IMPERIAL MATERIAL: NAPOLEON’S LEGACY IN CULTURE, ART, AND HERITAGE, 1821–2021

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Online Workshop, 3rd September 2021

Napoleon Bonaparte died exactly two hundred years ago on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He had spent the last six years of his life in exile on St Helena, removed from political and military power, in the unusual situation of being able to try to shape and preserve his own posthumous legacy. He was, in a way, phenomenally successful. Napoleon is an instantly recognisable name to this day, and despite growing efforts in recent years to critically revise his reputation and highlight his role in issues such as the reinstatement of slavery, he has largely managed to escape the same level of historical censure as other infamous military dictators. This is perhaps partly because his name has become such an adaptable brand, standing for an entire era of people, places, and events, as well as a full two centuries’ worth of art, craft, and consumer commodities. While other events marking the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death have weighed his contributions to legislative, political, and military reform, less work has been done to confront his vast material, visual, and cultural legacy.

Napoleon’s death in 1821 prompted a frenzy of creation and circulation of materials relating to him, a whirling international trade in objects, images, texts and memorabilia which has essentially never since ceased. Death masks were made, shipped to Europe, waylaid, stolen, copied, and taken around Latin America by one of his doctors. Portraits were exchanged and exhibited, caricatures continued to abound, and actors took on the mantle of the Emperor from the stage to the film set. Personal items belonging to Napoleon were gifted to friends and family, collected by his admirers, and displayed at public exhibitions around the world: his horse, the key to his room, his toothbrush. These items make national headline news to this day when they are rediscovered, are sold for monumental sums to contemporary collectors and serve as key advertising strategies for museums. Napoleonic items can be official or personal, serious or comical, luxury or disposable: the former emperor can be equally thought of as a monumental Neoclassical marvel in white marble, as Joaquin Phoenix, or as a tiny cartoon figure astride a fat pony – yet little work has so far been done to bring together these diverse cultural histories in conversation. We therefore invite researchers of all disciplines, and museum and heritage professionals, to reflect on the enduring material and visual legacy of Napoleon, what our interpretation and use of it means for the future as well as how it affects our understanding of the past.

Possible themes for papers include:
• Napoleon in theatre, TV and film; in music; in poetry; in art, sculpture and drawing; in books, ephemera, printing, paratext
• Napoleon in exhibitions and museums: museum histories, interpretations of collections, and how objects are presented to the public, including in past, present and future events; how Napoleon is used in marketing strategies or public engagement
• Private collecting and the choices and agency of collectors, including by historians; the memorabilia trade both in the 19th century and up to today; Napoleonic tourism and the creation, looting or buying of souvenirs from significant places
• Gender, sexuality, and Napoleonic memory; involvement of women as collectors, curators, consumers
• Race and empire: critical histories and commentaries on Napoleonic representations
• Medical histories of Napoleonic objects
• Dress, fashion, appearance
• Home décor
• Religion and the macabre
• Animals and Napoleonic symbolism
• The ‘golden’ or ‘rosy’ vs. ‘black’ legend of Napoleon and ongoing critical interpretations
• Comedy and ridicule
• Romanticisation, neoclassical heroism, masculinity
• Circulation and object histories
• Re-enactment
• Public commemoration; plaques, monuments, iconoclasm
• Napoleon and antiquity

Please submit abstracts for short 15-minute papers, along with a short bio, to ImpMatWorkshop@gmail.com by 13 June 2021. (Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words.) Following the workshop, we plan to pursue the publication of selected papers as a collected edition.

Convenors: Dr Matilda Greig (Cardiff University) and Dr Nicole Cochrane (University of Exeter

Confirmed keynote: Dr Ruth Scurr (University of Cambridge)

BARS Digital Events: State of the Arts

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Thursday 27 May, 5pm BST

Scholars of British Romantic literature have become increasingly attentive to the material and cultural contexts inhabited by the period’s authors. This roundtable will showcase some of the innovative work being undertaken in this field for The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts. Each participant will offer a five-minute presentation of their chapter, organized around a key image, allowing plenty of time for discussion about how visual studies have reshaped how we approach and understand the boundaries between print and visual culture in the period.

Our speakers will include Laura Engel (Duquesne University), Ian Haywood (University of Roehampton), Jill Heydt-Stevenson (University of Colorado), Alison O’Byrne (University of York), and Kacie Wills (Illinois College). The session will be chaired by Maureen McCue (Bangor University) and Sophie Thomas (Ryerson University).

