“Romantic Horizons: Pushing the Boundaries of Romantic Studies”, (Online Joint Symposium)

      Comments Off on “Romantic Horizons: Pushing the Boundaries of Romantic Studies”, (Online Joint Symposium)

Romantic Dialogues and Legacies, Department of English Studies presents a Transcontinental Joint Symposium featuring decorated panels from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana , USA and Durham University, UK. “Romantic Horizons: Pushing the Boundaries of Romantic Studies” will be held online and hosted via Zoom on November 17, 2023 at 3.30 pm UK time. The event focuses on a broad range of writers and themes from John Clare, Disability Studies, a re-discovered Henry Kirke White to the politics of Romantic reading, Jane Austen, PB Shelley as well as Hart Crane among others.

University of Notre Dame Panel

  • Laura Betz, “John Clare: Sonnets and Nests”
  • Essaka Joshua, “Disability Studies and Romanticism: Staging Interventions”
  • Greg Kucich, “‘We poor pilgrims in this dreary maze’: Henry Kirke White and the Broken Boundaries of the ‘Uneducated Poets'”
  • Ian Newman, “Beyond the Ballad: Sea Songs and Shanties”
  • Yasmin Solomonescu, “Reimagining Persuasion in British Romantic Literature”

Durham University Panel

  • Emily Rohrbach, “Romantic Contingencies and the Politics of Reading”
  • Sarah Wotton, “Post-Romantic Relations: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Emily Brontë”
  • Mark Sandy, “’The Silken Skilled Transmemberment of Song’ : P. B. Shelley, Romantic Quest, and Hart Crane”

The duration of each presentation is 15 minutes and each panel leads up to to an interactive discussion at the end of the event.

Register now for free: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/romantic-dialogues-and-legacies/romantic-horizons-pushing-the-boundaries-of-romantic-studies/e-dgdqvm

Archive Spotlight: Humphry Davy’s Notebooks and the Navy

      Comments Off on Archive Spotlight: Humphry Davy’s Notebooks and the Navy

We really need your help in completing the project to transcribe Humphry Davy’s notebooks… Read on to see something of Davy’s life two hundred years ago and the kinds of scandal your transcription could unearth…  

In January 1823, Humphry Davy was asked by the Commissioners of the Navy Board to investigate why the copper sheeting on the bottom of ships was corroding, reducing the speed of these vessels greatly. He regarded the matter as one of national importance and immediately referred it to the Council of the Royal Society. They set up a Committee but it was Davy alone who investigated the matter. He was sent samples of the copper used to sheathe two naval ships, the HMS Batavia (a former floating battery that was disposed of in 1823) and Leonidas (a thirty-six-gun fifth-rate frigate launched in 1807). The way that Davy felt called to action, and the patriotic fervour with which he responded, was not unlike the earlier episode of the miners’ safety lamp in 1816. The two episodes would end in a similarly less than ideal manner. 

Sir Humphry Davy, Bt by Thomas Phillips

At this point in his life, Davy was largely a man of leisure, having married the wealthy widow Jane Apreece in 1812, been granted a baronetcy, and resigned from the work at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He had been elected President of the Royal Society in 1820 and held a weekly soirée for the most eminent scientific men at his house; his letters from this period are replies to people who have sent him their latest books, their accounts of voyages, and who ask his advice on an array of subjects. Davy was highly aware of his status as PRS and would not be tainted by suggestions of monetary gain or reward. For example, and again in keeping with his work on the safety lamp that he performed gratis, he tells one respondent that as President of the Royal Society it would not be proper for him to comment on an invention that was to be patented. A patriotic call from the British Navy was a different matter. 

