Romantic Circles Reviews and Receptions is delighted to announce the publication of reviews of no fewer than ten new books – on Romanticism and psychoanalysis, Napoleonic Italy, Irish, Welsh, and English Romanticism, the gothic, and much more besides – along with a roundtable on Romantic scholarship and teaching, Covid-19, and uprising with Carmen Faye Mathes (University of Regina), Rebecca Schneider (University of Colorado Boulder), and Anna Shajirat (Quincy University), hosted by RC R&R editors Alex Gatten (University of Connecticut) and Lenora Hansen (New York University).
Please click here for all of this excellent material.
And should you wish to have your book reviewed in RC R&R, to review a book, or to propose ideas for other kinds of content, then email Ross Wilson (rmw24@cam.ac.uk) in the first instance.
Emily Paterson-MorganComments Off on CFP – Black Studies & Romanticism Virtual Conference
Sponsored by the Mount Holyoke English Department & the Critical Social Thought Program June 24-25, 2021
Hortense Spillers suggests that a new “grammar” for thinking and instigating Black liberation from white history is necessary. With this conference we offer a platform, one virtual but intimate, for people interested in seeking what new grammars we in the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and present centuries need to learn from Black Studies in our period-bound disciplines. Our hope for the conference is that it will address the white power structures that support anti-blackness in the larger world and in the field of Romanticism. Romanticism entails a history of promised but failed revolutions, a history that terrorizes as much as it transforms. While the field has long been shaped by histories and discourses of whiteness and patriarchy, this conference avows and solicits new and ongoing scholarship on race, anti-slavery, abolition, and indigeneity.
In that regard, we hope the conference also continues the conversations about the future, if there is one, of Romanticism. We hope to press forward with conversations about Romanticism and anti-racist studies in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries already underway, to work collaboratively to find new grammars and narratives, and to press mutually on the theoretical foundations of each period. Such a project might include looking at abolitionary and anti-racist discourses within the period, drawing on contemporary critical race theory, and contemplating anti-blackness in modern scholarly methods. We know that no future is possible without a restructuring of the field that decenters whiteness and systemic racism. Our other hope, then, is that by undertaking the work of this conference we can bring together a range of scholars, both inside and outside of Romanticism, to ensure a vitality of voices are heard with work that takes the form of solidarity and collective action.
What new narratives might nineteenth-century, eighteenth-century, and romantic-era texts furnish to develop our own anti-racist future? How is Black Studies necessary to rethinking those fields in the development of this future? How might Black Studies show a history in this constructed period not constituted by whiteness? In other words, how might Black Studies help us as we reconfigure Romanticism as a site of vital contemporary scholarship, pedagogy, and activism? How might Romanticism and Black Studies meet in other ways, in other speculative futures?
Conference papers and panels will be punctuated by three plenaries. The first will feature Bakary Diaby (Skidmore), Annette Joseph-Gabriel (U Michigan), and Nicole Aljoe (Northeastern) in conversation; the second, Eugenia Zuroski (McMaster), Kerry Sinanan (UTSA), and Matt Sandler (Columbia) in conversation; and the third will feature a talk by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (University of Southern California).
Topics are open but might include papers or think pieces on Romantic-era texts and Black Studies writers such as C. L. R. James, Fred Moten, Saidiya V. Hartman, Frank B. Wilderson III, Christina Sharpe, Cedric Robinson, Hortense J. Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, R. A. Judy, Calvin L. Warren, Jared Sexton, Dionne Brand, Marquis Bey, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Achille Mbembe, Jennifer C. Nash, Keguro Macharia, M. NourbeSe Philip, David Marriott, Tiffany Lethabo King, Joshua Bennett, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, among others. We welcome pieces that explore Black Studies in relation to transatlantic, indigenous, transgender, nonbinary, queer, feminist, disability, abolitionist, and decolonization scholarship, pedagogy, and activism. We especially welcome papers on underread or unknown Romantic-era authors, authors from the longer nineteenth century or Black Atlantic, and authors outside the time period who nonetheless connect to it. We encourage papers, presentations, and performances of creative scholarship, in any way you’d like to define it.
We’ll ask participants either to record or post papers, performances, presentations, or collaborations a week before the conference. (Individual papers should aim for 15 minutes; collaborations might be longer.) There will be space for online commenting, but submissions will be grouped and then discussed synchronously at the conference.
We will also have a special, separate forum designed to showcase undergraduate work done this year on these topics. If you’d like to have your students participate in some way, please indicate your interest in your proposal.
Selected papers, presentations, and other work will be collected in a special issue of Romanticism on the Net.