Book your free ticket here.

CFP – Global Blake: Afterlives in Art, Literature and Music

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11-13 January 2022, Online at the University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Luisa Calé, Stephen F. Eisenman and Linda Freedman

In recent years an exciting, new body of work, including Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture (2007), Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (2012), William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (2017), William Blake and the Myth of America (2018), and The Reception of William Blake in Europe (2019), has emerged around the posthumous reception of the artist and poet, William Blake. From almost complete obscurity following his death in 1827, Blake has become one of the most important figures in British cultural life. What is less understood, outside certain pockets such as the USA and Japan, is the significance of Blake elsewhere in the world.

Today, Blake’s global presence cannot be underestimated. The aim of this project is to showcase the wide variety of global ‘Blakes’ (after Morris Eaves’s “On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t”, 1995, and Mike Goode’s “Blakespotting”, 2006) and to provide an overview of the appropriations and rewritings as well as examples, that fall into three categories: art, literature and music. It will examine how Blake’s global audiences have responded to his poetry and art as well as explore what these specific, non-British responses and cultural and social legacies can bring to the study of Blake. What is fascinating about works in art, literature and music inspired by Blake is the fact in which the verbal and the visual in Blake’s art translates into different cultural contexts in unique ways.

Building on The Reception of Blake in the Orient (2006) and The Reception of William Blake’s Reception in Europe (2019), part of the longstanding and successful series The Reception of British and Irish Authors with Elinor Shaffer as series editor, the organisers welcome proposals for papers (20 minutes) and panels (two or three 20-minute papers). Potential topics, which should focus on either influence or engagement, include but are not limited to the following:

•       Studies of influence in Literature, such as Salman Rushdie, Jorge Luis Borges, Ben Okri, Kenzaburo Oe, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, the Beat Generation and the Black Mountain Poets.
•       Blake in translation
•       Postcolonial Blake and Blake in world literatures and arts
•       Blake and the theatre or performance
•       Afterlives in art and exhibition culture, such as Rockwell Kent, Helen Martins, or Subir Hati.
•       Blake and graphic novels and comics
•       Setting Blake to music
•       Reception by Women, People of Colour and LBGT+
•       Blake and the digital age
•       Blake, Nature and nature
•       Blake, pantheism and soul
•       Routes of transmission: Blake and the web, social media, publishing houses, publishing histories and facsimiles
•       Blake and literature written for children
•       Blake and film, such as Jim Jarmusch, Derek Jarman, Hal Hartley
•       Blake – now: Interviews and social media journalism

This conference is on Blake’s significance in and for other cultures and countries.

Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a short biographical note (50 words in the same Word document) should be sent to Sibylle Erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk) and Jason Whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) by 30 September 2021. 

Call for Salons: Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections

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In addition to our Call for Papers for Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections, we are issuing a Call for Salons: social discussions designed to capture something of the conviviality of BARS’ in-person events. 

One of the hardest parts of a physical conference to recreate online are the passionate conversations with small groups over dubious conference coffee about subjects of mutual interest. Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections is not going to be able to offer exactly this experience, but we would like to facilitate smaller-scale and more conversational exchanges along with the discussions in our panels and plenary sessions. We are keen that these exchanges be led by the interests of BARS’ membership. 

To this end, we invite proposals from individuals or small groups who would like to host a salon as part of the conference. A salon will be an informal meeting (on Zoom or another platform) organised around a specific topic of interest for which a limited number of people can sign up. If you’d like to gather medical humanists attending the conference, or meet other people interested in Charlotte Smith, or have a really intense discussion about Julian and Maddalo, or just have a social chat with some like-minded people, please consider proposing a salon. 

We will look to schedule most of the salons on the weekdays between the main two conference blocks (so on Monday 16th, Tuesday 17th and Wednesday 18th August). Proposals should give a title, a contact person, a short description of the proposed topic of discussion, a preferred time slot, and a maximum number of attendees. The conference committee will try and ensure that there aren’t too many clashes, and will set up a directory of salons for delegates to browse. We will also handle Eventbrite sign-ups and set up Zoom meeting rooms as requested (although as a host, you’re welcome to handle sign-ups yourself, or use an alternative platform). 

To aid organisation, we ask that proposals for salons reach us by the same date as paper proposals: Monday 28th June 2021. 

Please submit proposals for salons using this Google Form: https://forms.gle/yiBGsDZEbmK4vuo27. 