In 1824 Davy confidently assured the Admiralty and Navy Board that he had found a fool-proof solution: the fitting of zinc or cast-iron protectors. Davy was in Portsmouth from 19 to 23 February and there he experimented with the royal yacht Royal George, the twenty-eight-gun HMS Samarang, and the ten-gun brig HMS Manly. His method became known as ‘Davy’s protectors’ just as the miners’ safety lamp became known as the ‘Davy lamp.’ Unfortunately, what had worked in the laboratory did not work at sea and the electro-plating had a chemical side-effect. It resulted in the ships’ bottoms being fouled, thus slowing them down even more. The whole episode was a disaster for Davy who, nonetheless, maintained throughout that there was no problem. 

Byron had mentioned Davy’s safety lamp in Canto I of Don Juan: ‘Sir Humphrey Davy’s lantern, by which coals / Are safely mined for’. Davy, in turn, wrote some Don Juan-esque lines of his own in a short, private, unpublished poem in a notebooks called ‘On the Bubbles’, dated December 1823. Davy rewrote Byron’s famous line ‘This is the patent-age of new inventions’, which had alluded to Davy’s achievements, to echo the rhythm but put forward his own gripes. It is unusual for Davy to write satirically and the new tone of this poem borrows from Byron’s cynical perspective. The poem has recently been transcribed as part of our AHRC-funded project crowdsourcing transcriptions of Davy’s extant notebooks and begins thus in a rather struggling fashion: 

On the Bubbles
This is the age for humbug &

cant.

Whoever possesses them nothing

can want […]

The poem moves to consider the prevention of corrosion occurring on the copper bottoms of ships, which was clearly on Davy’s mind at this time. The manuscript reveals that Davy knew about Robert Mushet’s patent, awarded on 14 June 1823 for a ‘Process for Improving the Quality of Copper, and of Alloyed Copper, Applicable to the Sheathing of Ships, and to Other Purposes’, before there is mention of Mushet in Davy’s letters. Davy takes his revenge privately here in a poem, just as he had in another unpublished poem in the same notebook, where he gave vent to his true feelings on the safety lamp controversy: ‘Thoughts after the ingratitude of the Northumbrians with respect to the Safety Lamp’. In ‘On the Bubbles’, Davy attempts to imitate Byron’s voice and seemingly cavalier attitude: 

We have copper that will not disperse in the sea.

The patent secures it quite from decay  

And make it in voyages bright as the day, 

But every one knows who is not an ass

That the work of this copper depends upon brass

Davy is here criticising Mushet’s patent. Rather than the solution Mushet proposes, he thinks that the Navy’s ships need ‘Davy’s protectors’. Davy’s resentment is demonstrable in these lines, and he chooses to express it in a poem. Transcribing the notebooks has unearthed many moments like this: please do consider taking a look at the project and making such discoveries yourself!  

Check out the website: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/humphrydavy/davy-notebooks-project

Sharon Ruston
Lancaster University

BARS/K-SAA Monograph Publishing Roundtable and Q&A

      Comments Off on BARS/K-SAA Monograph Publishing Roundtable and Q&A

An expert panel demystifies the process of publishing a monograph in Romantic Studies, responding to your questions.

Date and time

Wed, 27 September 2023, 17:00 – 18:30 BST

Tickets available here!

At BARS’ recent Romantic Boundaries conference, a roundtable on publishing in journals revealed there was considerable appetite for an event demystifying monograph publishing in Romantic Studies. In concert with the Keats-Shelley Association of America, BARS has put together a digital roundtable to try and help with this. This roundtable will be chaired by Matthew Sangster (University of Glasgow/BARS) and Kate Singer (Mount Holyoke College/K-SAA) and will feature the following contributors:

  • Rebecca Colesworthy, Senior Acquisitions Editor at SUNY Press
  • Ben Doyle, Publisher for Literary Studies at Bloomsbury (and formerly Emerald and Palgrave)
  • Tim Fulford, co-editor of the Liverpool University Press series Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850
  • Patricia A. Matthew, co-editor of Oxford University Press’s Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series
  • Bethany Thomas, Commissioning Editor for Literature at Cambridge University Press

The roundtable will begin with short introductions, but the bulk of the time will be committed to answering questions. These can either be asked live or submitted in advance (please email matthew.sangster@glasgow.ac.uk and ksinger@mtholyoke.edu by Monday September 18th so we can pre-circulate to our contributors).

