CFP Extended: Gilbert White and his Contexts

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Extended Call For Papers: Gilbert White and his Contexts

3–5 June 2025, Selborne, Hampshire, UK

Gilbert White (1720–93) has long been celebrated both as a keen-eyed naturalist and as a fine nature writer. His Natural History of Selborne (1789) has never gone out of print and is often considered as the guiding spirit of English nature writing. This conference brings together academics, archivists, independent scholars, naturalists, and heritage providers working in both the sciences and the humanities to reassess White’s life and work in the light of new findings and methodologies, to encourage and develop new networks and collaborations between White scholars, and to explore opportunities for collaborative research and publication.

Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words for a 20-minute paper to the conference website by the updated deadline of midnight on Friday 4 April 2025. We also welcome proposals for preformed panels of three speakers or roundtable discussions of up to five speakers.

Keynote Speakers: Stephen Moss, Anne Secord, and Jenny Uglow

Venue: Gilbert White House and Gardens in Selborne, Hampshire

Organisers: Brycchan Carey (Northumbria University), Steph Holt (Natural History Museum)

Conference Website: https://www.gilbertwhite.org.uk

New Resource: Romantic Circles’ Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lake District: Poems from the Commonplace Book, edited by Michelle Levy

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A new resource, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lake District: Poems from the Commonplace Book is now available on Romantic Circles, edited by Michelle Levy.

Check it out here: https://romantic-circles.org/editions/DW/poems

From the website:


Dorothy Wordsworth was an active poet for much of her life. Unlike her brother, William, however, she only published a few of her poems during her lifetime. This does not mean that her verse was unknown, as she shared her poems with her family members and social circle. She also returned to her poems throughout her adult life, recopying, rereading and revising them. This edition gathers her poetry as it appears in a single notebook, DCMS 120, into which she copied and revised most of her poems, as well as some other miscellaneous content. Dorothy purchased this notebook in November 1820, when on a visit to France, and most of these poems were written and entered in the notebook between 1826 and 1840, as best we can tell, though some poems may date to an earlier period. In total, the notebook contains 24 poems in 37 versions.

Conference and Seminar Support Report: Flora Lisica on ‘Drawing Keats’s London’ at Keats House Museum for the Being Human Festival 

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On a Saturday afternoon in November, we gathered at Keats House Museum in Hampstead for the purpose of exploring Keats’s legacy through drawing. Made possible by generous funding from BARS’s Conference and Seminar Support and Northeastern University London, and the support of Keats House, ‘Drawing Keats’s London’ was part of the Being Human Festival. This year’s theme for the festival was ‘Landmarks’, and it felt apt to be reflecting on this theme at Keats House, which is such a key landmark for British Romanticism and literary London. 

The free workshop formed part of a series of events organised by my colleagues at Northeastern University London. It originated from a chapter which I wrote about Keats’s relationship to the city, and his writing about urban nature, for Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration (Bloomsbury, 2024), edited by Charlotte Grant and Alistair Robinson. Co-led by artist Celeste Anstruther and myself, the purpose of the event was to introduce Keats’s work to new audiences, to engage the attendees with Keats’s poetry and his legacy in a novel and tactile way, and to encourage attendees to delineate their own relationship to Keats and the museum. At the end of the workshop, attendees were invited to write short reflections on their experiences of the event, and it was brilliant to see some remarking upon their new-found enjoyment of Keats’s work; one wonderfully wrote that they will ‘be reading Keats from now on’. 

In the Nightingale Room. 

We began by gathering in the Nightingale Room, with its tall windows giving expansive views of the museum’s garden, where I gave a short introduction on the relationship between Keats’s life and his work as a Londoner, and his relationship to the visual arts. I wanted to stress Keats’s unusual relationship to the city: despite spending the majority of his life in what would now count as Greater London, Keats very rarely made any mention of urban life in his poems and is best known for his nature poetry. Born in Moorgate, Keats spent a substantial part of his childhood in then-rural Enfield and Edmonton; after a short spell in Southwark for his medical studies, he settled in suburban Hampstead, with which he is most firmly associated. Keats’s cross-city migrations found an echo in our own journeys on the day, as we all travelled to Keats House from different parts of London. 

