The Shelley Conference 2024: Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations

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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 The volume contained much of Shelley’s major poetry, including the hitherto unpublished ‘Julian and Maddalo’, together with translations of Goethe and Calderón, and unfinished compositions such as ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Charles the First’.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 Website: theshelleyconference.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

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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:

–  #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

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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!

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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.

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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

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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

Five Questions: Sarah Burdett on the Arms-Bearing Woman

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Sarah Burdett is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at University College London; she will be joining the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge at the beginning of the new academic year. Her research focuses on Romantic-period women – writers, actors, playwrights, sportspeople and inspirations – and on the British stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her new book, The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1815, which we discuss below, was published in June by Palgrave.

1) How did you first become interested in the figure of the arms-bearing woman?

Funnily enough, my motivation to study the figure was two-fold: part scholarly, part personal. At a scholarly level, it was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) which first did it for me; specifically, her adamance that she aims not to encourage women to turn their ‘distaff into a musket’. This image of women over-stepping the bounds of Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda by adopting military personas – and thereby, emulating men both mentally and physically – sparked an eagerness in me to learn more about arguments for women’s martial rights and perceived corporeal capacities, at a time when women across the Channel were creating uproar in Britain by partaking in armed violence en masse as part of the French Revolution. Turning my attention to the theatre really brought this project to life: reading about a female soldier is one thing, but seeing a woman perform impressive martial feats on stage is quite another. Coming from a literature background, I was fascinated to discover the extent to which the process of embodiment allowed the eighteenth-century actress to challenge gendered mores in ways that textual representations could not; and it was eye-opening to learn just how transformative performance contexts could be in transforming the female warrior’s identity on stage. I began looking into reviews of actresses including Sarah Siddons, Julia Glover and Fanny Kelly performing armed heroines in London, and before I knew it, I was hooked!

At a personal level, I was intrigued to find how many of the oppositional comments aimed at arms-bearing women and female soldiers (both real and fictional) in eighteenth-century British newspapers, periodicals and theatrical reviews correlated with misogynistic attitudes that I myself have tolerated in the past! I spent a decade playing football at club and county level and was so often being told (by the ill-informed, of course!) that my actions were ‘unfeminine’, ‘unsuited to my sex’, and even ‘dangerous’ for me to pursue (I very occasionally receive not dissimilar comments now about my continued lifestyle as a long-distance runner!). It felt oddly cathartic to pick apart the overt biases and political / ideological agendas prompting comparable criticisms of the eighteenth-century female solider: in a strange way, defending and celebrating the physical and mental capabilities of the women warrior felt like an inclusive defence and celebration of any woman who has ever been told that her lifestyle choice ought to be reserved exclusively for men. I hope that some of that comes across in the book!

2) What are the main trends you trace in representations of armed female combatants on stage between 1789 and 1815?

One of the key aims of my book is to dispel the outmoded scholarly consensus that the female warrior falls exclusively into one of two general camps on the eighteenth-century British stage: romantic and rewarded; or political and punished. These are certainly pervasive trends in eighteenth-century comedy: much has been written of the loving heroine who disguises herself as a solider in a ploy to reunite herself with her serving spouse before returning safely to the domestic realms, and scholars have also highlighted the replication on stage of the Harriet Freke-esque armed heroine who is mocked before being exiled from the narrative. However, my study looks to complicate the idea that the female warrior’s identity follows any kind of straightforward or stable pattern by magnifying the complex threads that interweave to shape and reshape her identity from one performance to the next. While I show the female combatant as becoming ripe for allegorical reappropriation across the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades, the events and people to which she (often very surprisingly) alludes vary from play to play, and are unforeseeably directed, and redirected, by contextual specificities including scenography, the actress performing the role, the venue at which the play is being performed, and materials circulating outside of the theatre. Despite this, there are certain epochal trends in the female warrior’s development towards which my book gestures: most notably, the emergence in the 1810s of a heroine whose degree of agency, heroism and destructiveness vastly surpasses that of her 1790s forerunner. The importation of new dramatic genres from Europe; the development of new stage technologies; and the progress of Napoleon’s campaign (most pertinently, his exploits in Spain) are all shown to accelerate the birth of a transcendently deadly armed heroine, whose startlingly devastating warfare becomes integral – peculiarly enough – to the triumph of virtue over vice.

