Romantic Connections
Networks of Influence, c.1760-1835
The Early Career and Postgraduate Conference for The British Association for Romantic Studies
Friday 1st June 2012
Newcastle University, UK
Keynote Speaker: Professor Jon Mee (Warwick)
“Sometimes when I think of them I seem
Two consciousnesses – conscious of myself,
And of some other being.” (William Wordsworth, The Two Part Prelude, II, 29-31)
“Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, Book II, Chapter 4)
“If I listened to the words of my mouth, I might say that someone else was speaking out of my mouth.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophic Investigations)
The BARS Early Careers and Postgraduate Conference for 2012 invites submissions for 20-minute papers on the theme “Romantic Connections,” which is to be understood broadly as covering literary, personal, and social interactions both within the Romantic period and between the period and its legacies. In particular, this conference seeks to counterpoint the myth of the solitary genius by inviting delegates to locate the writers of the period in the contexts of the networks, ideologies, correspondences and communities with which they were engaged. Webs of influence, literary and sociable, entangle all writers and writing, and this conference seeks to explicitly engage with these connections and with the recent advances in scholarship and technology that have rendered their importance increasingly apparent.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Echoes, allusions, and intertextuality
• Social versus poetic influence
• Writing partnerships, communes and communities
• Urban versus rural writing
• Groupings such as the Hunt Circle, the Bluestockings and the Lakers
• Satire and literary squabbling
• The role of ‘minor’ writers
• Modes of dissemination for literary works
• Magazine culture and periodical networks
• Notions of original and solitary genius
• Personal and poetic interactions
• Celebrity culture
• Benevolence versus egoism
• Conversation and sociability
• Connections between genres and forms
• The influence of the theatrical world
• Popular culture and the market-place
• Challenges faced by and opportunities accorded to female and working-class writers
• Competition and anxiety
• Literature’s links with other fields, such as politics, philosophy, art, science and music
• Passions, and / or romantic attachments
• Correspondences
• Local, national and international networks
• Biography and life-writing
• Canon formation
• Textual revisions and reversions
Along with panel sessions and the keynote address the conference will also feature a roundtable on collaborative works, the aim of which will be to offer practical advice on how to work in partnership in the field of Romanticism. In light of current changes in the Arts and Humanities, we hope to speak to this uncertain moment by offering positive ways in which early career academics and PhD students might collaborate with individuals and organizations and open up a dialogue with the public as well as their academic peers. Speakers taking part in this roundtable will include Kerri Andrews (Strathclyde), Matthew Grenby (Newcastle), and Gary Kelly (University of Alberta).
Each panel paper will last 20 minutes. Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to: BARS_RC@yahoo.co.uk
Deadline for abstracts: 30th January 2012. We aim to notify successful speakers by the beginning of March 2012.
Further information available on the conference website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/niassh/events/supported/RomanticConnections.htm
Organizers: Matthew Sangster (Royal Holloway), Helen Stark (Newcastle University), and Matthew Ward (University of St Andrews).
Victorian Literature and Culture
Volume 39 – Issue 02 – 01 September 2011
Research Articles
Deborah Shapple Spillman
Simon Knowles
Mark Frost
A. Michael Matin
Diana Maltz
Robert D. Butterworth
Scott Rogers
Gordon Fraser
Beth Tressler
Sean O’Toole
Melissa Shields Jenkins
Elizabeth Bleicher
Andrew King
Clare Hutton
Review Essay
John M. Picker
Alison Chapman
NAVSA 2012: “Victorian Networks”
September 27-30, 2012
University of Wisconsin – Madison
The North American Victorian Studies Association Conference for 2012, in Madison, Wisconsin, September 27-30, invites papers on the theme of networks. Keynotes include Amanda Anderson, Adam Phillips, and a visual networks panel with Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Julie Codell, and Mary Roberts. Participants will also be able to sign up for networks seminars of 15 presenters of precirculated 5-page position papers on the topic.
