Five Questions: Gillian Russell on The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century

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Gillian Russell is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of York. Her work focuses on British and Irish literature, history and culture of the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in theatre, gender, sociability, war and print culture. Her books include The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Culture, 1793-1815 (Oxford University Press, 1995), Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture, 1770-1840 (co-edited with Clara Tuite; Cambridge University Press, 2002), Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture (co-edited with Neil Ramsey; Palgrave, 2015). Her latest monograph, which we discuss below, is The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting, was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press.

1) How did you first become interested in ephemera?

I would date this interest to how as a child I used to pore over a shoebox filled with documents from the First World War preserved by a relative, such as crumbling newspapers, drill manuals, guides to useful French phrases, and field service postcards asking you to mark phrases as appropriate such as ‘I am quite well’.  (Luckily this material was eventually given to the local museum). In researching my first book The Theatres of War, I was reliant on ephemeral material such as playbills, posters, newspaper clippings, caricatures, etc. but it was only much later that I became interested in how that material had been preserved, often in named collections.  For example, Sarah Sophia Banks’s collection on private theatricals which included material on military theatricals was very important to The Theatres of War but it was only much later that I became interested in Banks as a collector.

Another important influence was my involvement in events associated with the return from Canada to Australia in 2007 of the earliest document to be printed in Australia which is a playbill for a performance in Sydney of Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy Jane Shore in 1796.  This experience led me to think more about the playbill in general and also about how institutional contexts shape the meaning of a document, in this case investing a fragile scrap of paper with national historical significance.  As a result of my work on sociability, I was also interested in how ephemera such as tickets and playbills can be a way of accessing eighteenth-century consciousness of the ephemerality of sociable life.  The fact that some tickets were virtual art objects is a sign of investments in the uniqueness of particular social occasions that might otherwise be missed in the historical record.

2) What do you think are the most important things we miss when we confine book history to books?  How does examining ephemera help to address this gap in our understanding?

To be fair to book historians they have argued for a long time that we shouldn’t confine book history to the study of the codex-form book. The importance of ephemera as part of the spectrum of print has been recognised by doyens of book history such as D. F. McKenzie and Michael Harris. Peter Stallybrass and James Raven have also drawn attention to the importance of jobbing print. The reasons why printed ephemera hasn’t featured more in book history have been because of assumptions, created by the category itself, that not much of it survived and also because we lack the descriptive tools and methodologies by which to analyse it.  Cataloguing protocols influenced by the codex-form book that are focused on author, title, publisher, and date of publication are not easily applicable to e.g. a playbill or advertising handbills.  The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue project in the late 1970s actually excluded playbills and other kinds of ephemera relating to sociability because a) there was too much of it and b) it was difficult to describe.  Digitisation has been transformative in making the existence of collections of printed ephemera and their contents more visible.  When I began the project in the early 2010s, for example, the only way to access Sarah Sophia Banks’s vast collection in the British Museum was to go to the Department of Prints and Drawings.  Now a lot of what she collected is available to view online.  Digitisation is no replacement for the ‘real thing’ though, as I explore in the book in relation to the 1796 Sydney playbill.

3) In what ways would you see the ephemeral eighteenth century as differing from the ephemeral seventeenth century and the ephemeral nineteenth century?

Not surprisingly, in the light of my affiliation, I see the ephemeral eighteenth century as being very long.  I argue that there’s a remarkable continuity in the kind of ephemeral material collected by individuals from the 1640s to the 1860s.  Ephemeral print expanded and diversified as technology changed, for example in the use of larger type for posters in the early nineteenth century, but what printed ephemera could do, in terms of publicizing and recording quotidian life in the form of print to the moment remained consistent between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.  Indeed, you could say that the ephemeral eighteenth century is still with us in the form of the ephemerality of social media, as well as the survival of the printed notice that has played a significant role in marking the experience of lockdowns in 2020-21.

4) Studying ephemera is complicated both due to the potential scale of the kinds of materials that could be considered and due to the rarity and particularities of survivals.  How did you come to locate and select the forms of ephemera you focus on in your chapter (Sarah Sophia Banks’s collections, playbills, visiting cards, the print surrounding frost fairs)?

