North American Society for the Study of Romanticism

NASSR sessions at ACCUTE 2019 (UBC): Organized by Miranda Burgess and Alexander Dick

England in 1819 in 2019: Romantic Historicity 200 years on

and

England in 1819 in 2019: Historical Romanticism 200 years on

Few books have shaped Romantic literary studies during the last two decades more than James Chandler’s England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Published in 1999, English in 1819 extended the critique of Romantic ideology that inaugurated the historical turn of the 1980s. But it also made a case for reading Romanticism as peculiarly conscious of itself as a “moment” in history—what Hazlitt called the “spirit of the times”—that established the preconditions for the modern idea of history. These two panels invite reflections on our current moment in literary-historical studies by engaging Chandler’s theses from new perspectives that have emerged since its publication. We are especially interested in work that widens Chandler’s frame beyond its European setting, including work on comparative imperialisms, Indigenous exchanges, the global south, and archipelagic/maritime perspectives. The first panel is designed to examine directly Chandler’s theoretical premises; the second will re-consider literary texts from or around 1819 (not exclusively those featured in England in 1819) in light of recent developments in the Romantic historicist studies that Chandler’s book delineated. Although we regard the panels as offering opportunities for distinct modes of engagement (“theoretical” and “applied”), overlap is unavoidable and encouraged. We invite speakers to identify on which of the panels they would prefer to participate, keeping in mind that they will be speaking to both.

Please send the following: A file containing a 300 to 500-word paper proposal without personal identifying marks and the 2019 Proposal Info Sheet available on the ACCUTE website.

Proposal submission deadline: November 15, 2018

British Association for Romantic Studies: 16th International Conference, ‘Romantic Facts and Fantasies’. The University of Nottingham, July 25-28, 2019.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/english/romantic-studies/index.aspx

Proposals are invited for the 2019 conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies, to be hosted by the School of English, University of Nottingham, from 25-28th July. Our theme is ‘Romantic Facts and Fantasies’.

We look forward to welcoming you to the East Midlands, where the historic city of Nottingham is located among the heartlands of British Romanticism. Newstead Abbey was Byron’s ancestral home; Sherwood Forest was re-imagined as the meeting place of Richard I and Robin Hood in Scott’s Ivanhoe; and the Cromford Mills are a living monument to Richard Arkwright, whose inventive development of spinning mills and power looms was an integral strand of the Industrial Revolution. This conference will explore the potency of ‘fact’ and ‘fantasy’ both in the Romantic period and during the afterlife of Romanticism. The aim is to develop a collective understanding of how Romantic ‘fact’ and ‘fantasy’ work together and against one another, and in so doing embody the spirit of an age whose inventions and innovations laid the foundations for modernity while simultaneously exulting the power of the imagination and its creations. Keynote speakers for Romantic Facts and Fantasies are Laura Mandell (Texas A&M), Robert Poole (UCLAN), Sharon Ruston (Lancaster), Diego Saglia (Parma), and Jane Stabler (St Andrews).

We encourage proposals for open-call sessions and themed panels as well as individual proposals for 20-minute papers.

Subjects covered might include (but are not limited to)…

Bicentenaries 1819-2019: The Peterloo Massacre; the ‘Six Acts’, the Carlsbad Decrees; the birth of Queen Victoria; Stamford Raffles and the foundation of Singapore; Simon Bolivar’s victory at Boyacá; the Panic of 1819; the opening of the Burlington Arcade, London; the Cotton Mills Act; the death of James Watt; Keats’s odes; Scott’s Ivanhoe, Bride of Lammermoor, and A Legend of Montrose; the final volume of Southey’s History of Brazil; Blake’s ‘Ghost of a Flea’ (1819/20).

Factual and fantastical encounters and dialogues: travel narratives; poetry of encounter; translations; colonial discourses; geologies, geographies and aesthetics of landscape; rivers, canals, bridges and roads in material, commercial and imaginative landscapes.

Facts and fantasies of collective and individual identity: Romantic provincialism (the Lunar Society, the Lake School); national identity and ideas of the state; religion; ethnography; Romantic life writing and autobiography; Romantic-period economics, consumerism, industry and agriculture; Romantic facts and fantasies of childhood; Romantic experiments in education; Rousseauism.

The scientific imaginary: Mary and Percy Shelley; Humphry Davy, poet and scientist; the development and legacies of Romantic science fiction; Erasmus Darwin, the Lunar Society and Joseph Wright of Derby; Malthus and Malthusianism.

Imagining the Romantic world: Keats’s ‘living year’; plagiarism and originality; the professional imagination in Keats, Davy, Blake, Caroline Herschel and William Herschel; pedagogic and didactic poetry, prose and drama; histories and history-writing, including the emergence of national histories; paintings, sculptures and music commemorating the events and ‘heroes’ of the Napoleonic wars, politics, industry and culture; architecture and Romantic fantasy (eg. Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, and Joseph Gandy’s visualisations of the Bank of England and other buildings by John Soane); Romantic book illustration and developments in the technology of print.