March 1, 2012 is the deadline for electronic submissions of proposed papers and panels. We welcome proposals of no more than 500 words for individual papers; for panel proposals, please submit abstracts of 500 words per paper and a panel description of 250 words. Please include a one-page cv and submit all files in .pdf format to english.wisc.edu/navsa. Conference threads might include:
* Commodity culture networks and the circulation of things and bodies
* Networks of print (books, chapbooks, newspapers, magazines, letters, pamphlets), including relations among publishers, printers, editors, writers, readers
* Networks of artists, critics, consumers, scholars
* Networks of discourse (such as science, religion, nature, politics)
* The science of networks, then and now
* Textual networks (characters, plot, language, intertextuality)
* Networks of influence, production, reception
* Networks of display or exhibition
* Fashioning networks among otherwise unconnected authors and historical figures
* Transnational and other migrations: geographic, cultural, ideological, rhetorical
* Borders and “borders” — theorizing cultural connection, separation, entanglement
* Diasporic networks: cosmopolitanism, wandering, exile
* Clandestine networks such as spies, secret agents, and detection
* Networking technologies
* Network arts
* Social networks including leisure clubs and professional societies
* Family and kinship networks
* Victorian cities: streets, arcades, parks, or other networks of urban space
* Imperial networks
* Network forms: gossip, blackmail, suspense, serials,, periodicals, or other genres
* Psychic and supernatural networks: seances, spiritualism, mediums
* Digital networks and twenty-first century reading practices
* Networked periodization: romantic/victorian/modernist
* Networks of resistance: feminist, ecological, queer
* Networks of iteration and translation (between image, text, adaptation
CFP: THE ENDS OF HISTORY, a Special Issue of Victorian Studies.
In the 1980s and 1990s, literary critics and historians occupied a relatively integrated conceptual space through the rise of cultural studies and the “new historicism.” If this interdisciplinary framework was never seamless, “historicization” nonetheless represented a critical project equally palpable to history and literary criticism. The last decade or so, however, has found many critics seeking the revival of form as a key axis for literary study as against a perceived overemphasis on (or reduction to) historical context or ideological content. An early catalyst, MLQ’s 2000 special issue on the topic found Susan Wolfson attempting to “rehabilitate formalist criticism” without simply “cross-dressing it as a version of historicist criticism.” More recently, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s 2010 special issue in Representations questioned the Jamesonian “political unconscious” while opposing the reading of “surfaces” to that of “symptoms,” thus inviting a rigorous rethinking of the mandate to “always historicize.” In a more polemical vein, Rita Felski’s essay “After Suspicion” and her lecture “Context Stinks!” appear to equate historicism with suspicious reading and to find both irreconcilable with the need to “respect . . . what is in plain view.” Still other critics urge “distant reading”: methods like Franco Moretti’s turn to graphs, maps, trees, and (more recently) network theory; or Heather Love’s Latour-inspired “descriptive turn.” Latour’s critiques of “suspicious” reading and “context” have exercised enormous influence across the fields of social-scientific and historical studies (for example, Tim Mitchell, Rule of Experts, and Tom Bender and Igancio Farias, eds., Urban Assemblages). This “descriptive turn” has its own advocates in the historical social sciences which may also provoke questions about what kind of historical analysis befits the formalist exploration of texts (literary and otherwise) and vice versa.
While defenders of suspicion have already come forward (for example, John Kucich, “Unfinished”), this special issue invites essays that take a somewhat different tack. Rather than positions for or against neoformalist, “surface,” and “descriptive” critical practices, the essays we seek will ask what these discussions portend for Victorianist historicism. We ask: Need the turn toward form be a turn away from history and, if so, what does it mean to pursue “Victorian” studies ahistorically or posthistorically? What is the legacy of the “new historicism” and is it incompatible with “what is in plain view”? Do historical writings embed their own hermeneutic instructions independently of critics’ distinctions between depth and surface, close and distant reading? What does history tell us about formalism and what does form tell us about history and historicism? In what new relation to each other are literary studies and history to stand in the wake of a formalist turn?
The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2012. Essays of not more than 8,000 words (including endnotes) should be prepared in MLA Style. We encourage submissions not only from literary scholars and historians, but from those in any field (including, for instance, the history of art or of science) whose work engages with relevant questions and issues. Submissions and inquiries should be sent directly to both of the issue’s guest editors by email attachment.