The main challenge I faced in writing the book was how to communicate the breadth and diversity of printed ephemera and the significance of the work of collectors in amassing this material.  My initial plan was to focus on Sarah Sophia Banks but I gradually realised that a) there was too much in her collecting to cover and b) I wanted to convey the fact that she wasn’t the crazy eccentric that she’s sometimes represented as, but rather part of a tradition of popular antiquarianism going back to the seventeenth century.  (Marilyn Butler’s work on popular antiquarianism was very helpful in that respect).  I deal with the tip of the tip of the iceberg of Banks’s collecting, focusing on particular items and subjecting them to techniques of close reading that we use in literary analysis.  I see the book as laying the groundwork for future study in this field e.g. in relation to how imaginative literature, particularly the novel, incorporates and remediates printed ephemera.  I address this in the book in relation to Edgeworth and Austen. 

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’ve been interested in Charles and Mary Lamb for a number of years and am beginning to work on an edition of Lamb’s Specimens for the Oxford University Press edition, helmed by Greg Dart. Also, I haven’t finished with ephemera.  I’m planning a project on collectors of ephemera in Yorkshire and Scotland and down the track I’d like to do some work on printed ephemera in Irish history.

Report from the North West Long Nineteenth Century Seminar on the theme of ‘Melmoth’s Afterlives’.

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The North West Long Nineteenth Century Seminar takes place at Manchester Metropolitan University (Manchester Met). This year it has hosted a special seminar on the theme of ‘Melmoth’s Afterlives’ as part of a series of online events to celebrate the bicentenary of C. R. Maturin’s novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), supported by generous funding from the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Byron Society of America’s ‘Romantic Bicentennials’ initiative. The seminar involved contributions from postgraduates, early career researchers and established academics, and was organised by Sonja Lawrenson, Matt Foley and Emma Liggins.

Report by Rebecca Alaise, PhD candidate at Manchester Met’s Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. 

The ‘Melmoth’s Afterlives’ series seeks to explore the lasting influence that Melmoth has had on the Gothic mode and the ways in which the novel’s titular figure, and the Wandering Jew figure in general, have been re-animated by a variety of writers from the nineteenth century until today. The potency of Melmoth is evidenced in homages such as Honoré de Balzac’s Melmoth Reconciled (1835), Oscar Wilde’s moniker ‘Sebastian Melmoth’ and Sarah Perry’s 2018 novel, Melmoth, to name but a few.

The UK’s second coronavirus lockdown made an online presentation of this year’s seminar a necessity. While attendees may have been secure in their own domestic spaces rather than in the cells, subterranean vaults and isolated islands of Maturin’s gothic imagination, this online presentation offered an ideal atmosphere to consider a novel that revels in themes of detachment and isolation. For this research seminar an international trio of leading and early career scholars presented papers that evaluated afterlives of Melmoth from the nineteenth century onwards. Dr James Kelly (University of Exeter) opened with a paper titled ‘’The love of fame, the hope of profit, the vacuity of idlesness’: Maturin, Melmoth and Romantic authorship.’ Princeton’s Colin N. Azariah-Kribbs discussed the concept of curiosity as compulsion in the paper ‘Curiosity, Suffering, and Narrative in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer’. The seminar concluded with Professor Lisa-Lampert Weissig’s presentation of the paper ‘Melmoth and the Wandering Jew Tradition’.

Opening the seminar, Dr James Kelly discussed the moral and financial connotations of Maturin’s gothic output. Establishing the importance of Ireland as the country in which Maturin’s novel was forged, this social and historical background was valuable when assessing the critical responses to Melmoth the Wanderer following its publication. Kelly’s paper examined the bifurcated nature of Maturin as an Irish Protestant clergyman, on the one hand, and writer of gothic literature that was perceived as blasphemous and nihilistic, on the other. By describing how Maturin had to disavow the shocking content of Melmoth’s fictional oratory, Kelly reminded us of how Oscar Wilde was similarly forced to defend certain passages in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) during his trial for gross indecency in 1895. Questioning if Maturin’s emphasis on theatre is linked to his Irishness, Kelly went on to outline the importance of oratory when assessing the power of Melmoth’s entreaties within Melmoth the Wanderer. It was noted here that Maturin’s novel undercut certain Romantic idealisations of the author figure, questioning the nature of gothic authorship as one in which writers may be more detached from the moral implications of their narratives. Kelly discussed how Maturin seemed proud to class himself as a playwright, a notion evidenced by the fact he referred to himself as the creator of the play Bertram; or the castle of St. Aldobrand (1816) in many of his prefaces. Such avowals point to a desire to distance himself somewhat from this authorship of Melmoth the Wanderer. By scrutinising the multi-faceted nature of Maturin’s authorship Kelly’s paper demonstrated the ways in which writers like Maturin were often torn between commercial and moral motives when producing tales of gothic dread. Describing how Maturin himself was often conflated with his most famous character, Kelly’s paper allowed for an interesting discussion upon authorship and Melmoth’s lasting influence on European Romanticism, as attendees pondered whether a text like Melmoth the Wanderer can ever be independent of its author.

