BARS Exchange

By Eric Loy

We’re excited to announce that the William Blake Archive has [finally] arrived on Twitter. You can find and tweet us using @BlakeArchive.

We often lovingly refer to the Archive as a “mature” digital project–the website first created in the halcyon days of 1996–but expanding the Archive’s online social presence struck us as a good opportunity to connect with other projects and people around the world dedicated to the digital humanities. In other words, we envision social media to be more than a frivolous side enterprise. Understanding the cultural landscape of the modern Web, we see social media as potentially integral to the goals of the Archive and to digital humanities in general.

So what will that look like? We outlined a basic strategy for what you might see in our future Twitter feed:

• Publication Announcements: Did we mention that we have a new batch of letters coming soon?
• Blog Posts: Twitter is great way to share blogging content.
• Blake Content: anything from Blake artwork to excerpts from his letters.
• Tweets to other projects and library collections: communication, collaboration, support, and maybe a few inside jokes?
• Re-Tweets of digital humanities / archive news: sharing DH news and encouraging a …read more

  Source: http://blakearchive.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/blake-archive-twitter/

By maximiliaan@gmail.com As noted in my previous blogs on Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, the first story read by the Byron-Shelley circle on that stormy night in June 1816, L’ Amour Muet, was not as influential and well-known as the second story, Les Portraits de Famille / The Family Portraits. Mary Shelley herself stated that Les Portraits de Famille […] …read more

Source: http://www.romtext.org.uk/frankenstein-and-fantasmagoriana-story-2-les-portraits-de-famille/

By admin

Please see below for details of a symposium and evening event exploring the history of authorship using the archive of the Royal Literary Fund; these will be held at the British Library on Friday 9th May. I feel that I should declare an interest here (I’m one of the organisers and the most junior of the speakers), but I’m pretty excited by the line-up and think that it should be a really interesting day.

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The Royal Literary Fund and the Perils of Authorship

The British Library Conference Centre

Friday 9th May

10:30-17:45 (followed by a wine reception, then an evening event from 18:30-19:30)

The dissenting minister, philosopher and educationalist David Williams (above) founded the Royal Literary Fund in 1790 in order ‘to withdraw those apprehensions of extreme poverty, and those desponding views of futurity, which lead Genius and Talent from the path of Virtue’, which in practice meant providing confidential financial aid to struggling writers. More than three thousand six hundred writers applied to the Fund prior to 1939, including luminaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, Leigh Hunt, Joseph Conrad, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Richardson, but also hundreds of less familiar figures. Their stories …read more

Source: http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=233

By Honor Rieley

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Source: http://romanticrealignments.blogspot.com/2014/03/week-8-monday-america-through-british.html

By NENC The next meeting of NENC will take place on Tuesday 11th March, at 5.30pm in Room B.30 in the Bedson Teaching Centre at Newcastle University (Location 21 on page two of this campus map: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf).

By Katherine Fender

By Shannon Jaime

Since re-grouping in January, the members of BAND have been working earnestly on a variety of new and ongoing projects, including Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue, Receipts, The French Revolution, Chaucer, Prospectus, The Four Zoas, Genesis, Tiriel, and additional groups of Blake’s letters. In an effort to do more shameless plugging for our imminent letters publication, I’d like to share why I decided to continue with the letters project.

On a more practical note, I wanted more experience in building XML files from the screen-up and in gathering provenance info for problematic or untraced letters. Yet there’s another reason I couldn’t stay away from the correspondence of Will Blake. As a Romanticist who has read and studied Blake’s poetry, I find that it is sometimes easy to forget that beyond Blake’s artistry, beyond his philosophical and mystical Ideas, there existed an actual human being. After working on one of Blake’s letters last semester, I realized that we often think of Blake the Poet, or Blake the Engraver, but not Blake the man—someone who lived, breathed, socialized, gossiped, fell ill, worried about money and work, conducted business with a host of acquaintances, expressed opinions, and often let his imagination wander into …read more

Source: http://blakearchive.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/to-the-letters/

By Honor Rieley

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Source: http://romanticrealignments.blogspot.com/2014/03/upcoming-event-coastal-cultures-of-long_2.html

By manuchander by Manu Samriti Chander I mentioned in my last post the Calcutta-born poet Henry Derozio (1809-1831), or “Indian Keats” as he has sometimes been called. I first discovered Derozio’s work in graduate school and planned to write about him in my dissertation, but I didn’t have the resources at the time to travel to work […] …read more

Source: http://www.romtext.org.uk/global-romanticism-ii-imitation-innovation-and-interlocution-in-nineteenth-century-india/

By GlynisIngram

Music and the Nerves

I first became interested in the ‘fashionable diseases’ of the long eighteenth century when I was working on my book Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease. In that period, especially in Britain, the notion that music was a matter of nervous stimulation became widespread, bringing thinking on music into the wider debate on nervousness, sensuality and sensibility. Until the 1790s, music was generally depicted as refining rather than damaging the nerves with the context of the Cult of Sensibility. Thereafter, however, musical nervousness became a full-blown fashionable disease, with a moral-medical critique of its excesses and the whiff of emotional and spiritual superiority.

By the eighteenth century British contributions to the discussion of music’s physical effects, such as Richard Browne’s 1729 Medicina Musica and Richard Brocklesby’s 1749 Reflections of Antient and Modern Musick, tended to assume that music’s power over emotions was experimentally verifiable, that the body worked on Newtonian principles, and that the nerves were responsible for music’s impact.¹ There was an extensive debate about how the nerves transmitted sound to the brain, with a variety of theories on the nature of the nerves co-existing, …read more

Source: http://www.fashionablediseases.info/Blog/?p=90