{"id":4096,"date":"2022-03-01T16:12:57","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T16:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=4096"},"modified":"2022-03-01T16:12:57","modified_gmt":"2022-03-01T16:12:57","slug":"cfp-the-romantic-cliche-1798-1830","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=4096","title":{"rendered":"CFP: The Romantic Clich\u00e9 (1798-1830)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

International Conference
19-20 May 2022, Universit\u00e9 de Paris<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keynote speaker : Pr Nicholas Halmi, University of Oxford<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The aim of this conference is to identify various Romantic-period clich\u00e9s and to analyse how they were built and played with. This will lead us to question the construction of a so-called Romantic identity in literary criticism, but also more generally in collective representations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word \u201cclich\u00e9\u201d was coined in the 19th century and originally referred to a stereotype block that could reproduce types or images repeatedly. The word now characterises \u201ca phrase or expression regarded as unoriginal or trite due to overuse\u201d (OED). Alternatives to the term \u201cclich\u00e9\u201d include words such as \u201ccommonplace\u201d and \u201ctopos\u201d. Any trope, image, figure, and theme can potentially become a clich\u00e9. This very intricate concept raises the issue of artistic originality both in terms of literary creation and of reception. This conference stems from the observation that clich\u00e9s are often easily identified, but rarely examined under a critical lens. When and how does a phrase, an image, a theme, or a figure become a clich\u00e9? Is repetition enough to transform a trope into a clich\u00e9, as suggested by its etymological root? As writers of the Romantic period rarely used this word, one of the aims of this conference is also to translate it into the critical and poetical language of that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many countries, Romanticism is nowadays often associated with popular sentimental images and figures which distort and impoverish its original contents, turning for instance the concept of absolute love in Novalis\u2019 works into a symbol of mawkishness (\u201cfleur bleue\u201d, in French). The clich\u00e9 is thus both an effacing of meaning through repetition and a reduction or a parody, which raises issues of reception. Among other possible approaches, this could spur our delegates to examine the ideological implications of turning Romanticism into a clich\u00e9. For instance, to what extent did T.S. Eliot\u2019s desire to turn Percy Shelley\u2019s political stance in his earlier utopian poems into a clich\u00e9 participate in a more general attempt to define literature outside of the realm of politics? Indeed, the concept of the \u201cclich\u00e9\u201d has often been used as a weapon by later authors and critics to downplay the subversive dimension of Romantic literature and to define it as an outworn paradigm. This phenomenon was already under way during the Romantic period \u2013 for instance, John Keats was often charged with Cockney sentimentality by Tory reviewers, exposing the complex connections between clich\u00e9, taste,
and class. In Germany, many features of Romanticism which were conceptualized by Charles de Villers and Madame de Sta\u00ebl at the beginning of the 19th century, were associated to spirituality and led to the juxtaposition of Romanticism and idealism, creating an ethereal German Romantic identity. This construction proves particularly enduring, although Novalis underlines in his works the importance of the body and reflects in his fragments on the implications of transcendental medicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the concept of the clich\u00e9 can also be useful to analyse the way Romantic writers defined literary creation. One could say that Wordsworth, in the \u2018Preface\u2019 to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, aims to forsake the clich\u00e9s of 18th -century poetic diction. Percy Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry (\u00a73), defines poetic art as a way to revitalize dead metaphors, that is, commonplaces and clich\u00e9s. In Don Juan, Byron repurposes the clich\u00e9 of Don Juan as an active seducer, turning him into a prey for women. Yet, to what extent is this conception of literary creation a modernistic clich\u00e9 that we retrospectively apply to the Romantic period? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Romantic writers also gained mastery over these clich\u00e9s by playing with them, sometimes unwittingly reinforcing them \u2013 Percy Shelley, for instance, in \u2018Letter to Maria Gisborne\u2019 plays with the clich\u00e9 of the evil Romantic poet by describing himself as an \u201cArchimago\u201d, and largely contributed with Adonais to the construction of the clich\u00e9 of the frail, feminised Romantic poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In France, Romanticism is often reduced to the post-1830 clich\u00e9 of Mussetian sentimentalism, which Flaubert notoriously debunked in Madame Bovary, thus distorting and obscuring the legacy of other French Romantic writers such as Lamartine or Vigny. Reflecting on the concept of the Romantic clich\u00e9 from a French perspective is therefore a way to underline how French Romanticism was adulterated and deformed by later conservative writers and by the appearance of a new paradigm of reading which derides the ambition of Romantic writers to
philosophize. Finally, moving on to an often less studied linguistic area, one cannot but notice the complexity of the appropriation of Romanticism in 19th-century Danish literature. For instance, in Jens Peter Jacobsen\u2019s novel Niels Lyhne (1880), Romanticism is both conjured up as a source of evocative images and ironically rejected. The eponymous character uses his Romantic clothing as a means of seduction which he can nonetheless abandon instantly. These examples underscore the complexity of the construction of the so-called Romantic
identity. Accordingly, we intend our conference to be clich\u00e9-ridden in the widest possible sense:<\/p>\n\n\n\n