BARS Exchange

By Rosie Whitcombe

With the centenary of E.P. Thompson’s birth approaching in 2024, Keats-Shelley Journal seeks contributions for articles, notes, and other interventions engaging Thompson’s work and its legacies. Thompson’s writing, particularly his foundational book The Making of the English Working Class, has had a profound influence on the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century politics and culture. His particular influence on Romantic historicist methodologies has helped transform the field over the last half century, and his biography of writer, designer, and socialist activist William Morris has not only crucially shaped the reception of Morris and his work, but also presciently bridged the sometimes-limiting divide between scholarship of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Contributions could be focused on any aspect of Thompson’s writing or political action itself, but also—inspired by his commitment to making visible the experience of working people—on poets, writers, and activists who sought in various ways to advance social and economic justice for the working classes throughout the nineteenth century. This special issue seeks to honor and extend the journal’s ongoing commitment to a widening community of authors and readers, which has impelled the recent publication of our “50 Voices” flash-essays collection (vol. 69) as well as roundtables “Toward and Undisciplined …read more

Source:: https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=4747

By Rosie Whitcombe

University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway, June 20-22, 2024

Symposium Speakers

• James Chandler, University of Chicago
• Jeffrey N. Cox, University of Colorado Boulder
• Lilla Crisafulli, University of Bologna
• Greg Kucich, University of Notre Dame
• Richard Lansdown, University of Tasmania
• Piya Pal-Lapinski, Bowling Green State University
• Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
• Peter Manning, Stony Brook University
• Anne Mellor, UCLA
• Omar Miranda, University of San Francisco
• Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews
• Diego Saglia, University of Parma
• Maria Schoina, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
• Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia
• Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne
• Susan Wolfson, Princeton University

This event, co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame and the University of Colorado Boulder, will take place at the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway, a state-of-the-art research/teaching/conference facility located within steps of the Colosseum and offering spectacular views of the Colosseum from its rooftop terrace. Venue website: rome.nd.edu

Speakers will expand upon Marilyn Butler’s seminal investigation of a romantic “cult of the south” to address Byron’s personal, poetic, and political interactions with a wider range of cultures throughout the Mediterranean Rim: Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, the Balkans, and Turkey, as well as Italy. This broader cultural focus opens new critical pathways for exploring a large array of revolutionary aesthetic and political initiatives crucial to the development of European Romanticism …read more

Source:: https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=4745

By katiesnow11

Cologne: TASCHEN. 2023. ISBN: 9783836507868. Published May 12 2023. £60.

Review by Katie Snow (ks596@exeter.ac.uk)

Alexander Roob’s enchanting The History of Press Graphics opens by setting the evolution of illustrated news against key political revolutions, reforms, and crises. The history of graphic journalism, Roob shows, is in many ways the history of democracy, forged through changes in how diverse publics produced, consumed, and responded to information. It is perhaps surprising then, that press graphics do not feature more heavily in modern scholarship. Reductive attempts at thematic categorisation combined with a squeamishness surrounding artistic hierarchies has too often left them, Roob writes, ‘consigned to the bottom drawer with various kinds of ephemera.’ Lavishly illustrated and politically astute, this new work rightly reinstates press graphics to the centre of conversations about artistic movements, media, and industry from the Age of Enlightenment through to the advent of the First World War. Roob is particularly well placed to write this one-hundred-year history; his career has seen him work as a church painter and comic illustrator as well as a teacher of graphics and painting. This combination of creative and scholarly expertise enables an academically rigorous and wonderfully adventurous tour of pictorial journalism as it built upon …read more

Source:: https://romanticillustrationnetwork.com/2023/07/25/review-the-history-of-press-graphics-1819-1921-the-golden-age-of-graphic-journalism-by-alexander-roob-reviewed-by-katie-snow/

By Matthew Sangster

Sarah Burdett is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at University College London; she will be joining the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge at the beginning of the new academic year. Her research focuses on Romantic-period women – writers, actors, playwrights, sportspeople and inspirations – and on the British stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her new book, The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1815, which we discuss below, was published in June by Palgrave.

1) How did you first become interested in the figure of the arms-bearing woman?

Funnily enough, my motivation to study the figure was two-fold: part scholarly, part personal. At a scholarly level, it was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) which first did it for me; specifically, her adamance that she aims not to encourage women to turn their ‘distaff into a musket’. This image of women over-stepping the bounds of Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda by adopting military personas – and thereby, emulating men both mentally and physically – sparked an eagerness in me to learn more about arguments for women’s martial rights and perceived corporeal capacities, at a time when women across the …read more

Source:: https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=4728

By Isabelle Murray

The World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Call for Papers

The fourth World Congress of Scottish Literatures will be held from the 3rd to the 7th July 2024 at the University of Nottingham in England. The Congress is a major international gathering of scholars with a research interest in the study of all Scottish literatures, across all of Scotland’s languages, with an emphasis on Scotland’s place in the world.