Colin N. Azariah-Kribbs’ paper ‘Curiosity, Suffering, and Narrative in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer’ was able to pinpoint myriad important instances of curiosity within the narrative, illustrating how the motivation of curiosity is a fundamental aspect of the novel. The paper presented the character John Melmoth in an interesting new light, defining him as not just the titular Melmoth’s great nephew but an ‘avid consumer of narrative’ and the driving force behind the piecing together of all of the novel’s disparate tales. From here Azariah-Kribbs was able to discuss certain tendencies towards narrative consumption and a striving towards greater knowledge, allowing them to chart the ways in which certain characters are drawn into cycles of suffering. Interestingly, the paper defined Melmoth himself as a figure lacking the passion of curiosity and Azariah-Kribbs followed this assessment by suggested that while Maturin uses curiosity as a perilous and destructive force a lack of it can come with its own perils. The paper’s argument upheld that suffering brought about by curiosity cannot be fully comprehended in the novel where a sense of amorality seems to pervade all. While Azariah-Kribbs’ presentation upheld Melmoth the Wanderer as a culmination of observing curiosity in the gothic it also shrewdly emphasised the inherent amorality of Maturin’s brand of curiosity.

The final paper ‘Melmoth and the Wandering Jew Tradition’ saw Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Professor of English and Comparative Medieval Studies (University of California, San Diego) present a detailed historical contextualisation of the Wandering Jew Legend. Enhanced by a slideshow containing various historical illustrations, Lampert-Weissig began by outlining how the legend was borne. As a supposed witness to the crucifixion of Christ the Wandering Jew has been interpreted as a cursed (and sacrificial) figure by a variety of writers. This paper sought to expose the complex strands that have been woven into the Wandering Jew tradition over the centuries as writers and artists have re-imagined notions of eternal life. By discussing the differences in Jewish and Christian readings of this figure the paper offered valuable insight into how certain gothic writers may have been influenced by earlier incarnations of the Wandering Jew, a figure that can be read here as a proto-Melmoth, addled by negative medieval representations of the Jew and once synonymous with apocalyptic prophecy and threat. Lampert-Weissig’s chronological approach to representing the multi-cultural iterations of the legend meant that the audience had a clear idea of this symbolic figure’s roots and evolution. The paper explored the ‘development’ of the Wandering Jew legend during the long nineteenth century when its popularity rivalled that of the Faust Legend. Wandering Jew characters of this era were used to represent more generalised human suffering. Composers, artists and writers purloined it resulting in a popularity that often led to the Jewish elements of the wanderer’s identity fading. While presenting a series of nineteenth century artworks depicting the Wandering Jew, including etchings by French artist Paul Gustave Doré and Polish painter Samuel Hirszenberg, Lamper-Weissig discussed conflicting uses of the legend. With the horrors of the Second World War in mind, the audience saw each slide speak to the mounting sense of danger and fear that became enmeshed with representations of the Wandering Jew. Offering a powerful and historically intriguing background to Maturin’s Melmoth character, Lamper-Weissig’s discussions encouraged a fascinating post-paper debate. Many of the themes discussed in the Q&As were pertinent to the following week’s seminar with Sarah Perry whose 2018 novel re-imagines Melmoth as a female wanderer and witness, proving once more that it is the fate of Melmoth to live on.

As we said goodbye, shut down our computers and looked forward to the next seminar, I was reminded of how Melmoth’s gothic presence was so portable, shifting between countries as he sought his victims. This sense of gothic globe-trotting extended to the research seminar itself with contributors and attendees from all over the world. That the online nature of the event allowed better access to a host of global perspectives reminds us that even in uncertain times we can benefit from new ways of expanding our knowledge of the Gothic.

