{"id":5448,"date":"2024-08-20T10:16:03","date_gmt":"2024-08-20T10:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5448"},"modified":"2024-08-20T10:16:03","modified_gmt":"2024-08-20T10:16:03","slug":"the-shelley-conference-2024-posthumous-poems-posthumous-collaborations-conference-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5448","title":{"rendered":"The Shelley Conference 2024: Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations – Conference Report"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lydia Shaw, Shelley Conference Postgraduate Helper, here details for the BARS Blog, an overview of the Shelley Conference<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018The Shelley Conference, Posthumous Poems<\/em>, Posthumous Collaborations\u2019 took place on 28-29th<\/sup> June 2024 at Keats House in London. On the eve of the conference, Mark Sandy gave a beautiful pre-conference lecture titled \u2018\u2018Waters on a Starry Night\u2019: Shelley\u2019s Poetic Reflections on Wordsworth\u2019. The lecture discussed touchstones between Percy Shelley and Wordsworth\u2019s poetic imagery with a focus on haunting loss, absent presences, vacancy and effervescent similes that took us on a \u2018poetic quest for the unseen\u2019, to borrow Sandy\u2019s words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following morning saw the beginning of the first full day of the conference. The day began with opening remarks by Amanda Blake Davis on the continuing importance of collaboration to Shelley Studies, especially in Anna Mercer\u2019s approach to Shelleyan collaboration in the 2017 Shelley Conference and in her monograph, and within Shelley\u2019s own circle during and after his lifetime (i.e. The Liberal<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first set of panels were The Liberal<\/em> and \u2018Posthumous Existence\u2019. Following a coffee break were the panels \u2018Affect and Co-Creation\u2019 and \u2018Mary as Editor\u2019. I attended the \u2018Affect and Co-Creation\u2019 panel which consisted of a fascinating talk by Katy Boyer on Shelley\u2019s corpse and the relation between Percy Shelley\u2019s drowned body and his poetry. Merrilees Roberts explored Mary, Jane and Percy\u2019s collaborative grief in \u2018The Choice\u2019 and lyrics to Jane Williams. Lisa Vargo gave a paper on \u2018The Zucca\u2019 and Mary Shelley\u2019s role as editor, seeing the poem as a sort of dialogue between Mary and Percy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another short break was followed by the parallel panels on \u2018Twentieth Century Touchstones\u2019, and a panel consisting of musicality and considered silences, aptly named \u2018Sound and Silence\u2019. Camila Oliveira Querino gave a brilliant paper on \u2018\u2018Music\u2019 and other Posthumous Poems<\/em> set to music\u2019. This was followed by a more contemplative paper on \u2018Silence and Sympathy in \u2018Julian and Maddalo\u2019\u2019 by Elspeth Askew that considered the role and value of silence in the poem. The panel was closed by Amanda Blake Davis\u2019s excellent discussion of \u2018Arboreal Soundscapes in \u2018The Woodman and The Nightingale\u2019\u2019 which explored subjective responses to objective sounds in the poem, the experience of writing through sound and the significance of Shelley\u2019s identification of specific trees such as the poplar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next was lunch in the garden of Keats House followed by the Plenary Panel \u2018Editing the Dead\u2019. The panel consisted of talks by Will Bowers, Nora Crook, Paul Hamilton and Valentina Varinelli with fruitful discussions on Mary Shelley\u2019s role as editor, the \u2018Jane poems\u2019 and how they substitute and consummate Percy Shelley\u2019s feelings for Jane, and questions surrounding the publication of the Posthumous Poems. <\/em>The plenary panel was followed by a drinks reception to launch volumes 5 and 6 of The Poems of Shelley <\/em>(Longman Annotated English Poets), hosted by two of the editors of the volumes, Will Bowers and Mathelinda Nabugodi. The event culminated in a brilliant and moving speech by Kelvin Everest, who shared his experience of editing Shelley for Longman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The summer weather continued for the second day of the conference with opening panels on \u2018Uncovering Editions\u2019 and \u2018Shelleyan Disruption\u2019. The former took place in the Nightingale Room and included talks by Andrew Hodgson, Gary Kelly and Keerthi Vasishta on Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Milner and