Many of the attendees had not been to Keats House previously, and we spoke about Keats’s relationship to the house. Ironically, what is now Keats House was never Keats’s house in his lifetime: he lived there as a lodger of his friend Charles Armitage Brown, sometimes needing to vacate the house when Brown sublet it during the summer. His slightly precarious living situation reflects the broader material and financial pressures of living in London, which remains the case for many today. Nature and the imagination are some of the few things which the city offers freely to all of its inhabitants, and we spoke about the way that this perhaps explains Keats’s repeated returns to natural subjects in his poems. 

Celeste took over the second part of the workshop, leading us through a series of drawing exercises. The Nightingale Room was perfect for this, as there were plenty of unusual, and beautiful, architectural features to focus on. The expanse of windows meant that we were able to draw the garden too, such as the mulberry tree, which probably would have been growing there in Keats’s time too. We also had some fruits – apples, pears, pomegranates – and autumnal leaves scattered on the tables to help anchor our attention. 

Celeste was brilliant at helping us reflect on the purpose of what we were doing in the context of the museum and Keats’s work. Each task asked us to focus our attention upon an object, and to think how we might try to convey the material presence of the chandelier, the corner of a window frame, the pear, or the leaf, in two dimensions. Some of the exercises only gave us a short amount of time to draw an object; one required us to draw with our non-dominant hand. Another demanded that we draw something with a single continuous line, without ever lifting our pencils, sharpening our attention to the way that objects relate to, and flow into, one another. These were also exercises in negative capability, asking us to be, in Keats’s terms, ‘content with half-knowledge’ as we drew and had to let go of our desire for knowable outcomes. 

The outcomes of different exercises. 

In the final part of the workshop, everybody scattered around the museum. Keats House holds a number of items which Keats owned, or which would have been in the building during his time, and some attendees chose to depict those in their drawings: a life-mask of Keats, the engagement ring which he had given to Fanny Brawne, Joseph Severn’s portrait of Keats on his deathbed. Others focused on the balanced architectural proportions of the house. One attendee wrote in their reflection that they were thinking about Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, and were ‘inspired to draw the scene from the window that Keats would have looked on’, to capture ‘the beauty of the season of “mist and mellow fruitfulness”’. Another noted that they ‘focused on finding “personal” impressions in the house […,] anything that would speak of the people that walked these halls’. 

The museum is encouraging us to enter this kind of make-believe. Providing period-appropriate furniture, it suggests that envisaging the way that life was led in the building in Keats’s time will help us understand Keats and his work more clearly too. We were generously welcomed to Keats House on a Saturday, when the museum is normally closed, which was wonderful. As we moved around the building, it began to feel less like a museum and more like a home, and helped us tease out the outline of Keats’s life in the house. It was a little like one of the exercises we did with Celeste, where we were asked to draw the space around an object rather than the object itself – and gradually, surprisingly, the object itself would take shape after all. Similarly, drawing at Keats House enabled us to feel Keats’s presence and absence, to hear the echo of the past in its rooms, and to imaginatively bridge the gap of two centuries between Keats’s time and our own. 

Drawing in the house and garden. 

Sharing drawings and reflections in the Nightingale Room. 

Flora Lisica

Flora Lisica is Assistant Professor in English at Northeastern University London. She recently completed her PhD on Romantic literature at the University of Cambridge, and has published on Keats and Mary Shelley.

Call for Contributors: The BARS Blog

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The BARS Blog is the blog of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), the UK’s leading national organisation for promoting the study of Romanticism. The blog is maintained by the society in order to share news and information about developments in the field. 

We would be excited to hear from potential contributors who would like to have their work published on the BARS Blog and shared on our popular social media pages. We would be particularly thrilled to hear from PGR/ECR colleagues!   

Our regular blog series include:

–  Romantic Poets in the Wild. This is a series that features creative writers, artists, and creative-critical writers who have been inspired by the Romantics and Romantic writing—broadly defined of course—and who will be in dialogue with our BARS blog communications team about their work and creative process.

– #OnThisDay – focusing on Romantic bicentenaries. The premise of the blog is to give readers a snapshot of 1823 in 2023 (and on into 2024 and beyond!), relevant to that month or even that particular day.

–  PGR/ECR Spotlight – We would love to hear from postgraduate and early career researchers about your research! Get in touch with us if this is of interest! 

–  Romantic Reimaginings: This series aims to question and explore Romanticism in the twenty-first century. 

– If you have your own idea for a blog post, please get in touch! 