The roundtable will also include details for joining the K-SAA’s new mentoring program, including group and individual monograph advising.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/barsk-saa-monograph-publishing-roundtable-and-qa-tickets-705523789647

On This Day: Robert Bloomfield – 200 years

      Comments Off on On This Day: Robert Bloomfield – 200 years

The BARS ‘On This Day’ Blog series celebrates the anniversaries of literary and historical events of the Romantic period. Want to contribute a future post? Get in touch.

Today on 19th August 2023, we mark 200 years to the day of the death of Romantic poet Robert Bloomfield with this blog post by Emlyn David.

The 19th August marks the bicentenary of Robert Bloomfield’s death, with this anniversary offering an occasion to reflect on the poet’s works and his legacy. Bloomfield died in dire poverty at Shefford, Bedfordshire, aged fifty-six, forgotten by most of his contemporaries – but his death does not reflect the great popularity that some of his works enjoyed during his lifetime.

The poem that made Bloomfield’s reputation, The Farmer’s Boy (1800), can be considered as one of the bestselling poems of the Romantic era. Although Bloomfield first struggled to find a publisher, Capel Lofft finally agreed to publish the poem along with woodcuts by John Anderson, a Scottish wood-engraver and a pupil of Thomas Bewick. It sold an estimated 51,000 copies and was translated into French, German and Italian, with some excerpts translated into Latin. New editions regularly appeared throughout the nineteenth century.[1] As the title of his major work suggests, Bloomfield is one of the many local or regional poets who are associated with the labouring-class tradition of poetry of the late eighteenth century. Many authors of humble origin found a place for their writings on the literary market of the time, a trajectory that Bloomfield describes with great humour in the epitaph he had written for himself (an epitaph dated April 1823, but which was never actually used):

First made a Farmer’s Boy, and then a snob / A poet he became, and here lies Bob.[2]

Bloomfield nevertheless represented much more than the tail end of this poetic fashion. His poems reworked the pastoral and georgic traditions and inspired poets of a younger generation, most notably John Clare, to revive them in their poetry. Clare lamented the death of his “departed brother bard” in a letter dated 7 March 1825 to Joseph Weston:

“I deeply regret that ill health prevented our correspondence & that death prevented us from being better acquainted I sincerely loved the man & admired his Genius.”[3]

Clare regularly mentions Bloomfield’s works in his correspondence. He praises him highly, especially when comparing him with other poets concerned with the depiction of rural life, like George Crabbe. Clare insists on Bloomfield’s proximity with and his intimate knowledge of the subjects of his poems, which endow his poetry with a sincerity that is absent from Crabbe’s works:

“[Crabbe] knows little or nothing about [the peasantry] compared to [Bloomfield], who not only lived among them, but felt and shared the pastoral pleasures with the peasantry of whom he sung”.[4]

According to Clare, the authentic quality of Bloomfield’s works is what makes him “the most original poet of the age & the greatest Pastoral Poet England ever gave birth too [sic].”[5]

Bloomfield’s works represent and celebrate his native landscapes and the customs of his village, giving pride of place to popular culture in literary texts destined to a polite readership. “It will be observed that all my pictures are from humble life, and most of my heroin’s servant maids”[6], he writes in the preface to his collection Wild Flowers; or Local and Pastoral Poetry (1806). Storytelling is at the centre of his poetry, and Bloomfield always underlines the role of old women as the repository of a cultural knowledge that is central to a community while depicting them as skilful narrators. His poems give a vivid and often enthusiastic description of rural life, while emphasizing the physical discomfort, exploitation and exhaustion that come with rural labour.[7]

He inspired both poets and painters. John Constable – another artist known for his love of his native landscapes – used lines from The Farmer’s Boy as a poetic catalogue tag to his painting The Wheatfield, which he exhibited in 1816 [8]:

No rake takes here what heaven to all bestows / Children of want, for you the bounty flows!