While the fourth World Congress does not have a specific theme, our scope is transnational, and we would especially welcome papers on subjects that reflect the specific context of the Congress in Nottingham: the relationship between Scotland and England from earliest times to the present, a relationship which has had profound implications for the entire world, and which is a significant relationship in literatures in Scots, Gaelic, English, French and Latin from earliest evidence to contemporary production. Under this broad umbrella, we hope to address the following strands:

• Scoto-English relationships: personal, inter-textual, political, cultural and historical

• Scotland in Empire and the Empire in Scotland

• Outlaws, outliers and exiles

• My enemy’s enemy is my friend: Gaelic literary relationships beyond Scotland – Shaped by Landscape: literary understandings of land, sea and …read more

Source:: https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=4720

By Francesca Killoran

It was on board the tantalisingly named Hercules that Byron left Italy and sailed for Greece to join the fight for independence. Britain had responded to the war back in the February of 1823 by creating the London Greek Committee in order to help the cause of Greek Independence from the Ottomans. However, Byron had been thinking about Greece not only since the war began in 1821, whilst writing the latest Cantos of Don Juan, but in the much earlier writings of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages Cantos I-II published in 1812 which was to grant Byron fame and infamy.

Byron’s outspokenness against Britain is evident from his first speech in the House of Lords in December 1812 which described the Tory government as ‘full of ‘bankruptcy, convicted fraud, and imputed felony.’^[1] Such less than subtle attacks are applied to Britain in order contrast with the idealised demi-paradise of Ancient Greece, especially Athens, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages Cantos I-II:

‘[s]on of the morning, rise! approach you here! / […] [l]ook on this spot-a nation’s sepulchre! [a]bode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn / Even gods must yield.’^[2]

From the sunrise a new beginning for Greece and Europe is offered. However, the narrator …read more

Source:: https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=4449

By Rosie Whitcombe

An in-person symposium hosted by Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS)

15 September 2023

There will be no registration fee for this event. Teas, coffees, and a light lunch will be provided. ***

This symposium builds on conversations which have been taking place at Durham University over the last fifteen months as part of the IMEMS research strand ‘The Georgian North’, designed and led by Professor Fiona Robertson:

https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/medieval-early-modern studies/research-strands/the-georgian-north/.

The symposium sets out to develop new approaches to the intellectual and creative cultures of the northern counties of England in the Georgian period, 1714-1830. Important contributions to knowledge, interpretation, creative practice, and scientific advance were made in the north country during this still largely rural and early industrial period in its history. They took shape in social, professional, and discursive networks of considerable complexity and reach, bringing together artists, abolitionists, antiquaries, architects, writers, theologians, musicians, astronomers, philosophers, mathematicians, botanists, landscape designers, linguists, clergy, social and political reformers, actors, and archaeologists. Yet there has been little connected cross-disciplinary exploration of these cultures, their significance, and their legacies.

We invite proposals for 15-minute papers …read more

Source:: https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=4716

By mcinnesa Last week, Jeremy Corbyn tweeted an advert for Poetry for the Many, his anthology of poetry co-edited with Len McCluskey, with a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy. Even though Twitter seems to … Continue reading → …read more

Source:: http://www.romtext.org.uk/jeremy-corbyn-romanticism-and-vogon-poetry/

By Anthony Mandal Romantic Textualities is delighted to announce that we have appointed Dr Andrew McInnes (Edge Hill University) as our new Digital Editor, whose role will be to oversee and expand the journal’s offerings beyond the numbered … Continue reading → …read more

Source:: http://www.romtext.org.uk/our-new-digital-editor/

By Amy Wilcockson

We received a number of very high quality applications for the BARS Communications Assistant 2023-24 position. The Executive Committee are delighted to announce that there will be two new Assistants working on the BARS Blog and social media in the next academic year:

Isabelle Murray is a Masters graduate from Cardiff University. Her thesis, ‘The Glory of the Flower: the Flora in William Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry’, focuses on the sociality of Wordsworth’s natural world, providing an original colour analysis of the use of yellow in his poetry. Her blog site, LetsTalkRomanticism, seeks to explore modern literature, art, music and film through the lens of British Romanticism. Her first post compares Bruce Springsteen’s discography with the poetry of Wordsworth, ‘I walk Streets of Fire… A few miles above Tintern Abbey’, underlining the potential of Romantic literature as an expansive genre. Follow Isabelle on Twitter here.

Statement: I am thrilled to be a part of the BARS community! I cannot wait to surround myself with others who have such a passion for Romanticism.

Dr Rosie Whitcombe is a writer and academic. She is currently an MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield where she is helping to prepare The Cambridge Edition of the …read more

Source:: https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=4706