– Rebecca Alaise

CFP: Scott at 250 – History, Landscape, Environment

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The Twelfth International Walter Scott Conference

The University of Edinburgh,4-8th July 2021

Plenary Speakers: Prof. Deidre Lynch, Harvard University and Prof. Alison Lumsden, University of Aberdeen

In the 250th year since the birth of Walter Scott the University of Edinburgh, his alma mater, will host a conference on his work and global legacy. Proposals for papers or panels on any aspect of his writing, collecting, or curation of his estate at Abbotsford are invited. Particularly welcome will be those which address Scott’s understanding of the historical landscape, the interrelation of human societies and their environment, and landscape as both aesthetic and economic resource.

Given the continuing uncertainty over international travel due to the pandemic, and (in harmony with the environmental element of its theme) our concern to limit the carbon footprint of our conference, it will be held in a hybrid format, with contributors participating either in Edinburgh or online. All contributors, whether present in Edinburgh or not, will record their papers as audio or video files, and these will be available for participants to view before or during the conference. Discussion of these papers will take place in the afternoon and early evening among those physically present and those joining us by video conferencing.

More details are available here. Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis and should be sent to the organiser, Robert Irvine, at r.p.irvine@ed.ac.uk.

Keats House: The Feast of the Poets online event, 29 Jan

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Join Keats House on the last Friday of the month for a wide-ranging and light-hearted discussion on matters poetic, literary and cultural.

‘The Feast of the Poets’ was a poem written by Leigh Hunt, first published in 1811. The poem took a satirical swipe at poets good and bad and was later republished along with an introduction and notes, speculating on the future reputations of what became the British Romantic Poets.
Join us on the last Friday of the month for a wide-ranging and light-hearted discussion ‘from a principle of taste’ to help us decide who should feast with Apollo and Artemis and who should be turned to stone.

#FeastOfThePoets

Joining Rob Shakespeare (Principal Curator, Keats House) this month will be:

Ian Haywood (Professor of English at the University of Roehampton and working with Keats House to support a TECHNE funded research student placement); and

Anna Mercer (Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University who has also been working with Keats House to support the Keats200 project); and

Laila Sumpton (poet and current Keats House Poet in Residence, working on ‘Poetry versus Colonialism’, looking at the colonial histories of the Keats House collections).

Details and booking here.

‘The Thirty-Third Year of an Ill-spent Life’ – Byron’s Birthday

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I love birthdays, especially my own. Although last year’s celebrations were non-existent due to Covid, generally I indulge in a week-long round of drinks and dinners and general frolics, using the birthday as an excuse to try and see everyone I care about. The older I get, the more excited I am to see the next birthday come around (I’ve already started planning my 40th, and that’s not for another 5 years!)

However, inexplicably, many people do not enjoy birthdays. Lord Byron is a classic example of this, and never more so than on the occasion of his 33rd birthday, 200 years ago today.

Shortly before midnight on the 21st of January 1821, Byron notes in his journal that ‘in twelve minutes, I shall have completed thirty and three years of age!!!’ Writing of his ‘heaviness of heart’, Byron does not seem to have been overly happy at the prospect, and decides to go to bed and sulk. A few minutes later, however, and he is back at his journal having heard the clock strike midnight. These chimes announce that he is ‘now thirty-three!’, a melancholy signal inspiring Byron to scrawl a quote from Horace, ‘Eheu, fugaces, Posthume, Posthume, / Labuntur anni’ [Alas, O Postumus, Postumus, the years glide swiftly by] (Ode 2.14).

He continues in this gloomy vein, dashing off a deeply dismal little squib which offers a clear indication of his unenthusiastic state of mind:

Through life’s road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing – except thirty-three.

The next entry is even more lugubrious, as the poet glumly envisions an epitaph (complete with a scribbled outline of a sort of gravestone):

1821.
Here lies
interred in the Eternity
of the Past,
from whence there is no
Resurrection
for the Days ― whatever there may be
for the Dust ―
the Thirty-Third Year,
of an Ill-spent Life,
Which, after
A lingering disease of many months,
sunk into a lethargy,
and expired,
January 22nd, 1821, A.D.
Leaving a successor
Inconsolable
for the very loss which
occasioned its
Existence.