Bloomfield’s poetry reminds us that the places we know best can be an inexhaustible source of wonder and delight. His love of nature and of the landscapes he knew so well accompanied him during his entire life, and on his grave at All Saints’ Church, Campton, Bedfordshire, one can read:

Let his wild native wood notes tell the rest.

To help us leave behind this bicentenary and hope for future celebration of Bloomfield’s works, why not take the time to read and enjoy a poem that was published posthumously in The Remains of Robert Bloomfield, and let his own words “tell the rest”:

The Flowers of the Mead

How much to be wish’d that the flowers of the mead

The pleasures of converse could yield;

And be to our bosoms, wherever we tread,

The reasoning sweets of the field!

But silent they stand,—yet in silence bestow, 5

What smiles, and what glances impart;

And give, every moment, Joy’s exquisite glow,

And the powerful throb of the heart.[9]

Emlyn David

Emlyn David is a first-year English Literature PhD student at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne.  Her PhD research focuses on the representation of folklore and popular culture in 19th-century Scottish literature, more specifically in the works of James Hogg, George MacDonald and R.L. Stevenson. Other research interests include Romantic poetry, labouring-class poetry and the representation of oral storytelling in the works of authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 


[1] Bloomfield, Robert. « The Farmer’s Boy (1800) ». The Collected Writings of Robert Bloomfield. Edited by Tim Fulford, John Goodridge and Sam Ward. Editorial Introduction. Pars 1-7. Romantic Circles, August 2023, https://romantic-circles.org/editions/bloomfield_poems/editions.2019.bloomfield_poems.8FarmersBoyPt1.html.

[2] Bloomfield, Robert. « The Author’s Epitaph ». The Collected Writings of Robert Bloomfield. Edited by Tim Fulford, John Goodridge and Sam Ward. Romantic Circles, August 2023, https://romantic-circles.org/editions/bloomfield_poems/editions.2019.bloomfield_poems.39AuthorsEpitaph.html.

[3] John Clare to Joseph Weston, 7 March 1825. The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle. Edited by Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt. Romantic Circles, August 2023, https://romantic-circles.org/editions/bloomfield_letters/HTML/letterEEd.25.399.html.

[4] Clare, John. The Letters of John Clare. Edited by Mark Storey, Oxford University Press, 1985, p.302.

[5] Clare, John. The Letters of John Clare. Edited by Mark Storey, Oxford University Press, 1985, p.300.

[6] Bloomfield, Robert. « Wild Flowers, or Pastoral and Local Poetry (1806) ». The Collected Writings of Robert Bloomfield. Edited by Tim Fulford, John Goodridge and Sam Ward. Romantic Circles, August 2023, https://romantic-circles.org/editions/bloomfield_poems/editions.2019.bloomfield_poems.21WildFlowersPt1.html.

[7] John Goodridge. « Storytellings: “Old Women’s Memorys” ». John Clare and Community, University Press., 2013, pp.169-189.

[8] Rosenthal, Michael. « Constable and Englishness ». The British Art Journal, vol. 7, no 3, 2006, p.43.

[9] Bloomfield, Robert. « Poems from the Remains of Robert Bloomfield (1824) ». The Collected Writings of Robert Bloomfield. Edited by Tim Fulford, John Goodridge and Sam Ward. Romantic Circles, August 2023, https://romantic-circles.org/editions/bloomfield_poems/editions.2019.bloomfield_poems.36RemainsPt11.html.

The Shelley Conference 2024: Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations

      Comments Off on The Shelley Conference 2024: Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations

Keats House Museum, London, 28-29 June 2024

Call for Papers

Two years after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1822, Mary Shelley, after a painstaking editorial process, published Posthumous Poems (1824). The volume contained much of Shelley’s major poetry, including the hitherto unpublished ‘Julian and Maddalo’, together with translations of Goethe and Calderón, and unfinished compositions such as ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Charles the First’.  