Proposals of 350-500 words should be sent to black-studies-romanticism-2021@mtholyoke.edu by January15th. Details on acceptance will follow shortly thereafter. Please send any and all questions to the conference co-organizers, Kate Singer (Mount Holyoke College) and Chris Washington (Francis Marion University).
Anna MercerComments Off on On This Day in 1820: What Did Byron Really Look Like?
The BARS ‘On This Day’ Series celebrates the 200th anniversary of literary and historical events of the Romantic period. Want to contribute a future post? Get in touch.
Today we are delightedto share a post co-authored by Geoffrey Bond (former Chairman of the Byron Society) and Christine Kenyon Jones (King’s College London). This post marks 200 years since Byron wrote a letter in October 1820 about the gossip suggesting he had been seen in London when he was actually thousands of miles away. It also celebrates the publication of their new book (click link to get your own copy!): Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits.Enjoy!
On this day in 1820
‘A new ghost story for you’[1]
What did Byron really look like?
In October 1820, in Ravenna, doppelgangers were much on Byron’s mind. His publisher John Murray had told him that someone had just bet 100 guineas that they had seen Byron in London. And this was nothing new. In 1810, Byron told Murray, when he had actually been at Patras, he had apparently been encountered twice in St James’s Street, London by his schoolfellow Robert Peel and his brother — and had also been ‘seen by somebody to write down my name amongst the Enquirers after the King’s health – then attacked by insanity’.
And just recently, Byron added, he had met a man at Ferrara who asked him if he knew Lord Byron. ‘I told him no – (no one knows himself you know) “then” says he – “I do – I met him at Naples the other day”.’
What was it about Byron that made people feel they knew him and what he looked like, even when they actually didn’t? The question of how he really appeared, and why he seemed both so individual and so chameleon-like, was one of the main motivations for Geoffrey Bond and me when we were writing our new book: Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits (just published by Unicorn).
Verbally, Byron’s poems are full of his personality, of course. And visually there seems to have been a combination of strong, individual facial features with a set of characteristics that indicated ‘Byron’ – even when in fact the image might look nothing like him.
So in 1822 Lorenzo Bartolini spent many hours face-to-face with Byron sculpting this fine clay bust – described by Thomas Medwin as ‘an admirable likeness’.[2]
Lorenzo Bartolini, ‘Terracruda’ bust of Byron, 1822. Courtesy of Libson & Yarker.
But the only version that Byron himself ever saw of the finished sculpture was this engraving by Raphael Morghen,
Raphael Morghen, engraving of the Bartolini bust of Byron, 1822. Private collection.
which, he complained ‘overlooked seventy’ and ‘exactly resembled a superannuated jesuit’.[3]
Similarly, this sketch from life by George Harlow in 1816
George Harlow, profile sketch of Byron, 1815. Private collection
went through generations of engravings until it emerged looking like this
Gottfried Engelmann, engraved frontispiece for English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (Paris: Galignani, 1819).
and was described by Marianne Hunt as ‘a great schoolboy who had been given a plain bun instead of a plum one’.[4]
Sometimes all that was needed to signify ‘Byron’ was an open shirt-collar, curly hair, strong jaw and a receding hairline,
Joseph West, ‘Lord Byron, from a sketch taken on his leaving England’, engraving, c. 1816. Private collection.
Maxim Gauci, ‘George Gordon, Lord Byron, To Chandos Leigh Esqr.’ (c.1819). Private collection.
Indeed ‘puzzle prints’ such as this one
Henry Burn, ‘The Spirit of Byron in The Isles of Greece’, 1825. Private collection.
played on these features by inviting viewers to spot the open white collar, Byronic profile and the characteristic hairline, hidden among the vegetation of ‘The Isles of Greece’.
‘I have often seen engravings prefixed to the works of his Lordship,’ remarked Captain Forrester, who met Byron in Greece in 1824, ‘but great was my astonishment, although prepared to make a fair allowance to artists, to see before me a being bearing as little resemblance to the pretended fac-simile, as I to Apollo.’[5]
After Byron’s death, the variety became even more pronounced, and Byron in the form of memorabilia both acquired a perm, as in this ceramic plaque of 1850,
Unknown artist, after Thomas Phillips, Staffordshire ware porcelain plaque, c. 1850. Private collection.
and became distinctly bald, as in this Staffordshire figure of the same period.
Unknown artist, Staffordshire ware bust, c.1850. Private collection.