In these lines, Byron offers an intriguing image of the debauched ‘Thirty-Third Year’ dying of its excesses (‘sunk into a lethargy, / and expired’) and leaving the Thirty-Fourth year as its lonely ‘successor’. The past 365 ‘Days’ are dead and gone, never to be remembered without remorse; and while man’s rotting carcass might be resurrected by a lenient deity, the time wasted in the course of an ‘Ill-spent Life’ cannot be redeemed or revived. Yet, the markedly mournful tone is characteristically undercut by a wry gleam of levity in the humorous image of the newly birthed Thirty-Fourth year slumped in despair at the grave of its dissipated predecessor, rendered foolishly ‘Inconsolable’ not only by the ‘very loss which / occasioned its / Existence’ but also by the thought of having to endure another such year of degenerate excess.

Byron’s dislike of birthdays, and despondency each year as yet another one loomed, is well known. (On his thirty-sixth birthday he writes with an almost gleeful morbidity of his ‘funeral pile’, a splenetic outlook that was unfortunately proved eerily prescient three months later). This gloomy stance was intensified by the poet’s melancholic disposition and a susceptibility to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), rendering dark wet Januarys particularly difficult. However, in later years personal vanity, as much as depression, undoubtedly play a part in the moody poetry Byron produced each birthday.

In 1818, he bemoans the fact that ‘now at thirty years my hair is grey’ and looks fearfully ahead to when he is ‘forty’ and must wear a wig (‘peruke’) to conceal his bald pate. This was not an isolated occurrence. Byron was increasingly obsessed with his appearance, especially after his scandalous separation from his wife and ignominious retreat from England’s shores in early 1816.

Shortly after arriving on the Continent, he writes to his sister Augusta Leigh about his white hairs, rotting teeth and extra poundage, concerned that he looks older than his years:

My hair is growing grey, & not thicker; & my teeth are sometimes looseish though still white & sound. Would not one think I was sixty instead of not quite nine & twenty?

(BLJ, 5, 120)

This conviction intensified in the coming years. In 1822, Byron is agonising over Bartolini’s bust to his publisher John Murray, worrying that it makes him look ancient and gloomily prognosticating his imminent demise:

Bartolini’s is dreadful – though my mind misgives me that it is hideously like. If it is – I can not be long for this world – for it overlooks seventy.

(BLJ, 9, 213)

A year later, and Lady Blessington records Byron’s seemingly endless discussions about his encroaching decrepitude. ‘To hear Byron talk of himself’, she writes cattily, ‘one would suppose that instead of thirty-six he was sixty years old’ (Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron, 229).

Despite merrily claiming to be over one hundred years old in one hotel guestbook in Geneva, as he left his twenties behind Byron undoubtedly grew increasingly sensitive about his age and appearance – particularly when people assumed he was much older than he was. And many people did think he looked old for his years. In 1818, on visiting the poet in Venice, Newton Hanson (who had known Byron since his youth), cruelly observed that:

Lord Byron could not have been more than 30, but he looked 40. His face had become pale, bloated, and sallow. He had grown very fat, his shoulders broad and round, and the knuckles of his hands were lost in fat.

(BLJ, 6.78)

This appears to have been a common refrain. On arriving in Pisa in 1821 and catching his first sight of the famous poet, Thomas Medwin was shocked to see a short man ‘apparently forty years of age’ (Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, 7).

Medwin’s account of this meeting draws attention to one of the main sources of Byron’s self-consciousness in 1821 – the loss of the luscious locks immortalised by Thomas Phillips and Richard Westall, etched in prints, and distributed to tens of thousands of readers. Though, as Medwin notes, his hair still ‘waved in natural and graceful curls over his head’, it had become ‘thin’ and ‘grey’, and his head ‘was assimilating itself fast to the “bald first Caesar’s”’ (7-8). This change is captured in Alfred D’Orsay’s 1823 sketch of Byron, in which the receding hairline is striking (though Byron was going through one of his periodic bouts of abstemiousness and is particularly slender).


Sketch of Lord Byron at Genoa, attributed to Count Alfred D’Orsay, 1823.