Presentation formats

We welcome proposals for the following:

Individual 20 minute papers.

• Abstracts of no more than 250 words (excluding the title).
• Please include your name and institutional affiliation (if applicable).

Panels of either three 20 minute papers or four 15 minute papers.

• Please include an abstract of the panel theme, together with 250-word (excluding the title) proposals from each of the speakers, in a single document.

Open-call sessions.

• Proposals should include a 350-word (excluding the title) description of the potential session, outlining its importance and relevance to the conference theme.
• Accepted open-call sessions will be advertised on the BARS 2019 website from mid-November 2018.

Submissions

The deadline for proposals for open-call sessions is 1 November 2018.

The deadline for submissions of panels and individual papers is 17 December 2018.

Please email proposals to bars2019@nottingham.ac.uk.

Conference Website: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/english/romantic-studies/index.aspx

Please join fellow Romanticists in Manchester, UK for the 2019 International Conference on Romanticism, scheduled to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Peterloo. Keynote speakers are Marlene Daut (UVA) and Anne-Lise François (UC-Berkeley), and we will have a plenary panel on Peterloo with James Chandler (Chicago), Catherine Hall (UCL), and Robert Poole (Central Lancashire). More details can be found on the conference website:

https://icrmcr2019.wordpress.com 

Join the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) August 8-11, 2019, in Chicago for the 27th annual conference: Romantic Elements. We summon “Romantic elements” both as an indication of our renewed attention to matters of style and form and as a token of the long history of defining the essential characteristics of a period that is also a historical, generic, and affective disposition. We ask once again, what are the elements of Romanticism?

For more information, please visit the conference website at: https://nassrchicago2019.wordpress.com/ 

Call for Papers

Joint Conference of the International Association of Byron Societies (IABS) and the German Society for English Romanticism (GER)

Transgressive Romanticism: Boundaries, Limits and Taboos

4-8 September 2019

University of Vechta (Germany)

Romanticism thrives on contradictions; conjuring up images and ideas of acquiescence in the sad Wordsworthian “music of humanity” (‘Tintern Abbey’) and in pastoral serenity on the one hand, it is, on the other, defined by transgressiveness, overreaching and the repudiation of boundaries. While political boundaries are often daringly crossed in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, it is intriguing to see that, aesthetically speaking, even radicals such as Shelley (persistently) abided by the strict and apparently restrictive patterns of sonnets, odes or terza rima forms. Although tending to be conservative in terms of aesthetics, Romantics seem to prefer to undermine and challenge the metrical and stanzaic grids they inherited from Dante or the Italian Renaissance and to fill their poems, plays and novels with explosive and transgressive contents. This conference, which is organised jointly by the IABS and the GER, will therefore focus on the tense relationship between restriction and transgression in politics, religion, morality, sexuality and gender which underlies and imbalances many Romantics’ works. Apart from the Shelleys, Keats, Coleridge and other Romantic period writers, the conference will also focus on transgressions in Byron’s works. While subscribing to the time-honoured and venerable form of the verse epic, subjecting himself to the constraints of the ottava rima form, Byron’s Don Juan is the byword for transgressiveness, for breaches of taboo and trespassing upon forbidden territory. While Byron pleases himself in the role of the transgressor and scoffer, venting his anger on the previous generation of Romantics by denigrating them as conformists and cowards, it will be an intriguing challenge to re-cast and re-evaluate many other Romantics as challengers of limits and boundaries, as intruders upon the consecrated ground of taboo.

Proposals for 20-minute papers are invited on aspects of boundaries, limits and taboos within the context of Byron and Romanticism. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

- Transgressive Lakists

- Challenging Boundaries of Gender (Hemans, Smith, M. Shelley)

- Romanticism and Taboo

- ‘Aesthetic Brawling’ (Kotzebue) in the Romantic Age

- Peterloo as a Trigger for Romantic Transgressions

- The Chameleon Poet as a Transgressor

- Childe Harold’s Transgressive Pilgrimage

- Don Juan

– the Art of Overreaching and Underreaching

- Metrical Transgressions in Romantic Poetry

- #HeToo: Sexual Transgressions in Byron (and Others)

- “workshop[s] of filthy creation”

– Romantics and Transgressive Creation

- The ‘Other’ Romantics

- The Transgressive Gothic

- Romantic Lampoons and Scandals - ….

Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words to the conference convenor (norbert.lennartz@uni-vechta.de) by 15 November, 2018. Confirmed keynote speakers are: Denise Gigante (Stanford), Richard C. Sha (American University, Washington), Nicholas Roe (St Andrews), Ian Duncan (Berkeley), Andrew Elfenbein (Minnesota) and Diego Saglia (Parma).