Lauren M. E. Goodlad, University of Illinois, lgoodlad@illinois.edu
Andrew Sartori, New York University, asartori@nyu.edu
Works Cited
Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1-21.
Farfas, Ignacio, and Thomas Bender, eds. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Felski, Rita. “After Suspicion.” Profession (2009): 28-35.
—. “Context Stinks!” Portland Center for Public Humanities at Portland State University. Portland, Oregon. November, 2011. Lecture.
Goswami, Manu. “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44.4 (2002): 770-99.
Kucich, John. “The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion.” Victoriographies 1.1 (2011): 58-78.
Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-48.
Love, Heather. “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History 41.2 (2010): 371-91.
Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkley: U of California P, 2002.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. New York: Verso, 2005.
—. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” New Left Review 68 (2011): 80-102.
Wolfson, Susan J. “Reading for Form.” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000): 1-21.
From the SiR website: “Studies in Romanticism celebrates its 50th birthday with a special issue, “Reading Keats, Thinking Politics,” edited by Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun, commemorating the 25th anniversary of one of our most successful numbers, “Keats and Politics: a Forum,” edited by Susan M. Wolfson. Contributors to “Reading Keats, Thinking Politics” include Jacques Rancière, Rei Terada, Noel Jackson, Jonathan Mulrooney, Brian McGrath and Magdalena Ostas, as well as a brief interview with David Wagenknecht, who served as editor of SiR for more than three decades.”
Here are the articles and reviews from this anniversary issue:
| 1. | An Interview with David Wagenknecht Author: Rzepka, Charles J. |
p. 221-227 |
| 2. | Reading Keats, Thinking Politics: An Introduction Author: Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun |
p.229-237 |
| 3. | The Politics of the Spider Author: Jacques Rancière |
p. 239-250 |
| 4. | How Keats Falls Author: Jonathan Mulrooney |
p. 251-273 |
| 5. | Looking at the Stars Forever Author: Rei Terada |
p. 275-309 |
| 6. | The Time of Beauty Author: Noel Jackson |
p. 311-334 |
| 7. | Keats’s Voice Author: Magdalena Ostas |
p. 335-350 |
| 8. | Keats for Beginners Author: Brian McGrath |
p. 351-372 |
| 9. | Review of Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought Author: Eric Gidal |
p. 373-377 |
| 10. | Review of Damian Walford Davies, ed., Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy Author: Anahid J. Nersessian |
p. 377-380 |
| 11. | Review of Sue Brown, Joseph Severn, a Life: The Rewards of Friendship Author: Jack Stillinger |
p. 381-383 |
-
Neo-Victorian Networks: Epistemologies, Aesthetics and Ethics
University of Amsterdam
June 13-15, 2012
This conference seeks to assess the state of contemporary neo-Victorian literature, film, television and other media, with papers offering new readings of neo-Victorian texts. The conference also seeks to interrogate the critical field surrounding the notion of the neo-Victorian by asking how we, as scholars, understand this genre and its allied politics. Does the current cultural interest in the “new Victorian” imply a resistance to post-modernism, post-structuralism or post-humanism? Or, can neo-Victorianism help us interrogate these terms? How does our post-Victorian landscape accommodate and manipulate the neo-Victorian urge?
We encourage papers that question the ethics, aims and cultural implications of neo-Victorian trends, and which attempt to understand this genre in light of our own political climate and our scholarly resistance to the liberal humanist subject. We also hope to receive papers that playfully link the Victorian and the contemporary, as in Joy De Lyria and Sean Michael Robinson’s reimaging of The Wire as a Victorian serial or Anna Maria Jones’ connections between the workings of the Victorian sensation novel and contemporary Victorian scholarship. Submissions from graduate students are welcomed.
Keynote Speakers:
Christine Ferguson (University of Glasgow)
Mark Llewellyn (University of Strathclyde)
Please send 250 word abstracts, together with a 100 word biographical note, to Joyce Goggin (J.Goggin@uva.nl) and Tara MacDonald (T.C.MacDonald@uva.nl) by February 1, 2012.