Byron was obsessed with his thinning hair, so obsessed in fact, that he even resorted to a noxious old wives’ remedy sent to him by his friend and factotum Douglas Kinnaird, involving eggs and other less-savoury items being plastered across the scalp each day:

What’s that you say about “Yolk of Egg for the hair”? The receipt―the receipt immediately.

(BLJ 9.101)

By the way, your hair receipt costs me an egg a day. ――Does it nourish as well as embellish the hair?

(BLJ 9.143)

(Any user of modern hair-loss treatments will appreciate the desperation driving Byron at this point!)

Thomas Moore, meanwhile, noted during a visit in 1819 that Byron’s features had lost their ‘romantic character’, coarsened by his dissipate lifestyle. This observation draws attention to the other aspect of the poet’s vanity, the sneaking sense of personal culpability and conviction that his dissolute excesses – particularly the ‘fuff-fuff and passades―& fair fucking’ with countless ‘Seminal vessels’ in his ‘Whore-hold’ in Venice (BLJ 6.40) – were to blame for the rapid deterioration of his looks. Certainly, Byron ruefully echoes Moore’s views, sheepishly admitting that his dissolute habits would soon see him fall, like a ‘yellow leaf’ to ‘the ground, with all deliberate speed’ (BLJ, 6.106), the same guilt inflecting the 1821 birthday squib on the evils of his ‘Ill-spent Life’.

By January 22nd 1821, the beautiful youth who enraptured Ali Pasha with his delicate features and shell-like ears was long gone, as was the dashing young poet lionised by London and eagerly pursued by countless women. In their place was an aging Lothario who would – a mere three years later – be reduced to bribing his lovers with costly gifts, no longer able to rely on the allure of a handsome face and physique. As Byron morosely admitted later in 1821, ‘it was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life that I was no longer a boy’ (BLJ, 9.37).

Yet, while Byron might have worried about the loss of his looks and feared he would be ‘interred in the Eternity / of the Past, / from whence there is no / Resurrection’, 200 years on we’re still celebrating his life and works (and his birthday) – so I’d say he’s aged pretty well, all thing’s considered!

Dr Emily Paterson-Morgan is Head of Publishing for Knowledge E and the Director of The Byron Society. In addition, she sits on the editorial boards of The Byron Journal and the Gender and Culture in the Romantic Era series for Anthem Press, and is currently researching Byron’s engagement with adultery discourses in English print culture. Contact her via Twitter: @epatersonmorgan or email: emily@p-m.uk.com

For more details about the Byron Society, its monthly events, membership programme, PhD Bursary and other grant schemes, please visit www.thebyronsociety.com. Contact the Byron Society via email: contact@thebyronsociety.com or twitter: @byron_society

CFP: Table Talks 2 – New Approaches to Romantic Studies and Society

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Wednesday 16th June 2021

Table Talks’, interactive workshops linked to the AHRC-funded project ‘The Romantic Ridiculous’, will continue in 2021 with a mixture of lightning talks, Q&A, and conversation – this time with a focus on Romantic Studies and the idea of ‘society’, broadly considered.

Join Dr Andrew McInnes and Dr Felicity James for an exploration of Romantic-period conversation, collaboration, and creativity.

We seek close readings of any aspect of ‘society’ related to Romanticism. This might include, but is not limited to:
• Representations of the city, urban space, the home, and/or domesticity
• Representations of work, labour, and/or economy
• Representations of conversation, collaboration, and/or friendship
• Explorations of genres representing society, for example, Gothic fiction, silver fork
novels, journalistic and/or satirical material
• Explorations of the anti-social

We invite postgraduate and early career researchers to pitch a literary text to close read alongside our selections. This close reading does not have to be linked to ‘The Romantic Ridiculous’ project but should lead to a discussion of a new perspective on Romantic Studies and society.

We have 5 x £100 bursaries for successful pitches. A virtual reading pack will be sent out before the event and successful applicants will be expected to lead an informal discussion of their chosen text.

Please send a pitch including a literary text of ca. 1000 words (which may comprise a 1000-word extract from a longer text or complete texts of 1000 words or less) with a 250-word rationale for its inclusion to Andrew.McInnes@edgehill.ac.uk by Wednesday 17th March 2021.

The ‘Table Talk’ will be open to all and we invite you to attend an exciting online discussion of new approaches to Romantic Studies and society!

