the British Museum, particularly in the early years between his move to London in 1775 and his first major publications in 1782. This period is sparsely covered in Bertrand Bronson’s excellent biography, as Bronson acknowledges. There are very few surviving letters from this period, and little evidence of Ritson’s activities. And yet, from his published work, it is clear that he carried out an astonishing project of research into early English literature during this period. During my trip, I was able to consult material held in the British Library which provided invaluable evidence of Ritson’s research.

The Register of Manuscripts Sent to the Reading Room of the British Museum goes a long way towards filling the gaps in Ritson’s biography. The Register makes clear that Ritson’s research was even more extensive than I had realized, and I now face the daunting task of cross-referencing the shelf marks recorded in the Register with the catalogues of the different collections. However some results were immediately apparent. The collections of the British Museum allowed Ritson’s research to take a literary turn, and many of his contributions to the study of early English literature would have been simply impossible without access to the those collections. Although Ritson’s work on medieval romance was among the last works published during his lifetime, he had identified and made a close study of many of his manuscript sources decades earlier. Although my focus, given my limited time, was on Ritson, turning the pages of the Register provided a fascinating window into the scholarship of the romantic period.

I was also able to examine Ritson’s Catalogue of Romances, his unpublished attempt to document and organize every printed romance, very broadly defined to include most fictional narrative works, in French, Italian and Spanish before 1600, and in English before 1660 (to my shame I only had the time and knowledge to deal with the volume of English romances). The Catalogue is a sprawling and eclectic work, with multiple layers of revision over the years, and it provides fascinating evidence of Ritson’s research and the ways in which it changed and developed. Although the bulk of the work is bibliographic, probably modelled on Joseph Ames’s Typographical Antiquities, there are many instances of Ritson’s literary judgements, sometimes arising from the task of categorization and organization. Particularly interesting are the notes in Francis Douce’s hand, in a distinctive red ink. Although it was previously unclear whether these had been made before or after Ritson’s death, I have identified several places in which Douce’s notes led to revisions in Ritson’s hand, providing clear evidence of collaboration.

I would like to thank BARS for making this trip possible. The information I gathered is extremely valuable for my research. It was a wonderful experience, if somewhat disorientating, to conduct research on how research was conducted more than two hundred years ago, to request, through an online catalogue, manuscripts that were themselves the record of manuscripts requested, and to sit in the crowded Reading Rooms of the British Library and try to understand a man who spent so many hours in the rooms of Montagu House.

Genevieve Theodora McNutt, University of Edinburgh

Five Questions: Carol Bolton on Southey’s Letters from England

Matthew Sangster August 18, 2016 Comments Off

Carol Bolton is Programme Director for English at Loughborough University. She has published widely on Romantic-period topics and has particular interests in writings that engage with issues of exploration and empire and in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century politics. She has played an important role in rehabilitating and exploring the work of Robert Southey, the subject of her first monograph and the focus of several substantial editorial projects in which she has played major parts. The latest of these, an edition of Robert Southey’s Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, which we discuss below, was recently released by Routledge as part of the Pickering Masters series.

1) How did you come to realise that you wanted to produce an edition of Letters from England?

I have worked on several collaborative projects to publish editions of Southey’s poetry (Poetical Works 1793-1810, 2004; Later Poetical Works 1811-1838, 2012) and letters (The Collected Letters, Parts 1-4, 2009-2013) as well as writing articles, essays and a book (Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism, 2007) on his representations of travel, exploration and colonialism. Letters from England presents a view of his own country through the eyes of an invented foreign national, so we see Southey distancing himself from his fellow citizens to write insightfully and often humorously about them. It is one of his most engaging works and presents a detailed, on-the-spot survey of early nineteenth-century life. The lifetime editions of this book (1807, 1808, 1814) are only available in copyright libraries and the most recent modern edition by Jack Simmons, was published in 1951. In sixty years the field of Romantic Studies has changed immensely and I wanted to present a new critical appraisal of the book, based on recent Southey research, as well as drawing on current methodologies that re-historicise literary works within their social and political context to appreciate their cultural relevance.

2) Your introduction very interestingly contextualises Letters from England within existing traditions of topographical travel writing and of depicting England through the eyes of fictional foreigners. To what extent do you think that Southey’s book-making was imitating past examples, and to what extent do you think that the Letters constitute an innovation?

As a bibliophile with a strong sense of literary tradition, Southey saw himself in a long line of authors, poets and historians in his own book-making ventures. In Letters from England he drew on the eighteenth-century interest in travelogues – domestic and foreign, factual and fictional – to produce what he hoped would be a lucrative best-seller. Writing it in the epistolary form, at a time when private reflections marketed for public consumption were popular, and employing a wry tone that is often satirical, the reflections of his Spanish tourist were intended to entertain. In this way he employed techniques used by earlier writers, such as Montesquieu, Horace Walpole, Thomas Percy and Oliver Goldsmith. Despite sharing some of the apprehensions of these previous authors – who highlight declining moral standards and increasing materialism in the English people – Southey raises other grave issues about his contemporary society. His fears for the stability of the nation, its eroding religious values, and his Romantic, anti-industrialist views on increasing mechanisation, urbanisation, consumerism, and progress for its own sake rather than to improve human lives, are all concerns in this work. In order to criticise the present, he judges his countrymen with a historian’s eye. His sense of Englishness is rooted in the past, its cultural traditions and heritage, and he invokes an idealised, nostalgic version of feudalism, which in spite of its hierarchical structure he believed had respect for all members of society. Southey felt his travel account was innovative in the ‘life-painting’ it provided, and Espriella doesn’t just visit obvious places, such as abbeys, tombs and national monuments. He describes everyday life on the London streets and in the factories of the manufacturing towns. He comments on the wealth and majesty of such a prosperous nation as well as capturing vignettes of poverty and suffering to produce a broad survey of early nineteenth-century England.