A copy of this Call can be seen on our website, https://bars.ac.uk/conference2021/, along with further information on the conference. If you have questions, the conference committee can be contacted using this address: BARSOnlineConference@Gmail.com. 

We hope you’ll consider joining us in experimenting with this format, and look forward to seeing many of you in August. 

Call for Papers: Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections – BARS Digital Conference

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As you know, the ongoing restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic mean that BARS has delayed its next international conference, New Romanticisms (to be held at Edge Hill University in partnership with the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) until Summer 2022. 

However, BARS remains committed to keeping our community connected and talking during this difficult time, so we are delighted to invite papers for a 2021 digital summer conference, Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections, which will be held online in two instalments in August (Thursday 12th and Friday 13th and Thursday 19th and Friday 20th).

Plenary sessions will include talks by Mary Fairclough and Orrin Wang; ‘Everything is Disconnected: Ecocriticism at a Distance’, a roundtable convened by Jeremy Davies, with Joseph Albernaz, Amanda Jo Goldstein and Francesca Mackenney; and a roundtable on Heritage and Representation chaired by Gillian Dow and Jeff Cowton. 

The theme of Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections is transparently suggested by our current situation, and we welcome papers that explore disconnection and/or reconnection, broadly conceived, both in Romantic-period literature and culture and in our engagements with the Romantic period in our present moment. However, we intend this conference principally to provide a means for reconnecting members of the larger Romantic Studies community, who have experienced a long period of disconnection, so we also welcome papers on any Romantic-period subjects people would be keen to discuss. 

Aware of videoconferencing fatigue and people’s increased commitments at this difficult time, we are opting for ten-minute papers. To help make the conference accessible, we will spread the schedule over four days and plan to have relatively short programmes on each day. We will schedule sessions to try and ensure that BARS members around the world who would like to present are able to do so at a reasonable hour. 

We are putting this conference together swiftly and on a truncated timeline, so the deadline for paper proposals is Monday 28th June 2021. Abstracts should be submitted using this Google Form: https://forms.gle/xVscx7W3iQGsN6K46. 

We welcome proposals for individual papers and full panels; please email us if you’d like to propose an unconventional session (on BARSOnlineConference@Gmail.com). If you would like to submit a pre-arranged panel, please submit each abstract individually, including the panel title and the panel organiser’s name in the dedicated box on the form. 

Papers should be kept to ten minutes in length and should be designed to be delivered over Zoom (screen sharing will be available to presenters, so PowerPoints or videos can be used). Papers may be given live or pre-recorded and screened in the sessions. Live conference sessions will be recorded and will be made available to delegates for a limited time. 

BARS membership is required to attend or present at the conference, but there will be no registration fee. 

The conference website is https://bars.ac.uk/conference2021/; this will be updated with further information and used to publish the programme in due course. 

We hope you will all consider submitting papers and joining us in August – we look forward to reconnecting (hopefully while avoiding digital disconnections)!

Call for Applications: BARS Communications Assistant

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The British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) would like to invite applications for a Communications Assistant to assist with the BARS Blog and social media for a period of one year tenable from June 2021. We are looking for someone with previous experience of using blogs and social media for academic purposes. This position is paid an honorarium of £500 and is open to all postgraduate students and early career researchers working in Romantic Studies anywhere in the world. This role will require around 1-2 hours per week.

Responsibilities will include:

  • Leading and contributing to the BARS Blog series ‘On This Day’ and ‘Archive Spotlight’
  • Proposing and curating new blog posts/series
  • Delivering an active and strategic social media presence
  • Attending online meetings with members of the BARS Executive Committee

The successful applicant will work closely with the Communications Officer, Anna Mercer, and the Blog Editor, Emily Paterson-Morgan. 

This post is an excellent career-development opportunity for a PhD student or early career researcher. You will have the chance to develop valuable skills in the field of scholarly communications and to contribute to the BARS postgraduate community. You will gain valuable skills (website management, content creation and digital communications) which will be useful in academic and non-academic roles alike. We expect that this role will be held alongside other academic or professional commitments such as completing a research project and/or teaching, and we encourage flexible working. 

