<\/p>\n
On Friday 30th<\/sup> September Keele University hosted an undergraduate and postgraduate conference on Byron and Romanticism.\u00a0 This event developed from an annual conference which was previously hosted by Edge Hill University under the command of Dr Mary Hurst.\u00a0 This year, in the spirit of collaboration, Edge Hill teamed up with Keele for an inaugural event that sought to encourage undergraduate and postgraduate students from a range of institutions to meet, present, and potentially collaborate on future projects.\u00a0 As our speakers varied in levels of study between year two undergraduates, to PhD students on continuation, our mission was to provide a warm and insightful glimpse into the academic environment.\u00a0 This year Keele had the honour of hosting the event, and did so in the beautiful nineteenth-century mansion house, Keele Hall.\u00a0 The papers themselves were delivered in the appropriate location of the mansion\u2019s Old Library.<\/p>\n Keele Hall, Staffordshire<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n The Old Library, Keele Hall, Staffordshire<\/p><\/div>\n The first panel consisted of two relatively old hands, Kimberley Braxton (a third-year PhD student from Keele University) and Kirsty Harris (who has just submitted her PhD thesis at Anglia Ruskin University), and was chaired by the renowned Byronist, Professor Bernard Beatty.\u00a0 Both speakers gave stimulating papers.\u00a0 Braxton\u2019s handling of the relationship between Byron\u2019s public \u201cByronic\u201d persona, and the influence of the Byronic hero on the subsequent writing practices of the Bront\u00eb siblings, was truly insightful.\u00a0 Interesting distinctions were made between Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s appropriations of the Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights <\/em>(1847),<\/em> and Bramwell\u2019s experimentation with Byronic ideals during the course of his personal life.\u00a0 Harris followed this paper with a discussion on metamorphosis in Byron\u2019s \u201cshipwreck\u201d narratives, with a close focus on Canto II of Don Juan <\/em>(1819-1824).\u00a0 In this paper, Harris discussed Byron\u2019s apparent rejection of the deities which were \u201cintrinsic to classical narratives\u201d, which she argued allowed him to develop the idea of human regeneration and an idea of heroism which was not dictated by the divine.\u00a0 The question session for this panel was understandably animated, with the questions themselves being skilfully fielded by both speakers.<\/p>\n Kirsty Harris, PhD Candidate, Anglia Ruskin University<\/p><\/div>\n The next session was chaired by Edge Hill\u2019s enigmatic Dr Andrew McInnes.\u00a0 Daniel Westwood (University of Sheffield) kicked off with an exploration of the monologue in Byron\u2019s Manfred <\/em>(1817).\u00a0 Whilst evaluating aspects of monodrama and monologue in Byron\u2019s first adult play, Westwood interrogated the complexities that arose from \u201ca work that is both attuned to the power of the monological and willing to embrace open-endedness.\u201d\u00a0 With an emphasis on the ambiguity that these tensions present, Westwood sought to develop McGann\u2019s ideas on Byron\u2019s distinctions between lying and cant to show that neither label is quite appropriate for the \u201clevel of ambivalence\u201d which surrounds this play.\u00a0 This paper was followed by two papers from Edge Hill University, both of whom were presented by students in their second year of undergraduate study.\u00a0 Megan Carney led the charge with a sophisticated analysis of the role of the servant in Gothic literature.\u00a0 Carney suggested that, through their unique role of simultaneously being and not-being, the agency of the servant is difficult to determine and, as a result, their presence can be compared to that of a ghost which is inextricably bound to a particular place though not active in the events which occur there.\u00a0 Soraya Atherton concluded this panel with a discussion of exile, with particular focus being placed on the exile of the Shelleys in the early nineteenth century.\u00a0 Atherton made astute comparisons between different kinds of exile, with a strong distinction being made between the morose ideas of exile demonstrated in Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em> (1818) with the more jubilant exile depicted in Byron\u2019s Childe Harold\u2019s Pilgrimage<\/em> (1812-1818) \u2013 in the later cantos in particular.<\/p>\n Megan Carney, Undergraduate, Edge Hill University<\/p><\/div>\n After a well-deserved lunch break and a tour of the iconic grounds at Keele Hall, the final panel (chaired by Keele\u2019s own Hannah Scragg) commenced with an undergraduate student from Canterbury Christ Church University, Rosie Jackson-Horn.\u00a0 Jackson-Horn argued that Byron\u2019s self-fashioned identity, which he took pains to develop throughout his oeuvre<\/em>, can even be seen through his letters and epistles to his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.\u00a0 Rather than \u201cmerely composing love-poems\u201d, Jackson-Horn demonstrated that these too can be perceived as self-fashioning texts aimed at strengthening Byron\u2019s already distinguished persona.\u00a0 Master’s student, Susannah Owen (Keele University), continued the theme of identity with a probing paper on the effects of the French Revolution on ideas of national identity.\u00a0 Moving away from Byron slightly, Owen referenced Benedict Anderson\u2019s renowned Imagined Communities<\/em> (1983) to discuss the ways in which writers such as Burke, Godwin and Percy Shelley responded to, and commented on, new ideas of community \u201cheld together not by a shared monarchical ruler, but through a shared national identity\u201d.\u00a0 The final paper of the day was presented by Alexander Abichou, who starts a PhD at Durham University this year.\u00a0 His paper rounded the panel off with a discussion of representations of history in Childe Harold\u2019s Pilgrimage<\/em>.\u00a0 With particular emphasis on the discussion of the appropriation of the Elgin Marbles in Canto II, Abichou discussed Byron\u2019s relationship to history and suggested that, to Byron, this appropriation of the marbles led to an idea of misplaced identity for the Greeks, which Byron attempted to reconcile through his narrative.<\/p>\n Alexander Abichou, PhD Candidate, Durham University<\/p><\/div>\n Our keynote speaker was greatly anticipated: Professor Drummond Bone from the University of Oxford did not disappoint.\u00a0 As a leading figure in Byron studies, and Romantic studies more generally, we could not have imagined a more appropriate speaker to end our day\u2019s discussion, and were very thankful to Drummond Bone for supporting both our event, and our burgeoning academics.\u00a0 With a thought-provoking investigation into the impact of women on the English cantos of Don Juan<\/em>, Drummond Bone provided a passionate and warming talk geared to incite further interest in, and appreciation for, Byron and Romantic studies.<\/p>\n Professor Drummond Bone, University of Oxford<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Julia Coole, Keele University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Please see below for a report by Julia Coole (Keele University) on ‘Byron and the Romantic World’, which BARS helped to support. Conference Report: Byron and the Romantic World… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1419"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1428,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions\/1428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Keele](\"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Byron-and-the-Romantic-World-1.jpg\")
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