If you have an idea for a blog or want to hear more, please contact BARS Communications Officer, Dr Amy Wilcockson, and Communications Assistant, Dr Adam Neikirk at britishassociationromantic@gmail.com.  

Call for Papers: Eloquent Voices: Orality in the Age of Print, 1750-1850

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Eloquent Voices: Orality in the Age of Print, 1750-1850

A Symposium at the University of Sussex, 16th September 2025

Contributions are invited to a symposium on Orality in the Age of Print, 1750-1850, to be held at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, on Tues 16th September 2025. This event seeks to gather scholars working on the intersections between print and orality in this period, to review the state of the field and generate opportunities for further collaboration, including publications. 

Orality, and its various modes and practices, played an important part in the literary, philosophical and cultural outputs of a period which has long been understood through the lens of print culture. Recent work has illuminated the complexities of print’s relations with speech and voice, demonstrating how the very conceptualisation of orality was made possible through incipient awareness of emergent print culture (Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral, 2017), and showing that print objects were frequently consumed in oral modes, such as acts of communal performance or reading aloud (Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books, 2017). Spoken language, indeed, in various forms, presented a persistent point of preoccupation and investigation across this period. Conjectural histories linked orality to the formation of society itself, whether in the origin of language per se or in socially-foundational acts of oral story-telling. Yet concerns about potentially destabilising forms of emotive speech (Hume on superstition and enthusiasm, Rousseau on theatricality) also persisted. Whilst the formal teaching of traditional rhetoric declined, there was a marked uptake of interest in orality in the cultural domain, whether in theorising spoken language as a communicatory tool for commercial society and its newly mobile classes (Adam Smith, Hugh Blair); in elocution teaching and ‘schools of eloquence’; or in flourishing debating societies. Classical oratorical figures, including Cicero and Demosthenes, remained influential if contested models, as new ways were sought to enact the civic belonging and political critique long associated with the oratorical. Spoken language practices remained dominant in political, legal and religious institutions of public life, including in sermon and prayer practices, even whilst debates raged over correct forms of the latter. Finally, aesthetic theory articulated the emotive power (pathos, the sublime) of rhetorical voice, and the enthusiastic effusions and spoken rhapsodies associated with sentimentality and sensibility were both valorised and satirised. 

What difference does it make to approach print literature in this period in the light of such contexts, and how might they inform our understanding of textual objects? This symposium invites contributions which explore how print culture negotiated, harnessed, exploited, expressed or regulated the powers of voice and their potentially wayward affects, in various and manifold ways, including in relation to such acts and notions as politeness, conversation, sincere speech, persuasion, and ethical eloquence. Contributions focusing on fiction, its techniques and devices, are especially welcome, but papers might also address other forms of writing, including sermons, debates, prayer, lectures, and philosophical writing. 

Short papers of c20 minutes are welcome on any of the following or related areas:

  • The role of voice in novels: dialogue, conversation, spoken soliloquy
  • Fictional orators and acts of persuasion 
  • Private and/or domestic acts of eloquence or oratory
  • The role of oral story telling in eighteenth-century philosophy
  • Rhetoric and oratory, including oratorical strategies in printed texts
  • Ventriloquism and other arts of voice
  • Devotional voice in prayer
  • Elocution and the education of voice; debating societies; public lectures; political oratory
  • Enthusiasm and religious speech, including sermons
  • Teaching of rhetoric and eloquence in universities
  • Connections with aesthetic theory, the sublime 
  • Oral reading practices
  • Oral genres in print eg the sermon
  • Visual representations of oral practices
  • Philosophical accounts of spoken language in language theory 

Our Keynote speaker will be Professor Mary Fairclough (York)

Abstracts of 250-300 words, and any inquiries, should be sent to Professor Catherine Packham, Department of English Literature at University of Sussex, by 30 April 2025: 

c.m.packham@sussex.ac.uk 

Call for Contributors: Gender and Culture in the Romantic Era

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Book proposals are invited for a series called Gender and Culture in the Romantic Era, published by Anthem Press (http://www.anthempress.com/).

Gender and Culture in the Romantic Era is a series of scholarly monographs and edited collections devoted to the topics of gender and culture in British poetry, fiction, and drama from roughly 1780 to 1830. In terms of gender, the series encompasses scholarship related to the lives and works of women writers but also includes studies that address broader constructions of gender identity and sexuality. In cultural terms, the volumes in the series engage broadly with the interconnections between literature and such topics as book history and print culture, politics, science and medicine, travel writing, visual and auditory art, religion, the periodical press, the environment, revolution, exploration, theory, and transatlantic and other transnational connections.