Sowerby\u2019s editions of Shelley and the role of Leigh Hunt as editor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A brief coffee break preceded the second set of parallel panels on \u2018Beyond the Human\u2019 and \u2018Transnational Shelley\u2019. The former saw a fantastic discussion by Paul Stephens on \u2018Shelley\u2019s Theory of Economic Value\u2019. Touchstones between the value of land and the transformation of nature into human property were also compellingly explored by Sola Ogunbayo and Yuan Ge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These parallel panels were followed by another short coffee break before the final panels of the conference on \u2018Conversation and Influence\u2019 and \u2018Translations\u2019. The former, chaired by Andrew Lacey, saw fantastic talks by Laura Blunsden on \u2018\u2018Alastor\u2019, Wieland, and Shelley\u2019s Symbolic Mind\u2019 and Oliver Clarkson\u2019s \u2018Wordsworth After Shelley\u2019, and my own paper on \u2018The Poetics of the Ocean and Human Potentiality in Shelley\u2019s \u2018Julian and Maddalo\u2019\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saturday\u2019s roundtable saw Kate Singer and Omar F. Miranda discuss the recently published Percy Bysshe Shelley for Our Times<\/em> (Cambridge University Press, 2024) with respondents Mark Sandy and Jennifer Wallace. Singer elegantly described the purpose of the book being to \u2018ripple the water of thinking about Shelley\u2019 and the aims of the editors (Singer and Miranda) to create a book that reflects not only our current times but future times. Sandy summed up the value of such a book, and the continued importance of studying Shelley, as that we see something in him, in his ideas, that mirrors back to ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Following this exciting roundtable was the keynote lecture by Ross Wilson. This engaging lecture drew attention to Shelley\u2019s persisting concern with the posthumous condition, from the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson<\/em> to themes of posthumousness, living again, ceasing to live again, and fragmentary forms as recurrent in Shelley\u2019s corpus. Shelley\u2019s concern with the posthumous condition was strikingly considered in the fragment \u2018On Life\u2019, wherein Wilson reflected upon Shelley’s remarkable claim that \u2018in living we lose the apprehension of life\u2019. This phrase was, of course, adopted as the title for Wilson\u2019s seminal 2013 monograph on Shelley. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his capacity as Conference co-organiser, Andrew Lacey delivered some heartfelt closing remarks, thanking his co-organisers Amanda Blake Davis, Paul Stephens and Merrilees Roberts, together with the PG Helpers Keerthi Vasishta and Lydia Shaw, and to Rob Shakespeare and the brilliant staff at Keats House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Closing the conference was Omar F. Miranda and Kate Singer with a drinks reception and raffle on the front lawn of the Keats House, hosted by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The Shelley Conference, Posthumous Poems<\/em>, Posthumous Collaborations\u2019 was filled with inspiring talks, dynamic discussion, the exchanging of ideas within a supportive community and will no doubt be the birthplace of new Shelleyan collaborations to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia Shaw has recently completed her PhD at Durham University. Her thesis refigures Byron and Shelley\u2019s poetics in relation to current environmental discussions. In examining these two Romantic poets\u2019 engagements with, and treatment of, the Italian landscape, she employs environmental discussions of interconnection to interrogate the conceived divisions between human and nature. Lydia was a recipient of The Byron Society PhD Bursary in the years 2022\/3 and 2023\/4.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image credits: Keats House Museum<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lydia Shaw, Shelley Conference Postgraduate Helper, here details for the BARS Blog, an overview of the Shelley Conference: \u2018The Shelley Conference, Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations\u2019 took place on 28-29th June… 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":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448"}],"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=5448"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5451,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448\/revisions\/5451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}