The Shelley Conference 2024 celebrates the first collected volume of Shelley’s poetry. Posthumous Poems is the product of collaborations. The most significant of these is between Mary Shelley as editor and Shelley as poet, but they also occur between Shelley and the guarantors of the volume, including Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’) and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. The conference also addresses ideas of posterity and reception more generally in Shelley scholarship, the range of literary forms collected in a single volume, and the complex collaborative literary relationships that shaped Shelley’s life and endured after his death.

The conference will be held at Keats House Museum in Hampstead, London. Proposals should be in the form of 200-word abstracts for 15-minute papers. Please include a 100-word biography with your proposal.  

Papers are invited on themes including, but not limited to:

Posthumous Poems, its texts and history

● New readings of key poems and of Posthumous Poems as a collection

● Mary Shelley as editor  

● Posterity and futurity as themes in Shelley’s work

● Texts in dialogue with Shelley’s work, particularly by those in his circle who survived him 

● Shelley’s engagement with Europe and European literature

● The nature and limits of the collaborative process

● Shelley’s reception outside of Britain or in languages other than English  

● Shelley and Byron

● Shelley and piracy

Deadline: Please email proposals in Word to shelleyconference@gmail.com by Monday 29 January 2024.

Bursaries: Several bursaries will be available for postgraduate and early-career researchers presenting  papers. Please visit the conference website for details. To apply, please add ‘Bursary’ to your email subject.

Keynote Speaker: Dr Ross Wilson (Cambridge)

Plenary Speakers: Professor Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin); Dr Bysshe Inigo Coffey (Oxford); Dr Madeleine Callaghan (Sheffield)

Pre-Conference Lecture (27 June): Professor Mark Sandy (Durham)

Conference Websitetheshelleyconference.com / facebook.com/shelleyconference / Twitter: @shelleyconf

Conference Organisers: Dr Amanda Blake Davis (Derby); Dr Andrew Lacey (Lancaster); Dr Merrilees Roberts (QMUL); Dr Paul Stephens (Oxford). Postgraduate Helpers: Lydia Shaw (Durham); Keerthi Vasishta (Durham).

Advisory Board: Dr Will Bowers (QMUL), Dr Bysshe Inigo Coffey (Oxford); Dr Anna Mercer (Cardiff);  Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi (UCL); Professor Michael Rossington (Newcastle).

Call for Contributors: The BARS Blog

      Comments Off on Call for Contributors: The BARS Blog

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:

–  #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 – Our newest blog series, 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, Amy Wilcockson, and Communications Assistants, Dr Rosie Whitcombe, and Isabelle Murray, at britishassociationromantic@gmail.com.  

In Other Wor(l)ds: Romanticism at the Crossroads, a special issue of Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840

      Comments Off on In Other Wor(l)ds: Romanticism at the Crossroads, a special issue of Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840

Note: The deadline for submissions has been extended to 9/15/23

Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Altre Parole / In Other Words (2015) describes switching from one language to another as crossing from one side of a body of water to its opposite shore. Inspired by this metaphor, this special issue invites essays that examine Romanticism’s movements across oceans and seas, as well as languages, genres, and genders. This special issue seeks to reevaluate popular conceptions of Romantic aesthetics, recover authors who continue or call into question Romanticism’s continued salience, detail the circulation of texts across oceans and borders, and strike connections between authors of different countries and cultures. Joselyn Almeida, Manu Chander, Bakary Diaby, Tim Fulford, Paul Giles, Evan Gottlieb, Samantha Harvey, Nikki Hessell, Kevin Hutchings, Peter Kitson, Deanna Koretsky, Tricia Matthew, Omar Miranda, César Soto, Helen Thomas, The Bigger 6 Collective, and others have reassessed traditional conceptions of Romanticism(s) and Romantic figures by challenging hitherto limited aesthetic, cultural, and geographical borders. Rather than view Romanticism primarily as an insulated phenomenon born out of a few European countries—as has generally been the case—this edition seeks to offer transatlantic, transpacific, and even transnational Romanticisms. Taken as a whole, this special issue will stretch the bounds and time period of Romanticism, better reflecting the development of Romantic aesthetics and their manifestations and subversions across the globe. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Revisionary analyses that account for a global framework and decolonise texts, authors, and Romanticism as a field of study;
  • Romantic networks connecting authors and ideas across space and time;
  • Critical race theory and non-binary & genderqueer readings of underrepresented and canonical texts, art, music, performances, and oral traditions;
  • BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ authors and artists;
  • History of the book and transnational reception histories of underrepresented as well as canonical works of literature, specifically works that reached different parts of the globe by either book, newspaper, broadsides, handbills, and other print ephemera; and
  • Comparative analyses connecting authors using similar forms (e.g., ballad romance), genre (e.g., Gothic), or allusions (e.g., Paradise Lost) across nations and languages.