3) To what extent do British theatrical representations of armed women draw on European and global histories, artistic traditions and political events?

A very large one! My book shows political and artistic developments occurring at home and abroad pivotally to impact British configurations of the stage amazon. I outline emphatically the extent to which Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German and Anglo-Spanish affairs bear upon the female warrior’s portrayal and reception, causing her theatrical reputation to fluctuate perpetually in accordance with shifting national and international relations. Artistic innovations imported from Europe are equally significant. My book juxtaposes representations of armed women offered in native sentimental dramas and tragedies of the early and mid-1790s with representations indebted to the German Sturm und Drang drama and the French-derived melodrama at the start of the 1800s: a period which saw plays styled on each of these continental models enjoying vast popularity in Britain. This comparison allows me to illustrate the crucial role played by European theatrical traditions in facilitating the emergence of a refashioned female warrior, whose ‘foreignness’ renders her a paradoxically dangerous and profitable intruder on Britain’s patent stage.

4) Which of the plays you examined for the project would you recommend most strongly to other scholars?

I’d recommend Samuel Arnold’s military melodrama Charles the Bold (1815). Not only does it feature a cannon-firing heroine (I mean, come on!) but it offers a great example, in my opinion, of melodrama’s complex interaction with revolutionary and Napoleonic activity, at both a literal and affective level. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the licensing manuscript is the only surviving version of the play (available via the excellent Adam Matthew Eighteenth Century Drama database), so you do need to put up with the occasional difficult-to-decipher-word or two. But it’s well worth the effort.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m now working on my second monograph project, provisionally titled Staging Hibernia and Caledonia: Gender, Theatre, and National Identity, 1770-1832. Theoretically-informed by the work of Edward Said, the study strives to unpack historical negotiations of Celtic identity by grappling with the extent to which theatrical exhibition served to manipulate British conceptions of Ireland and Scotland as sites of cultural ‘Otherness’ across an epoch crucial to the formation of a stable British self. I’m also currently writing a journal article on sporting women in late eighteenth-century fashionable society, which homes in on the troubling (yet enticing!) figure of the female equestrian and huntress, by exploring her representation in 1790s stage comedy.   

CfP: The World Congress of Scottish Literatures: University of Nottingham

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The World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Call for Papers 

The fourth World Congress of Scottish Literatures will be held from the 3rd to the 7th July 2024 at the University of Nottingham in England. The Congress is a major international gathering of scholars with a research interest in the study of all Scottish literatures, across all of Scotland’s languages, with an emphasis on Scotland’s place in the world. 

While the fourth World Congress does not have a specific theme, our scope is transnational, and we would especially welcome papers on subjects that reflect the specific context of the Congress in Nottingham: the relationship between Scotland and England from earliest times to the present, a relationship which has had profound implications for the entire world, and which is a significant relationship in literatures in Scots, Gaelic, English, French and Latin from earliest evidence to contemporary production. Under this broad umbrella, we hope to address the following strands: 

• Scoto-English relationships: personal, inter-textual, political, cultural and historical

• Scotland in Empire and the Empire in Scotland 

• Outlaws, outliers and exiles 

• My enemy’s enemy is my friend: Gaelic literary relationships beyond Scotland – Shaped by Landscape: literary understandings of land, sea and the environment – Scottish writing and World Literature 

• Scottish medievalisms and the premodern use of the past 

• Ultima thule: early Scottish engagements with Europe 

• Outward-looking Romanticism 

• Post-Couthy: literature in Scots since the Unions 

• Drama, theatre and performance 

• Contemporary Gaelic literature and media 

• Diasporic writing: Scotland in a global world 

Proposals for papers, posters and presentations should include an abstract of c. 200 words, and your affiliation. Papers in English, Scots or Scottish Gaelic are welcomed; however, the conference is unable to provide simultaneous translation services for papers not delivered in English. 

The deadline for ALL proposal submissions is 31 October 2023. 

Please send submissions to the Congress Committee at Nottingham: wcsl24@nottingham.ac.uk.  