For more information, including how to submit proposals, check the web page at

http://www.anthempress.com/gender-and-culture-in-the-romantic-era-1780-1830.

Romance, Revolution and Reform Issue 8: Call for Submissions!

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‘Play in the Long Nineteenth Century’

Deadline: 18th April 2025

While the long nineteenth century is not immediately associated with playfulness, scholars recognise it as a period that revolutionised play. Games were ubiquitous, hundreds of dedicated recreational spaces (museums, playgrounds, parks) were established, and a new cult of leisure took root, reshaping both public and private life. Play was also central to Victorian and Edwardian ideals of childhood, laying the groundwork for modern conceptions of child development. The fluidity of play as a concept reflects its inherent contradictions and multiplicity of meanings. In the seminal text on play studies, Johan Huizinga characterises the nineteenth century, with its rationalising tendencies, as “the end of play” (Homo Ludens, 1944). Others still have identified play as “a totalizing concept” which “pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self” (Matthew Kaiser, The World in Play, 2011). Structured or spontaneous, subversive or conformist, innate or transformative, play offers a mode of looking at the broader cultural and societal dynamics of the long nineteenth century as well as our own era.

This issue of Romance, Revolution and Reform is looking for papers of 5,000-8,000 words on ‘Play in the Long Nineteenth Century’ (1789-1914) in all its forms and in a global context. We encourage broad interpretations of play and invite submissions that explore its fluid and multifaceted nature. We welcome playful and creative approaches. The journal encourages multi- and interdisciplinary papers from across the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities and invites contributions from those at any career stage, including PGRs and ECRs.

The closing date for submissions is Friday 18 April 2025. To submit a paper, please email rrr@soton.ac.uk. We welcome early expressions of interest.

CfP: Nineteenth-Century Legacies (organised by BARS/BAVS Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellow 2025)

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In June 2025, Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with the British  Association of Victorian Studies and the British Association of Romantic Studies, will host an  in-person research day on Tuesday 3rd June examining realisms across literary, artistic,  theatrical, and critical forms, and considering the continuing influence of nineteenth-century  thought on our current moment. 

Presentations will be held during the morning in which delegates present 15-minute papers  attending to nineteenth-century realisms (broadly conceived), followed by an afternoon  discussion-based roundtable, structured around the topic: “Managing Difficult Legacies”.  Please see below for the full CFP. 

CFP: Nineteenth-Century Legacies 

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world’s business, how they have shaped themselves in the world’s  history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did; – on Heroes, namely,  and on their reception and performance what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in  human affairs. Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than  we can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as  Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have  worked here. 

Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. 

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our  contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is  not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions – about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that  our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one. 

George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life”. 

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They  have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—which is eternal, and  must be felt for its own sake 

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians.

In “The Natural History of German Life”, George Eliot condemns contemporaneous social  novels which claim to “represent the people as they are” while tending to idealise their  presentations of rural and working-class life. Eliot understood the far-reaching implications of  realist representation. In misrepresenting their subjects, these writers direct the sympathy of  their audience towards a false object which, as Eliot sees it, undermines the moral  imperative of their work. 

The way the real is constructed across literary, artistic, social, and political discourses is  instructive. Realism is a mode of aesthetic presentation which claims to correspond with real  life, designed to strike the reader or viewer as realistic or lifelike through the deployment of  certain conventions and strategies. The ways in which authors, artists, and thinkers use  these techniques to convince their audience that their work is correspondent with real life  can be revealing in how they see themselves, others, their own historical moment, their  place in the wider world, and beyond. By way of example, The Scottish National Portrait  Gallery in Edinburgh was championed by Thomas Carlyle who insisted that “the History of  the World [ . . .] was the Biography of Great Men”. Those who were deemed to have  contributed significantly to Scotland and the wider world are celebrated in William Brassey  Hole’s processional frieze which encircles the building’s Great Hall. It presents a calculated  version of Scotland’s past, which purports to be true and, by extension, real to observers in  the nineteenth century and through to our current moment. The policies, ideas, and images  which prop up these versions of reality created within nineteenth-century cultural, social, and  political discourses continue to resonate today. 