Successful proposals will suggest articles that enrich our understanding of Romanticism by expanding its literal and metaphorical borders. Abstracts are due by September 15, 2023 and should be no longer than 600 words in length. Essays that grow out of accepted abstracts will undergo peer review and are due by January 31, 2024. 

Please email submissions to Christopher Stampone (CStampone@SMU.edu). Papers will be published in a special issue of Romantic Textualities (Winter 2024), guest edited by Christopher Stampone and Joel Pace.

The BARS Blog: 10 Years On!

      Comments Off on The BARS Blog: 10 Years On!

To celebrate ten years of the BARS Blog in August 2023, we asked the Blog’s founder, Matthew Sangster, for a few words on the origins of the blog! Matthew created the blog in 2013 when he took over as Website Officer.

The BARS Blog was originally set up in 2013 as a way of solving a problem with the old BARS website.  With static news pages, it was necessary every so often to go in and either edit or delete older material to avoid content becoming bloated and confusing.  This was time-consuming and meant that part of the archive of Romantic Studies was being erased.  A blog seemed like a good solution to this problem.  The way that blog posts are dated and arranged means that current news is obvious; older content sinks slowly into the depths of the archive, but remains available if anyone wants to look it up.

BARS also seemed well positioned to maintain an active blog.  Many blogs start with good intentions, but end with the gaps between posts growing longer and longer before new posting ceases altogether.  Having an associational blog with mixed forms of content submitted by different hands would, we hoped, create an active presence that was worth checking on regularly for interesting updates.

The technical set-up of the Blog has changed very little over the past ten years: it’s still a simple WordPress installation with a few plug-ins and themes added to prevent spam and to customise the appearance.

By contrast, the content of the Blog has developed considerably over the years.  In the first days, it was just me posting links of interest and news sent to me by BARS members.  However, I wanted to create more substantial posts to showcase new work from engaging perspectives.  This led to the commencement of the Five Questions interview series, in which I invited people who had recently completed a major piece of research – typically, although not exclusively, a monograph – to reflect on their processes, assertions and conclusions.  The series continues – we’re now approaching the one hundredth interview – and I’ve continued to enjoy working on it even after passing over the editorship of the blog (as always, please just drop me an email if you have a project you’d like to discuss).

The biggest expansion in content on the Blog can be attributed to Anna Mercer, who as Blog Editor and then Communications Officer for BARS brought in a wide range of further contributors and worked tirelessly to connect up Romanticists.  Formats Anna introduced include On This Day posts, typically celebrating bicentennials, and the Archive Spotlight series, highlighting overlooked collections of Romantic-period materials.  Anna did an amazing job growing and enriching the Blog, as the posts selected by her successor as Communications Officer, Amy Wilcockson, for this 10th anniversary series will demonstrate.

As it turns ten, the BARS Blog is the most popular part of the BARS website. Posting has fluctuated over the years, but has always remained regular, with nearly 900 posts created since I first tested the interface by posting Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Limbo’.  I am very confident that in the hands of Amy and the newly-appointed Communications Assistants, it will continue to flourish.