Essential requirements:

Desirable experience: 

  • Previous involvement in writing or editing blog posts 
  • Experience of using WordPress 
  • Skilled in using social media for professional purposes, specifically experience of using Twitter and Facebook

To apply: please send an academic CV and personal statement (no more than 1 A4 page) explaining why you are best placed to undertake the duties above to britishassociationromantic@gmail.com by 4 June 2021. Informal enquiries can be directed to Anna Mercer mercera1@cardiff.ac.uk

Table Talks II: New Approaches to Romantic Studies and Society

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Please join us on Wednesday 16th June from 6 – 8 pm to discuss new approaches to Romantic Studies and society, including an update on Dr Andrew McInnes’s ‘Romantic Ridiculous’ project, and close readings of texts including Charlotte Smith’s children’s literature, Charles and Mary Lamb’s poetic collaboration, Mary Wollstonecraft’s object lessons, James Woodhouse’s labouring-class eco-poetics, Catherine Gore’s silver fork satire, and a verse biography of S T Coleridge!

More details, including a booklet of our selected texts, and registration here.

CFP: William Cowper, Art and Afterlife

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Olney, Buckinghamshire

3–4 September 2021

Call for papers from postgraduate students and early-career researchers for a two-day seminar on
William Cowper.

Cowper lived in and around Olney from 1768 to 1795, and it was here that he wrote Olney
Hymns (1779) with John Newton, Poems (1782), The Task (1785), and translated Homer. The
seminar will be centred on Cowper’s career in verse (hymns, poems, and translations), with a
particular focus on the formal and stylistic elements of this writing. Among a range of potential
subjects, papers may wish to address Cowper’s place in the satirical tradition, the potential for
ecocritical and environmental approaches to poems such as ‘Yardley Oak’ and ‘The Cast-away’,
or Cowper’s critical heritage from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Empson and Davie.

Proposals should be in the form of 150-word abstracts for fifteen- to twenty-minute papers.
Papers will be delivered in a sedentary roundtable format, with fifteen minutes for questions and
conversation. No fee will be charged to postgraduates and / or early career researchers who are
selected to give a paper, and we will provide them with free accommodation and meals.
Speakers include: Will Bowers (QMUL), Alexandra Harris (Birmingham), Andrew Hodgson
(Birmingham), Gregory Leadbetter (Birmingham City), and Fiona Stafford (Oxford).

Email abstracts to w.bowers@qmul.ac.uk and a.hodgson@bham.ac.uk by 5th June 2021

Five Questions: Eliza O’Brien, Helen Stark and Beatrice Turner on New Approaches to William Godwin

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New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures, edited by Eliza O’Brien, Helen Stark and Beatrice Turner, was recently published by Palgrave MacMillan as part of the Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print series. Below, the editors discuss their first encounters with William Godwin, the timeliness, origins and arrangement of the collection, and how they see Godwin Studies developing in the future.

1) How did you each first become acquainted with William Godwin?

Bea: I’m ashamed to say I didn’t meet him until I started my PhD. I came to Romanticism in reverse, via the nineteenth century, and when I started my thesis project on Romantic childhood and Romantic child-parent authorship, I came at him through his daughter Mary and through Romantic ideas about education, so the first work of his I actually read was The Enquirer. I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight, but I was immediately struck by the sense of a mind always to some degree at war with itself. Godwin’s capacity for brutal self-interrogation and at the same time astonishing self-deception, particularly about family matters, is a large part of my fascination with his writing.

Helen: I read Caleb Williams as an undergraduate on a module about the French Revolution convened by Matthew Grenby (a contributor to the volume). But it was Essay on Sepulchres which piqued my interest in Godwin and I didn’t read that until I was doing my PhD – or maybe afterwards. Michael Rossington introduced me to Sepulchres and it’s a text I find endlessly fascinating, which is why I wanted to write about it for our edited collection. It’s short but brimming with imagery ranging from the evocative to the visceral – such as when describing a hypothetical dead friend Godwin (morbidly?) exclaims, ‘I would give all that I possess, to purchase the art of preserving the wholesome character and rosy hue of this form, that it might be my companion still.’

Eliza: Like Helen, I also studied Caleb Williams as an undergraduate but it took me a very long time to find my way in Godwin’s world. I read the Penguin edition edited by Maurice Hindle that reprinted the essay “Of History and Romance” as well as Godwin’s 1832 account of writing Caleb Williams, and I think those encounters with Godwin’s ideas in other texts were what really helped me to see what was happening in the novel. That still applies now – how one text unlocks or modifies the next is one of the joys of reading his work. And as Bea says, his interrogative quality is one of Godwin’s most compelling virtues.

2) Why do you consider this a particularly appropriate moment to reassess Godwin and his influence?