Congress Website: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/english/iassl/index.aspx. 

Congress Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/ScotLit2024  

On this Day: 16th July 1823 – Byron leaves Italy for Greece to take part in the Greek War of Independence

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It was on board the tantalisingly named Hercules that Byron left Italy and sailed for Greece to join the fight for independence. Britain had responded to the war back in the February of 1823 by creating the London Greek Committee in order to help the cause of Greek Independence from the Ottomans. However, Byron had been thinking about Greece not only since the war began in 1821, whilst writing the latest Cantos of Don Juan, but in the much earlier writings of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages Cantos I-II published in 1812 which was to grant Byron fame and infamy.

Byron’s outspokenness against Britain is evident from his first speech in the House of Lords in December 1812 which described the Tory government as ‘full of ‘bankruptcy, convicted fraud, and imputed felony.’[1] Such less than subtle attacks are applied to Britain in order contrast with the idealised demi-paradise of Ancient Greece, especially Athens, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages Cantos I-II:

‘[s]on of the morning, rise! approach you here! / […] [l]ook on this spot-a nation’s sepulchre! [a]bode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn / Even gods must yield.’[2]

From the sunrise a new beginning for Greece and Europe is offered. However, the narrator reminds the reader of the Ottoman occupation of Greece through the description of the Parthenon where at its

‘proud pillars […] the Moslem sits’ (89-90).

Byron’s reimagination of ancient Greece invites the classically educated nineteenth-century reader to consider the immoral nature of such an ancient culture being occupied by non-Christians. But more than this, Byron creates parallels between the Imperialist tendencies of Britain and the ancient city state of Athens which would enforce its will over other Greek allies until the surrender of Athens to Sparta during the Peloponnesian Wars in 404 BC.[3]The classically educated reader identifies anxieties between Britain’s increasing domination of Europe, even before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, and Athens’ domination of the other city states in Greece. This discomfort is amplified through an evocation of Britain’s removal of artefacts from the Parthenon that even the Ottoman Turks had saved:

‘modern Pict’s ignoble boast, / to rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared’ (100-101).

The controversy surrounding Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the marbles from the Parthenon in Athens between 1803 and 1812, a highly publicised act, is discussed through the historical tribe of the Picts who were present in Scotland and Ireland during Roman occupation of Britain.[4]

History becomes a device through which the narrator creates parallels and criticism of British foreign policy. Byron’s abandoned home of Britain becomes the Imperialist dominator of Greece:

 ‘[w]hat! shall it e’er be said by British tongue, / Albion was happy in Athena’s tears? […] [t]he ocean queen, the free Britannia, bears / The last poor plunder from a bleeding land’ (109-114).

Britain becomes identified though its Imperialist acquisition of the marbles from the Parthenon. The passing on of Greek artefacts to Britain creates significant parallels between Imperialist Britain’s treatment of modern Greece through its acquisition of the marbles and ancient Athens’ treatment of its Greek allies. The Parthenon’s construction began in 447 BC, the same year that saw the transformation of the Delian league of Greek allies into the beginning of the Athenian Empire under the supervision of Pericles.[5] An educated reader would draw comparisons between the beginning of the Athenian empire and Britain’s potential for Imperialist domination in Europe. Out of this parallel, nineteenth-century Athens is only seen through

‘Athena’s poor remains’ (105)

This negative image of what little remains creates a theme of impermanence towards the Athenian empire which allows the reader to reflect on how early nineteenth-century empires, including the British, can be imagined to fall.

Byron himself would not live to see the independence of Greece in 1830, but his insight into the fall of Imperialism, whether Ancient Athens or Britain, is amongst his most brilliant observations. Such insights may have been overlooked in favour of the more flamboyant and intriguing dalliances of Byron’s life and writing, but the impermanence of empires seems all the more relevant in a post-Imperialist Britain inundated with the need for foodbanks.

Matt Jones

Matt Jones is an MA student at Cardiff University interested in the political radicalism of first and second-generation Romantic writers and their portrayals of Britain and Europe. On completion of his MA, Matt hopes to go on to a PhD that will explore these interests further.