Matthew Sangster

Call for Papers. E.P. Thompson: Romantic to Revolutionary, Keats-Shelley Journal Special Issue.

      Comments Off on Call for Papers. E.P. Thompson: Romantic to Revolutionary, Keats-Shelley Journal Special Issue.

With the centenary of E.P. Thompson’s birth approaching in 2024, Keats-Shelley Journal seeks contributions for articles, notes, and other interventions engaging Thompson’s work and its legacies. Thompson’s writing, particularly his foundational book The Making of the English Working Class, has had a profound influence on the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century politics and culture. His particular influence on Romantic historicist methodologies has helped transform the field over the last half century, and his biography of writer, designer, and socialist activist William Morris has not only crucially shaped the reception of Morris and his work, but also presciently bridged the sometimes-limiting divide between scholarship of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Contributions could be focused on any aspect of Thompson’s writing or political action itself, but also—inspired by his commitment to making visible the experience of working people—on poets, writers, and activists who sought in various ways to advance social and economic justice for the working classes throughout the nineteenth century. This special issue seeks to honor and extend the journal’s ongoing commitment to a widening community of authors and readers, which has impelled the recent publication of our “50 Voices” flash-essays collection (vol. 69) as well as roundtables “Toward and Undisciplined and Anti-Racist Romanticism” (vol. 70) and “The Caribbean and Romanticism” (vol. 71).

Please submit contributions by May 1, 2024 or direct any questions to Jonathan Mulrooney, Editor, at ksjournal@holycross.edu. Papers accepted after peer review will be included in a special section of Keats-Shelley Journal volume 74, to be published in Fall of 2024.

Byron and the Mediterranean “Cult of the South”: A Bicentennial Symposium

      Comments Off on Byron and the Mediterranean “Cult of the South”: A Bicentennial Symposium

University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway, June 20-22, 2024

Symposium Speakers

  • James Chandler, University of Chicago
  • Jeffrey N. Cox, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Lilla Crisafulli, University of Bologna
  • Greg Kucich, University of Notre Dame
  • Richard Lansdown, University of Tasmania
  • Piya Pal-Lapinski, Bowling Green State University
  • Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
  • Peter Manning, Stony Brook University
  • Anne Mellor, UCLA
  • Omar Miranda, University of San Francisco
  • Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews
  • Diego Saglia, University of Parma
  • Maria Schoina, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
  • Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia
  • Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne
  • Susan Wolfson, Princeton University

This event, co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame and the University of Colorado Boulder, will take place at the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway, a state-of-the-art research/teaching/conference facility located within steps of the Colosseum and offering spectacular views of the Colosseum from its rooftop terrace. Venue website: rome.nd.edu

Speakers will expand upon Marilyn Butler’s seminal investigation of a romantic “cult of the south” to address Byron’s personal, poetic, and political interactions with a wider range of cultures throughout the Mediterranean Rim: Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, the Balkans, and Turkey, as well as Italy. This broader cultural focus opens new critical pathways for exploring a large array of revolutionary aesthetic and political initiatives crucial to the development of European Romanticism and highly relevant for our own historical moment two centuries later.

Symposium activities will include a guided tour of the major Byron exhibition to be held at the Keats-Shelley House on the Spanish Steps of Rome (ksh.roma.it) and a link to the new Museo Byron in Ravenna (opening in 2024). A post-symposium concert of new music composed for this occasion and performed by world renowned tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake will take place at the stunning Palazzo Doria Pamphilij in Rome. Venue website: doriapamphilj.it/roma

The Symposium program is now finalized, but additional attendees are heartily welcome. More detailed announcements on Symposium registration (open to all at no charge) and website launch are forthcoming.

For additional information, contact Symposium co-organizers:
Greg Kucich Kucich.1@nd.edu
Jeffrey Cox jeffrey.cox@colorado.edu