BARS Digital Events: ‘The Late Mary Shelley’

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News of an extra Digital Event for February 2021 – book your tickets here!

‘The Late Mary Shelley’

18 February 2021 

5-6.30pm GMT 

Chair: Amanda Blake Davis 

Speakers: Antonella Braida (Université de Lorraine), Kathleen Hurlock (University of Georgia), Michael Rossington (Newcastle University), Angela Wright (University of Sheffield), Carly Yingst (Harvard University)  

The British Association for Romantic Studies is delighted to welcome you to the fifth session of our Digital Events series: ‘The Late Mary Shelley’. Please join us on Thursday 18 February at 5pm GMT on Zoom for a roundtable discussion between Dr Antonella Braida, Kathleen Hurlock, Professor Michael Rossington, Professor Angela Wright, and Carly Yingst, chaired by Dr Amanda Blake Davis. During the session, our guests will belatedly mark the anniversary of Mary Shelley’s death on February 1st by discussing her later life, works, and legacy, celebrating Shelley’s many achievements beyond and after Frankenstein. After this, the audience will be invited to take part in a moderated Q&A session.  

Antonella Braida is Lecturer in English in the Department of Computer Studies at the Université de Lorraine and member of the research centre IDEA (Interdisciplinarity in English Studies). Her publications include a monograph, Dante and the Romantics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and an edited collection, Mary Shelley in Europe: Essays in Honour of Jean de Palacio (Legenda, 2020). In 2016 she organised a symposium on Mary Shelley’s works and their European reception, and she is currently working on a volume on the representation of Italy by women writers in the 1820s. 

Kathleen Hurlock is a PhD student in English at the University of Georgia with research interests in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and a specialisation in depictions of trauma and recovery in British women’s fiction from the late eighteenth-century to the nineteenth-century. She completed her MA dissertation on Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, and she has written on Mathilda for the Keats-Shelley Association of America’s Blog (2019). Kathleen’s forthcoming publications include entries on the ‘matrix of intelligibility’ and ‘psychoanalytic theory’ in the Encyclopedia of Queer Studies in Education (Brill | Sense) and an essay on The Victim of Prejudice in an edited collection about Romantic women writers and sexuality. 

Michael Rossington is Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University. He is joint general editor of the Longman Annotated English Poets series (Routledge), an editor of The Poems of Shelley, and editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Mary Shelley’s Valperga (Oxford University Press, 2000). He has published widely on the Shelleys, including a chapter on Valperga in Mary Shelley in Her Times (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) and a chapter on Mary Shelley as editor in Mary Shelley in Europe (Legenda, 2020). 

Angela Wright is Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of numerous publications on Romantic women’s writing and on Romanticism and the Gothic, including Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764-1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and her most recent monograph, Mary Shelley (University of Wales Press, 2018). She is joint general editor of Volumes One and Two of The Cambridge History of the Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2020-) with Dale Townshend, and has also co-edited Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2014) both with Dale Townshend. With Professor Michael Gamer, she is now working upon the first edition of The Complete Works of Ann Radcliffe for Cambridge University Press, where she will also be volume editor for Radcliffe’s fourth romance The Mysteries of Udolpho. 

Carly Yingst is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Harvard University with research interests in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature. Her dissertation, Unsettling Time in the British Novel, 1720-1830, reconsiders the early novel’s relation to changing conceptions of time in modernity, with a concluding chapter on Mary Shelley’s writings in the 1820s, including The Last Man and Valperga as well as Shelley’s journals and letters. Carly is a former Communications Fellow for the Keats-Shelley Association of America and co-coordinator of the Long Eighteenth Century and Romanticism Colloquium at Harvard. 

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BARS First Book Prize 2019-21: Call for Nominations

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The British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) is delighted to announce the current round of The British Association for Romantic Studies First Book Prize, 2019-21.

Awarded biennially for the best first monograph in Romantic Studies, this prize is open to first books published between 1 January 2019 and 1 January 2021. In keeping with the remit of BARS, it is designed to encourage and recognise original, ground breaking and interdisciplinary work in the literature and culture of the period c.1780-1830. The prize will be awarded to the value of £250 and will be announced in August 2021. Up to three runners up will receive £100 each.