3) What seem to you to be the best and worst aspects of England in Espriella’s (and Southey’s) eyes?

The best aspects of England are its cultural heritage and the historical sites of interest that a tourist like Espriella would be expected to visit: cathedrals, abbeys, great houses, palaces and monuments. But Southey is concerned that while foreign visitors appreciate these places, his own countrymen do not value the rich heritage in front of their eyes. The English people are often shown as having valuable qualities of character – for instance their sense of intellectual and political independence – but Southey also sees them as being unaware of their place within a national tradition and a more glorious past, as well as lacking a cohesive social bond between the classes. In his anti-modern stance, he presents the English as focused on their livelihoods, so that the goods they produce and consume are more highly prized than their fellow citizens. His Romantic, anti-economic perspective paints a picture of soulless materialism that drives industry, hardens hearts against the poor and impoverishes English culture and heritage. Despite criticising his Spaniard’s ‘superstitious’ Roman Catholic faith, he employs his firm belief in the merits of a strong national church to expose the empty ceremonies and lip-serving, cold-hearted religion of the English. He also provides a survey of the sects that are springing up, whose charismatic prophets and zealous congregations are attracting members to what he considers insane beliefs and behaviour. Through Espriella, Southey warns that the schismatic state of the English religion is a threat to the Anglican Church as well as national stability. And Southey also uses the scandalised sensibilities of his outsider to lever a more concerned response from his countrymen towards the labouring classes and soften the hearts of the wealthy in their attitudes to the poor. As might be expected from a member of the ‘Lake poets’, Southey shows prescience in anticipating our modern ecological concerns, by demonstrating how enclosure and industrialisation are diminishing the countryside as a natural resource. The pedestrian tour of the Lake District made by Espriella shows his appreciation of its wild ruggedness at a time when theories of the sublime were popular, and the region was beginning to attract tourists (a word coined during this period). In prioritising the subjective, experiential voice of the walker, Southey shows how he and his fellow Romantics have become identified with this emblematic region and how their aesthetic responses to it have endured in England’s cultural heritage.

4) Now that the edition’s available, how do you think that scholars might profitably employ the insights to be gleaned from Letters from England? Are there aspects or elements which you think might be particularly useful for teaching the Romantic period at undergraduate or MA level?

The book is a rich source of information on the social history of the early nineteenth century. In addition, the editorial apparatus explains topical references, literary and cultural allusions, and includes translations of foreign language material. It provides references to Southey’s correspondence, facilitating greater understanding of the text, the influence of Southey’s friends and correspondents on its composition, and accurately identifies the sources he drew on in writing it. The fact that sections of Letters from England have been frequently cited and anthologised demonstrates its utility as a resource for the period. This new scholarly edition enables a full understanding of its socio-historical context, authorial intentions, and the relationship between this text and other works by Southey and his contemporaries. It intends to assist in the current trend for reappraising Southey’s eminence as a literary figure and to highlight the limitations of categories such as poet, historian or journalist that have been previously applied to him. Although Southey was a prolific and proficient writer in all these fields, we now know that he was also an amusing prose writer. Southey’s centrality to Romantic-period literature and its textual and cultural practices is now evident, but this edition adds an extra dimension in showing how the established perceptions of genre and style within which he and his contemporaries worked were challenged in a debate over form and function that makes this one of his most innovative works.

There are several aspects of the text that are useful for teaching the Romantic period to students. I have found the visitor’s view of London and his responses to the metropolis very helpful in teaching my MA module ‘Literary Londons’. The Lake District sections explicate contemporary aesthetic theories of the picturesque and sublime. The intertextuality of the book, identified in my research into Southey’s correspondence, identifies a range of correspondents and sources that illuminate the ‘bookmaking’ activities of nineteenth-century authors. In addition, the bifocal perspective of the experienced English author and the naive Spanish tourist are ideal for teaching students on courses about narratology, its structures and functions and use of focalisation. Letters from England is an essential source for the historical context of the period, against which many canonical and lesser-known texts can be read. This will facilitate greater understanding of the social, political and religious background of the Romantic period, and illuminate the attitudes, beliefs and concerns of its authors and their characters.

5) What new projects do you plan to work on now that the edition is complete?

I intend to investigate some of the contemporary issues raised by Southey in Letters from England in greater depth in the form of articles and essays. For instance, I am very interested in the version of ‘Englishness’ he presents to the reader and how this is informed by his views on history, literature and cultural precedents. I also intend to explicate his Romantic engagement with landscape (domestic and alien) in this book and his poetry, to demonstrate how his responses to colonialist ventures originate from his Anglophile sense of historical tradition and the influences of pastoral poetry. In the longer term I will be working on a monograph that examines the ‘politics of place’ in attitudes to travel, exploration and colonialism in the Romantic period.