Organizing Committee: Joyce Goggin (University of Amsterdam), Tara MacDonald (University of Amsterdam), Monika Pietrzak-Franger (University of Siegen), Eckart Voigts-Virchow (University of Siegen), and Antonija Primorac (University of Split)
Romanticism 17:3 (October 2011) in now available:
| Introduction
|
||
| Sharon Ruston | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 267-269. Citation | PDF plus (34 KB) |
||
| De Quincey’s Addiction
|
||
| Robert Morrison | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 270-277. Citation | PDF plus (72 KB) |
||
| The Strange Case of Dr White and Mr De Quincey: Manchester, Medicine and Romantic Theories of Biological Racism
|
||
| Peter J. Kitson | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 278-287. Citation | PDF plus (74 KB) |
||
| Imagining the Exotic: De Quincey and Lamb in the London Magazine
|
||
| David Higgins | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 288-298. Citation | PDF plus (437 KB) |
||
| The Janus-face of Romantic Modernity: Thomas De Quincey’s Metropolitan Imagination
|
||
| Daniel Sanjiv Roberts | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 299-308. Citation | PDF plus (78 KB) |
||
| De Quincey, Varieties of the Palimpsest, and the Unconscious
|
||
| Robert Maniquis | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 309-318. Citation | PDF plus (72 KB) |
||
| De Quincey’s Gothic Innovations: ‘The Avenger’, 1838
|
||
| Sue Chaplin | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 319-326. Citation | PDF plus (66 KB) |
||
| De Quincey and the Inferiority of Women
|
||
| Julian North | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 327-339. Citation | PDF plus (92 KB) |
||
| Encountering Ali Pasha on the London Stage: No Friend to Freedom?
|
||
| Amy Muse | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 340-350. Citation | PDF plus (86 KB) |
||
| ‘The porch of that enchaunted gate’: Spenserian Influences and the Romance of Place in Lamia by John Keats
|
||
| Tamsin Theresa Badcoe | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 351-364. Citation | PDF plus (96 KB) |
||
| Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (eds.), Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 264. £91.00 hardback, £24.95 paperback. 9780415399630 and 9780415876681.
|
||
| Markus Iseli | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 365-367. Citation | PDF plus (48 KB) |
||
| John Beer, Romanticism, Revolution and Language: The Fate of the Word from Samuel Johnson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. xii + 232. £50.00 / US $90.00 hardback. 9780521897556.
|
||
| Anthony John Harding | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 367-371. Citation | PDF plus (62 KB) |
||
| David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 256. £60 hardback. 9780199572748.
|
||
| Anthony Howell | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 371-374. Citation | PDF plus (57 KB) |
||
| Barry Hough and Howard Davis, Coleridge’s Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), pp. xxviii + 375. £14.95 paperback. 9781906924126.
|
||
| Gregory Leadbetter | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 374-376. Citation | PDF plus (50 KB) |
||
| Jim Kelly (ed.), Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. x + 229. £40.00 hardback. 9780230274570.
|
||
| Andrew Keanie | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 376-380. Citation | PDF plus (62 KB) |
||
| Claire Knowles, Sensibility and the Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 192. £55 hardback. 9780754669753.
|
||
| Sarah Zimmerman | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 380-383. Citation | PDF plus (55 KB) |
||
| Simon P. Hull, Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), pp. 240. £60 / US $99 hardback. 9781851966615.
|
||
| Pete Newbon | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 383-385. Citation | PDF plus (49 KB) |
||
| Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan (eds.), Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. x + 268. £50.00 hardback. 9780230208933.
|
||
| Emrys Jones | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 385-387. Citation | PDF plus (50 KB) |
||
| Suzanne E. Webster, Body and Soul in Coleridge’s Notebooks, 1827–1834: ‘What is Life?’ (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. xxx + 314. £55.00 hardback. 9780230545229.
|
||
| Paul Cheshire | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 387-388. Citation | PDF plus (44 KB) |
||
| Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. xiv + 347. £60.00 hardback. 0199572615.
|
||
| William Christie | ||
| Romanticism, Vol. 17, No. 3, Oct 2011: 388-391. Citation | PDF plus (56 KB) |
||
View PDF