Eligibility and nomination procedures

The  competition  is  open  to  books  by  authors  who  have  not  published  a  monograph before. Authors must have  been  awarded their PhD after 2014 (i.e. on or after 1 January 2015). Books must be nominated through the BARS membership or by their publishers.  A nomination form can be downloaded below.

BARS First Book Prize 2021 Nomination formDownload

Copies of nominated books must be received by the committee by the closing date, 1st March, 2021. Books received after this date are not eligible for consideration.  

Please send four copies of each nominated book to the Panel of Judges:

Dr. David Fallon: David.Fallon@roehampton.ac.uk; Prof. Francesca Saggini (Chair): fsaggini@unitus.it; Dr. Tess Somervell: tess.somervell@worc.ox.ac.uk; Prof. Angela Wright: A.H.Wright@sheffield.ac.uk

In the current round of the BARS First Book Prize, books must be submitted as .pdf copies or free / open downloadable  copies. If  you  wish  to  send  paper  copies,  please  contact  Francesca  Saggini  for further instructions.

Special Issue of European Romantic Review: Worlds of Maria Edgeworth

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European Romantic Review is pleased to announce the publication of a Special Issue, ‘Worlds of Maria Edgeworth’, guest edited by Susan Manly and Joanna Wharton. 

‘The seven new essays published here explore the reach and ambition of Edgeworth’s ideas and writings, showing how she built on and rethought Scottish and French Enlightenment philosophies, experimented with the ideas of fiction and reality, voice and print, and used the opportunities granted to her as a member of the “republic of letters” to gain a political life and influence. They connect her not only to prominent thinkers of her time, many of whom were personally known to her or her father, but also to global networks of commerce, colonization, and empire’ (Manly and Wharton, Introduction).

Articles:

Introduction: Worlds of Maria Edgeworth, Susan Manly and Joanna Wharton

The Secret of Castle Rackrent, Claire Connolly

Correspondence and Community: Maria Edgeworth’s Scottish Friends, Jane Rendall

Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld: Print, Canons, and Female Literary Authority, Aileen Douglas

“A desert island is a delightful place”: Maria Edgeworth and Robinson Crusoe, Clíona Ó Gallchoir

Maria Edgeworth’s Private Theatricals: Patronage, Zara, and 1814, Gillian Russell

Maria Edgeworth and the Telegraph, Joanna Wharton

Maria Edgeworth’s Political Lives, Susan Manly

Full details are available here.

Midlands Romantic Seminar 2021: ‘Burns, Satan, and the Sin of Rhyme’

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Online seminar: Matthew Ward (University of Birmingham): ‘Burns, Satan, and the Sin of Rhyme’

Wednesday 27th January, 17.30-18.45pm (GMT)

The Midlands Romantic Seminar is moving online for a series of talks in 2021.

You are warmly invited to the first of this year’s digital Midlands Romantic Seminar events. Matthew Ward (University of Birmingham) will deliver a paper on ‘Burns, Satan, and the Sin of Rhyme’ (especially fitting as the seminar falls in the same week as Burns Night!). There will also be a short Q&A after the talk.

Seminar abstract:

Matthew Ward’s talk will consider the ways that two of the chief influences on Burns’s creative life, the satanic and the sexual, are bedfellows and reveal Romantic ribaldry. Both sources of inspiration were discovered in his youth; both appear as mysterious, uncontrollable impulses that are not only depicted with humour but also suggest that, for Burns, comedy is drawn from and aligned with transgressive powers that are instinct with the making of poetry. Burns’s comic demonic is crucial to appreciating the distinctive character of his writing, but it also allows us to better appreciate the ways in which the ridiculous is aligned with the Romantic. Burns was no ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’ as we know. Though he played up to the image, he must have been tickled by it too, given how far from ‘heaven taught’ he liked to imagine his muses being. The laughter of Burns’s Satanism provides a vital contrast to the sublime, visionary company we have long associated with Romanticism. Encouraged by and combining the bawdier moments of Milton’s Paradise Lost with the supernaturalism of rural Scottish folklore, Burns’s comic demonic is something we would do well to take more seriously if not more solemnly as regards Romantic Satanism.

All are very welcome to attend. The event will run from 17.30-18.45pm (GMT) on Wednesday 27th January 2021, and will be held via Microsoft Teams. Registered attendees will receive a link to the event nearer the time. Please click here to register.