The purpose of this research day is to examine nineteenth-century realist presentations and  consider their present-day implications. Nineteenth-century ideas continue to feature within  the twenty-first century consciousness. During the morning, panellists will present 15-minute  papers followed by Q&As. These presentations will help lay the foundation for a discussion based roundtable event held during the afternoon, where participants will be encouraged to  reflect upon how nineteenth-century ideas, understandings, and problems raised during the morning presentations continue to influence university structures and the courses they  deliver, institutions in the GLAM sector, as well as shaping contemporary cultural and  political discourses. 

We invite contributions that attend to nineteenth-century realisms across literary, artistic,  theatrical, architectural, and critical forms, which pursue new directions that demonstrate the  capaciousness of the form, and its scope for providing insight into, or renegotiating,  perceptions of historical, cultural, or social moments.  

Researchers from all disciplines are invited to submit proposals for 15-minute paper which  consider nineteenth-century realisms. Papers may address, but are not limited to: 

– Realism: literary, artistic, theatrical 

– Subjectivity, the primacy of the individual 

– ‘Otherness’ and othering 

– Journalism and print culture 

– Authors and Artists 

– Cultural memory and the recent past 

– Religion 

– Philanthropists, philosophers, activists, and innovators  

– Empire and colonialism 

– Institutions: Workhouses, galleries, libraries, museums, how they were founded, and  by whom. The intellectual ideas underpinning them and whether they have survived  into the present day.

– Education: the Education Act (1870), National schools, Sunday schools, Ragged  schools, Workers’ Educational Association, YMCA lectures, technical colleges,  women’s education, curricula, pedagogy. 

– Events: The Napoleonic wars, the Acts of Union (1801), the Peterloo Massacre, the  Great Reform Act (1832), abolishment of Slavery in the British Empire (1838),  Chartism, the Paris Commune. 

– Technological Developments: development of the railway, development of  photography. 

– Science: Natural history, Darwinism, eugenic thought, phrenology 

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, and a biographical note of no more than 100 words to Amy Waterson (amy.waterson@rhul.ac.uk).  

Deadline: 15th March 2025 Decisions: 31st March 2025

BARS Digital Symposia – Call for Expressions of Interest

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The British Association for Romantic Studies is looking to expand its provision for members in the years between its international conferences by running a series of one-day digital symposia, beginning later in 2025.  Along with the Digital Events series, these symposia will allow for discussions between BARS’ major conferences and will provide spaces for addressing more specialised topics.  BARS’ International and Early Career and Postgraduate conferences necessarily use broad themes to ensure they can accommodate as wide a range of research as possible.  We hope that a symposia series will provide means for highlighting and discussing major current issues in Romantic Studies, ideally led by the interests of the BARS membership.

To this end, the BARS Executive is calling for expressions of interest from members (individuals or groups) who are interested in curating a digital symposium in the summer of 2025 (timed to avoid clashes with Romantic (Un)Consciousness, BARS’ Early Career and Postgraduate Conference in September).  A BARS symposium can include invited speakers, but must have an open call element and must include the work of postgraduate and early career scholars.  Beyond those provisos, we are happy to explore different modes of structuring and organising.  Organisers will have the support of the BARS Executive for circulating calls and managing logistics.

If you would like to propose a symposium, please send an email with an outline (a title, a paragraph or two on the theme, a list of suggested topics for papers) to bars.digitalevents@gmail.com.  The BARS Executive will read all expressions of interest received by Friday February 21st and will select one or two for our initial trial.  

Resource Announcement: Robert Bloomfield POET (1766-1823) – A new website.

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Tim Fulford and John Goodridge have created a new website presenting their scholarly edition of Bloomfield’s Collected Writings — including his bestselling The Farmer’s Boy, his poem/journal/sketchbook The Banks of Wye, his Rural Tales and May-day for the Muses and his manuscript account of his workmates (one of the few texts that describes the labour, culture and sociality of London artisans in detail).    

The website also features The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle — the only scholarly edition of his correspondence, which includes letters to and from John Clare and Robert Southey.  Poems by Bloomfield’s brother Nat (and Byron’s satiric response) are also presented, plus a series of illustrations of Bloomfield’s poems, some by the studio of Thomas Bewick.   

A section of Critical Reflections collects responses to Bloomfield from his own time — reviews from journals — and a series of essays by today’s scholars.

Robert Bloomfield (poet) 1766-1823beddoes.dmu.ac.uk