When we put out the original call for papers for the conference in 2017, there was a steady trickle of articles on Godwin but a relatively small number of book-length studies, the most of recent of which was Robert Maniquis’ and Victoria Meyers’ 2011 edited collection, Godwinian Moments (University of Toronto Press). We felt that interest in Godwin was greater than the published record might indicate, and we also knew there were some really great early career scholars working on Godwin – some of whom we’re absolutely delighted to feature in our collection. Since then, our suspicions have been confirmed by the appearance in 2019 of both the European Romantic Review special journal issue on Godwin and William Godwin: A Political Life (Pluto) by Richard Gough Thomas, joined this year by J. Louise McCray’s Godwin and the Book: Imagining Media, 1783-1836 (Edinburgh University Press).

3) How did you go about securing contributors for the collection?  Which areas were you particularly keen to address?

The collection arose out of a conference on Godwin we organised back in 2017. The three of us were at the time all based in the north east of England, and Godwin’s unique quasi-outsider position in relation to the Romantic and eighteenth-century canon as it is most often taught was something we collectively kept returning to. Eventually we decided to put our money where our mouths were, so to speak, and see what would happen if we put on an event that put Godwin front and centre rather than in his more customary position as supporter to the main Shelley-Byron circle. The response was a modestly sized but exceptionally energising conference, with wonderful papers given by Godwin scholars from the UK and abroad. Discussion continued out of the Newcastle University Percy Building, down to the pub, and well into evening, and we pretty swiftly concluded that a) Godwin Studies was in rude health and b) that we should invite our speakers to develop their presentations into chapter-length work. So in that sense, securing our contributors was straightforward. In order to draw out what we thought would be some productive dialogues between chapters, we also persuaded Matthew Grenby to contribute. Matthew had been a thoughtful and incisive audience member at the conference, triggering a stimulating discussion about Godwin’s children’s literature, and luckily for us he agreed to work up his research on some unattributed short stories. Given the collection’s focus on the future of Godwin Studies, Pamela Clemit and Avner Offer’s article on Godwin’s citations was the natural conclusion to the collection, and they graciously offered to arrange for it to be republished. 

4) How did you choose how to order and arrange the essays?

The collection follows the same three-part structure as the conference: Forms, Fears, and Futures. We chose these themes not merely for alliterative purposes, but because we wanted the original conference to move beyond the well-trodden ground of Caleb Williams and Political Justice. We thought that asking contributors to respond to the notion of ‘form’ was an interesting way of reflecting on the sheer range of genres he attempted, while ‘fears’ was chosen because Godwin is usually thought of as an author and thinker of great confidence and robust argument – we wanted contributors to consider less familiar, more anxious or doubting strands of Godwinian thought. Finally, ‘futures’ reflected not only Godwin’s future-oriented political theory and his own well-documented concern with his legacy, but ideas about Godwin’s afterlives and the future of Godwin Studies. For the edited collection, the ‘futures’ section in particular needed to be re-thought. The conference participants had addressed that theme on the day in stimulating ways which, on paper, didn’t quite allow for the main focus to be on Godwin’s work itself, so that needed to be developed differently. Again, our thanks goes to all the conference contributors for how their work on the day helped us to understand what shape the collection might take – and that thanks to them we had something to develop!

5) Which lines of approach from the collection are you particularly excited to see developed further?  Are there aspects of Godwin and his work that you think remain underexplored that you’d like to see more research on?

An interesting outcome of the conference was that while we received proposals from across a wide range of Godwin’s oeuvre, Political Justice and to a lesser extent Caleb Williams were touchstones throughout. Evidently, there are works which, for some authors, are simply unavoidable, and for Godwin, that’s Political Justice. A real strength of the collection is the way in which it shows how Political Justice haunts Godwin’s thought even as he apparently turns to other concerns, either by illustrating, attempting to converse with, modify or disavow its ideas. On the other hand, we are really pleased that the collection foregrounds scholarship on lesser-known works, as with John-Erik Hansson’s chapter on Godwin’s biographies for children, and dynamic approaches, such as Ruby Tuke’s use of gift theory to explore Godwin’s views on charity. We are particularly excited about contributions which bring entirely new material before readers for the first time, as with Helen’s chapter and Matthew Grenby’s. We’d love to see more in this vein, and we think that Godwin’s later works – his novels Cloudsley and Deloraine, and Thoughts on Man, for example – remain understudied. There is plenty of work to be done, and many exciting new directions for Godwin scholars to explore!