One practical point is that Byron was very fat at some stages of his life and painfully thin at others. A lifelong dieter and possible anorexic, as a teenager Byron was observed by his neighbour Elizabeth Pigot in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, using strenuous exercise such as cricket, and ‘boiling himself’ in the hot bath, in order to reduce his portly frame by more than sixty pounds.[6]
Elizabeth Pigot, ‘The Wonderful History of Lord Byron & His Dog’, 1807. Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
And, while in 1822 William Edward West portrayed his Lordship looking decidedly chubby,
William Edward West, Lord Byron, 1822. Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
only a year later, in this sketch by Count Alfred D’Orsay, he appeared painfully thin and weak, with his clothes hanging off him.
Count Alfred D’Orsay, Lord Byron fait à Gènes en 1823. John Murray Collection.
On the one hand, we have his mother’s opinion that the George Sanders portrait of 1807-9 was ‘very like’ Byron at twenty,
George Sanders, Lord Byron and Robert Rushton, 1807-9. Royal Collection Trust.
and the view of his mistress Teresa Guiccioli that this miniature (taken nearly ten years later) was ‘the most striking likeness I ever saw of him’.[7]
On the other hand, however, this well-known 1813 portrait by Thomas Phillips
Thomas Phillips, Portrait of a Nobleman, c, 1818. Newstead Abbey Collections.
was declared by Byron’s best friend John Cam Hobhouse to have ‘no resemblance’ to him whatsoever.[8]
In 1816 the caricaturist George Cruikshank made Byron resemble Napoleon, with knee-breeches and a pot belly, sailing off into exile as the Emperor had done just a year earlier.
George Cruikshank, Fare Thee Well, 1816. British Museum, London.
But in the same year, George’s brother Robert Cruikshank seems to reflect a first-hand knowledge of Byron’s real clothes, when he shows and exaggerates the style of baggy trousers that Byron actually wore.
Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Lobby Loungers, 1816. Private Collection.
The illustrators of Byron’s works, including Thomas Stothard in 1814, presented Byron’s protagonists such as the Giaour,
William Finden after Thomas Stothard, ‘The Giaour’, 1814. John Murray Collection.
clothed as a facsimile of Byron himself, as portrayed in his ‘Albanian’ costume painted the same year by Thomas Phillips.
Thomas Phillips, Nobleman in the Dress of an Albanian, 1814, Government Art Collection, Athens.
We chose as the frontispiece for our book this miniature painted in about 1817 by Girolamo Prepiani:
Girolamo Prepiani, Byron, c. 1817. Newstead Abbey Collections.
which – because it was created as an intimate portrait for Byron’s sister by an Italian artist not familiar with other images of Byron — presents him as an ordinary person rather than a celebrity or Romantic poet. It’s also unusual in showing the right side of Byron’s face, which had a smaller eye (the size of a sixpence, while the left one was said to be the size of a shilling – he was known as ‘eighteenpence’ because of this at school at Harrow). Here he looks very real and slightly sheepish, as if he might bite his nails (which he apparently did).
But whether this is the REAL Byron, any more than the other 100-plus images shown in our book, is very much open to question. To quote Winston Churchill, (speaking of Russia in 1939), perhaps all one can say of Byron when trying to define him, either verbally or visually, is that he was ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’.
Geoffrey Bond is a former Chairman of the Byron Society and author of Lord Byron’s Best Friends. He lives in the Nottinghamshire manor house that was Byron’s home from 1803 to 1808.
Dr Christine Kenyon Jones is a Research Fellow in the Department of English at King’s College London. Her previous books include Kindred Brutes, and Byron: The Image of the Poet.
[1]Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–94).
Anna MercerComments Off on New BARS Digital Events Fellow
The BARS Online Lectures Committee are delighted to announce that Francesca Killoran, a PhD student at the University of York, has been appointed as the BARS Digital Events Fellow. We received many impressive applications and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the applicants for their interest in and support for BARS. We look forward to sharing details of our future virtual events with you very soon! Follow us on Twitter @BARS_Official and on Facebook.
This year digital technology has brought us closer together than ever. With geography no object, we’re inviting experts on the Romantic era from all over the world to tell us all about the exciting things they’re up to. We’ll be exploring their thoughts on everything Wordsworthian, from poetry and artefacts to nature and the modern world, as well as finding out about their new books and research. We’ll also be investigating some of the themes raised in the free online course William Wordsworth: Poetry, People and Place. They’ll bring their enthusiasm, we’ll bring the questions – and we’d like to share your questions with them too!
This series is hosted by Jeff Cowton, Curator & Head of Learning at Wordsworth Grasmere, and Simon Bainbridge, Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Lancaster.
For further information, please contact Hannah Catterall, Events Officer at Wordsworth Grasmere, at h.catterall@wordsworth.org.uk
Disparate Romantics: Jonathan Bate
8 October, 7.30pm, £5
Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, award-winning biographer, joins Jeff Cowton and Simon Bainbridge to talk about his new book Radical Wordsworth, which explores Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator. He will reflect on what he learned when making his BBC Radio 4 series ‘In Wordsworth’s Footsteps’.
