{"id":5349,"date":"2024-06-28T07:46:23","date_gmt":"2024-06-28T07:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5349"},"modified":"2024-06-28T07:47:01","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T07:47:01","slug":"cfp-maria-edgeworth-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5349","title":{"rendered":"CfP: MARIA EDGEWORTH IN PARIS\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

International Colloquium, Friday 13 & Saturday 14 June 2025 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Confirmed keynote speaker: Gillian Dow  <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(University of Southampton) <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are now in a magnificent hotel in a fine square  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

formerly called \u201cPlace de Louis Quinze\u201d \u2013 <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

afterwards \u201cPlace de la R\u00e9volution\u201d \u2013 and now  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPlace de la Concorde\u201d. In this square the guillotine  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

was once at work night and day. Here Louis Seize  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

and Marie Antoinette died! \u2026 On one side of this  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

square are Les champs \u00e9lys\u00e9es; where the famous  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

courtisanne de l\u2019ancien r\u00e9gime drove her triumphal  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

car with horses shod with silver. What a mixture of  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

things in this best of all possible worlds! Voltaire  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

represented Paris by an image made of mud  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

interspersed with precious stones. As far as I have  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

seen this seems to be not only an ingenious but a  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

just emblem\u2026 [Maria Edgeworth, 20 October 1802] <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Background <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Irish novelist and educationalist Maria Edgeworth spent an intense five months in  Paris from October 1802 until March 1803, travelling there from Ireland with her father,  Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an inventor and man of science who had assisted with a river  engineering project at Lyon in the 1770s and who was already connected with French  scientists, inventors, and intellectuals. The Edgeworths were preparing to settle in Paris  for an indefinite period when Napoleon\u2019s Consulate issued an expulsion order, partly  based on their shared surname with the Abb\u00e9 Edgeworth, who had administered the  last rites to Louis XVI on the scaffold. Lovell Edgeworth, Maria\u2019s brother, was  subsequently interned at Verdun until 1814. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paris was pivotal for Maria Edgeworth. It was here that she first found herself a literary  celebrity in the wake of Practical Education <\/em>(1798) and Belinda <\/em>(1801), both of which  had been translated into French. She associated with the Swiss-French Delessert  circle; with Andr\u00e9 Morellet, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, Ad\u00e9laide and Claude Emmanuel de Pastoret, and Marc-Auguste Pictet; met the Benthamite jurist, Etienne  Dumont, and received a surprise offer of marriage from the Swedish scientist and  diplomat Abram Niclas Clewberg Edelcrantz. She went to the theatre and to salons,  and discussed theories of language, Napoleonic politics, literature, science, and  economics. A long and vivid letter written as she began her journey back to Ireland  describes her feelings at meeting Madame de Genlis, whose Ad\u00e8le et Th\u00e9odore <\/em>she had  translated into English as a girl of fifteen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1802-3 sojourn was personally, intellectually and politically significant for  Edgeworth\u2019s subsequent writing. Her personal crisis over the proposal of marriage from Edelcrantz, for example, merged with her intellectual response to Cambac\u00e9r\u00e8s\u2019 new  laws governing marriage and divorce. Her subsequent novel, Leonora <\/em>(1806), bears the  imprint of early Napoleonic-era sexual politics. The connections that Edgeworth made  during her Paris visit continued to be important to her for the next twenty-five years of  her writing career. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colloquium <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This colloquium will focus on Maria Edgeworth and her family, and especially on their  stay in Paris in 1802-3, so we particularly welcome papers relating to Edgeworth  herself; but we envisage a wider remit. As a writer and thinker, Edgeworth\u2019s imagination  and analytical powers were deeply engaged with the ideas flowing between France,  Switzerland, England, Ireland, and the Scandinavian and Nordic countries. After 1803,  Edgeworth read voraciously in Francophone literature; her works were translated into  French, Spanish and Italian, among other languages, and her educational thought and  writings for children gained influence across Europe. This transcultural presence and  engagement makes her a figure with whom we can think productively about  transnational networks of ideas. Edgeworth\u2019s contact with various salonni\u00e8res <\/em>also  allows us to reflect on the involvement of female thinkers in the supposedly masculine  worlds of politics and law-making. Edgeworth\u2019s fascination with Sta\u00ebl and other French  writers stimulates explorations of the ways in which literature permits the adoption and  adaptation of imaginaries across national borders. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We invite proposals for 25-minute papers focusing on Maria Edgeworth in Paris  and\/or on the related fields of enquiry outlined here. <\/strong>We are also open to proposals <\/strong> <\/strong>for papers centring on writers other than Edgeworth <\/strong>which amplify our sense of the  individuals, networks, and influences which she could have encountered in France  in the period of the Peace of Amiens and beyond. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please send paper proposals (c. 200 words) to: <\/strong>edgeworth-in-paris@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr<\/strong> by the deadline of 1 October 2024.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Website: <\/strong>https:\/\/edgeworth-paris2025.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk\/ <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organising committee:  <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isabelle Bour, Sorbonne Nouvelle <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claire Boulard-Jouslin, Sorbonne Nouvelle <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Susan Manly, St Andrews, UK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

International Colloquium, Friday 13 & Saturday 14 June 2025  Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris \u00a0 Confirmed keynote speaker: Gillian Dow   (University of Southampton)  We are now in a magnificent hotel in a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5349"}],"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\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5349"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5351,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5349\/revisions\/5351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}