[1] Lord Byron, ‘Frame Work Bill’, Hansard (1812) <https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1812/feb/27/frame-work-bill#S1V0021P0_18120227_HOL_4> [accessed 28th March 2023].

[2] Lord Byron, ‘Canto II’ in Byron’s poetry and prose ed. by Alice Levine and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Byron’s poetry and prose (London: Norton, 2000), pp.55-83; further references to this poem are included in the body of the essay, giving the relevant line numbers in brackets.

[3]  Oxford University Press, ‘Athenian Empire’, A Dictionary of World History (2015) <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199685691.001.0001/acref-9780199685691-e-257> [accessed 16th March 2023].

[4] Lee Taylor, ‘Elgin Marbles’, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (2009)

ed. by Iain McCalman, Jon Mee, Gillian Russell, Clara Tuite, Kate Fullagar, and Patsy Hardy <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199245437.001.0001/acref-9780199245437-e-214?rskey=XPFv5x&result=1> [accessed 14th March 2022].

[5] Russell Meiggs and Simon Hornblower, ‘Delian League’, The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization (2014) <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198706779.001.0001/acref-9780198706779-e-198?rskey=83gYGT&result=3> [accessed 14th April 2022].

CFP: The English Georgian North, 1714-1830: Rethinking Cultures and Connections 

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An in-person symposium hosted by Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS)  

15 September 2023 

There will be no registration fee for this event. Teas, coffees, and a light lunch will be provided. *** 

This symposium builds on conversations which have been taking place at Durham University over the last fifteen months as part of the IMEMS research strand ‘The Georgian North’, designed and led by Professor Fiona Robertson:  

https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/medieval-early-modern studies/research-strands/the-georgian-north/. 

The symposium sets out to develop new approaches to the intellectual and creative  cultures of the northern counties of England in the Georgian period, 1714-1830. Important  contributions to knowledge, interpretation, creative practice, and scientific advance were  made in the north country during this still largely rural and early industrial period in its history. They took shape in social, professional, and discursive networks of considerable  complexity and reach, bringing together artists, abolitionists, antiquaries, architects, writers,  theologians, musicians, astronomers, philosophers, mathematicians, botanists, landscape  designers, linguists, clergy, social and political reformers, actors, and archaeologists. Yet there has been little connected cross-disciplinary exploration of these cultures, their  significance, and their legacies. 

We invite proposals for 15-minute papers or presentations to contribute to a day of informal  and investigative discussion. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:  

• Environment and conservation 

• Abolition, reform, and intervention 

• Originality and innovation 

• Scientific enquiry, speculation, and new worlds 

• Practices of collecting, curation, and display 

• Performance: players, theatres, audiences 

• Composition: music, painting, poetry, prose fiction, architecture, design • Ancient pasts: theories and artefacts 

• Cultures of belief 

• Depletion and rediscovery (buildings, communities, habitats, traditions) • International and intercultural connections; connections across languages and  traditions 

• Conversation and exchange (social, professional, and discursive networks,  philosophical and historical societies, bookshops, print cultures)

The region under discussion comprises the historic counties of northern England – County  Durham, the North Riding of Yorkshire, Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland. Of  particular interest, because especially under-researched, is present-day County Durham  and the areas immediately bordering it, but we welcome work on all relevant locales and  communities. Of the many individuals active in the intellectual and creative cultures of the  period, some were permanently settled in the northern counties, while others were here for  shorter periods, often under-researched relative to the wider body of scholarship on their  work. They are all of significance to our discussion, as are, also equally, the natural and  constructed environments of the northern English counties – private and public buildings,  landscapes and treescapes, theatres and observatories. All these environments helped  shape the formation and development of ideas and many are now lost or under-regarded.  

This is an in-person symposium, open to researchers across disciplines, with papers and  roundtables and an emphasis on discussion and exchange. There will be at least one online only follow-up session later in 2023. 

We invite 300-word proposals for 15-minute papers or presentations. 

Please submit your proposal via this form by 14 July 2023: https://tinyurl.com/GeorgianNorth 

If you cannot attend but are interested in receiving information about the Research Strand and  follow-up sessions, you can use the above link to register your interest. 

We shall respond to all proposal submissions no later than 28 July, after which time further  details and the registration link will be made available.