Jonathan Bate CBE is Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, where he was Provost from 2011 to 2019.
Professor Stephen Gill joins Jeff Cowton and Simon Bainbridge to discuss his new edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, what it’s like to revisit this work after nearly three decades, and how far his understanding of Wordsworth has changed.
Stephen Gill is Professor Emeritus at Oxford University and Supernumerary Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford, and a long-serving member of the Wordsworth Trust. His publications include The Salisbury Plain Poems, which inaugurated the Cornell Wordsworth Series, Wordsworth and the Victorians, Wordsworth’s Revisitings, and edited collections including William Wordsworth: Selected Poems and William Wordsworth: The Major Works.
Dr Kerri Andrews joins Jeff Cowton and Simon Bainbridge to discuss her new book Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, which traces the footsteps of ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers – including Dorothy Wordsworth.
Kerri Andrews is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University. She has published widely on women’s writing, especially Romantic-era authors, and is a keen hill-walker and member of Mountaineering Scotland.
Professor Robert Morrison joins Jeff Cowton and Simon Bainbridge to discuss his new book The Regency Revolution, which has been longlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association prize for the best in non-fiction historical writing.
Robert Morrison is British Academy Global Professor at Bath Spa University and Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of several books including The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey.
Professor Saeko Yoshikawa joins Jeff Cowton and Simon Bainbridge to discuss her new book William Wordsworth and Modern Travel, and the history of tourism in the Lake District.
Saeko Yoshikawa is a professor in the Department of English Studies at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan. She is also the author of William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism: 1820-1900.
Professor Nick Mason joins Jeff Cowton and Simon Bainbridge to discuss William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes and his work on the new digital edition hosted by the Romantic Circles website. He will also be talking about editing an edition of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lakeland writings with Professors Paul Westover and Michelle Levy.
Nick Mason is Professor of English at Brigham Young University. He specializes in 18th- and 19th-century British literature (especially Romanticism), book and periodical studies, and contemporary European literature and culture.
Thursday 1 October, 5.00pm BST (UTC +1) This event is captioned.
Dove Cottage is the place where William Wordsworth produced most of his greatest and best-loved poems. After being restored as part of a multi-million pound project, it is open to the public again and ready to inspire a whole new generation of poets. Who better to celebrate this important moment with than the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage?
Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is an award-winning poet, playwright and novelist. In 2010 he was awarded the CBE for services to poetry and in 2019 he was appointed Poet Laureate. This year we have invited him to take over Dove Cottage for an exclusive performance combining his own poetry and his favourite Wordsworth poems, bringing to life the house that Wordsworth lived in 200 years ago.
Tune in on 1 October for this one-of-a-kind, online only performance. Experience the newly restored Dove Cottage, take in the beauty of Grasmere and its spectacular surroundings, and hear the poetry of two Poet Laureates as you’ve never heard it before. This live broadcast will not be available after the event, so make sure that you book your ticket!
Emily Paterson-MorganComments Off on Digital Edition: Keats’s annotated copy of Paradise Lost
Daniel Johnson (Univ. of Notre Dame), Beth Lau (California State Univ., Long Beach), and Greg Kucich (Univ. of Notre Dame) wish to announce the official launch of their digital edition of Keats’s heavily annotated copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost (2 vols., 1807).
The edition features page scans of Keats’s book, showing the entirety of the poem and all of Keats’s notes and markings. The viewer can zoom in for closer inspection and rotate pages to follow Keats’s writing around the margins. Each page scan is accompanied by transcriptions of the corresponding lines of Milton’s poem, Keats’s underscoring and vertical marginal lines, and Keats’s notes.
Users can move from page to page, note to note, book to book of Paradise Lost, and from one volume of Keats’s edition to the other. The site also includes a scholarly introduction, bibliography on Keats and Milton, and editorial notes. The digital edition of Keats’s Paradise Lost makes widely available this valuable source of information about Keats’s reading practices and response to Milton’s epic poem.
They invite everyone to visit and explore the website.
Emily Paterson-MorganComments Off on The Anne Lister Society: Call for Collaboration
The Anne Lister Society is dedicated to fostering sustained research and scholarly conversation about Yorkshire diarist Anne Lister, in order to establish her permanent place in the historical and literary record and to interpret the rich legacies of her life and writing for the future.
The Society is looking for scholars across the disciplines who may be working on Lister and her writings.
The Society eventually become a membership and subscription organization; in the meantime, they invite you to follow themon Twitter (@AnneListerSoc) or Instagram (@annelistersociety) for all their updates and news about debut events they plan for July, 2021 in Halifax, U.K.
Emily Paterson-MorganComments Off on Keats-Shelley Association of America – Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Grants
As in previous years the Keats-Shelley Association of America will award two Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Grants of $3,000 each to advanced graduate students, untenured faculty, or independent scholars.
The purpose of the Grants is to defray travel expenses incurred in pursuing archival and/or special-collections research related to British Romanticism and literary culture between 1789 and 1832, with preference given to projects involving authors and subjects featured in the Keats-Shelley Journal.
Due to possible delays related to COVID-19, extensions will be permitted this year.
No “country of origin” restrictions apply, and proposals from everywhere to go anywhere are welcome. Please note that the Grants do not underwrite time off for writing or for travel to a conference. Further information and application forms may be obtained at the K-SAA website here.
The works of Romantic writers and political philosophers served a morally instructive purpose for the audiences and readerships of their time. In their pamphlets, speeches, plays and poetry, as well as narrative texts, dominant discourses on, e.g., socio-economic questions, child-rearing, self-management, interactions with marginalised individuals, and visions of democratised states and communities stabilised, commented on and potentially subverted what is now considered a Romantic belief system. The implicit hierarchy of authors of such instructive texts and their recommended moral regulations open a window into the social inequalities of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Because these texts “appeared to have no political bias, these rules took on the power of natural law, and as a result, they presented readers with ideology in its most powerful form” (Armstrong 60). At the same time, it must be acknowledged that Romanticism as such “did create a great revolution in consciousness” (Berlin 20) insofar as Britain’s marginalised groups often became the central focus of Romantic works. Despite their normative character, these texts still left room to create counter-hegemonic discourses, allowed for alternative readings and subversive re-writings, and incited (sub-cultural) agency as a challenge to prevalent ideologies of the Long 18th Century. This emerging Romantic inclusiveness “signalled the beginnings of the aesthetic and ideological acceptance of previously marginalized ‘Others’, social, racial, cultural, and aesthetic” (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 19) – an awareness that would nowadays be considered ‘woke’.
For this volume on Romantic ethics and ‘wokeness’, we seek to shed light on the period of Romanticism from a distinctively cultural-studies point of view. By choosing an interdisciplinary approach, contributions should focus on, for example, the economic discourse, education and pedagogics, childhood and human perfectibility, slavery and colonialism, Bildung, female conduct books, the poetics of conscience, aesthetics, or crime and punishment, to uncover the morally instructive implementations of the works.
At the same time, we also invite contributors to consider the ongoing and undisputed relevance of Romantic discourses for the socio-cultural and political challenges of the 21st century. More often than not it appears that Romantic ideas echo into contemporary controversies surrounding questions of white privilege (Black Lives Matter), gender and sexual inequalities (#MeToo, LGBTQIA+), human rights, and the intensification of marginalisation in the face of global crises (financial crisis, migration, climate change, pandemics). In consequence, this volume will also address didactic questions immediately related to topics that have been stirring debates for more than 250 years:
How did Romantic literature and education serve as communicators of virtue, morals, and values?
How are ideals, belief systems and the ‘wokeness’ of Romanticism intertwined with contemporary social and cultural concerns?
Can Romantic ideas possibly be re-discovered as innovative approaches to modern teaching and (self-)instruction?
How can Romanticism therefore contribute to extend the canon for teaching literature (both in high schools and higher education) to incite politically active thinking in learners?
This Call for Contributions invites topics including (but not limited to) the following:
Female Education and Women’s Rights
Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement
Political Criticism and the Birth of Human Rights
Schooling in the Long 18th Century
Post-Nationalism and Global Community
Romantic Childhood and Human Perfectibility
The Affluent vs. The Poor: Charitable Acts vs. Social Hierarchy
Artistic Sensibility and the Woke Romantic Genius
Romantic Imagination and Re-definitions of Aesthetic Concepts
Please submit abstracts (400-500 words) accompanied by a short bio note to both guest editors for this issue: Marie Hologa (marie.hologa@tu-dortmund.de) and sophia.moellers@tu-dortmund.de) by 20 November 2020. Finished articles (ca. 6,000 -7,000 words) will bedue by 31 August 2021.
Dr. Marie Hologa and M.A. Sophia Möllers TU Dortmund, British Cultural Studies
Works Cited
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina. “Romanticism: Breaking the Canon.” Art Journal, Vol. 52, No. 2, Summer 1993 (Romanticism), pp. 18-21.
Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy, Princeton University Press, 1999.
