Romantic Circles Blog

A reminder that NASSR 2004: “ROMANTIC COSMOPOLITANISM,” will be held in
Boulder, Colorado, SEPTEMBER 9-12, 2004. PLEASE REGISTER EARLY:

http://www.colorado.edu/ArtsSciences/CHA/cfp.htm

We are delighted to announce the upcoming NASSR 2004 conference to be held 9-12 September 2004 at the Millennium Hotel in beautiful and sublime Boulder, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Many thanks to those of you who submitted proposals (you should have heard from us by now; if not, please contact us). Participants can look forward to four days of intellectually stimulating ideas and discussions and to splendid plenaries by Ann Bermingham (Santa Barbara), Angela Esterhammer (Western Ontario), and David Simpson (Davis).

The theme of our conference, Romantic Cosmopolitanism, provides an opportunity to query our period from the perspectives of the international, the global, the cosmic, the worldly, and the sophisticated. The term expands upon certain notions of region and place that some would deem central to the aesthetics and politics of Romanticism. It also invites us to think about alternatives to more typical moves to organize Romantic culture either around individuals or nation-states.

There are several exciting features of NASSR 2004 we would like to tell you about. These opportunities are available to anyone who would like to participate in the conference, regardless of whether you are giving a paper.

* First, we will be hosting two pre-conference seminars on September 8th: one, organized by Neil Fraistat, on Editing Romantic Texts with Neil Fraistat, Steven E. Jones, and Jerome McGann, a discussion of current editing projects by participants, and a roundtable discussion with prospective publishers: Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Marilyn Gaull (Palgrave Press), Julia Gaunce (Broadview press), Jerome McGann (Nines), and Fraistat and Jones (Romantic Circles).

Another pre-conference seminar on the “Import Of Romantic Drama” is being organized by Tom Crochunis, Catherine Burroughs, Alex Dick, and Michael Eberle-Sinatra. It will include a hands-on performance workshop conducted by Gilli Bush-Bailey and Jacky Bratton as well as plenary papers by Tracy Davis and Michael Gamer, and a panel on current projects on romantic drama and theater. If you wish to sign up for these, please look for registration information (forthcoming) on the NASSR 2004 website.

* * Second, for those not giving papers as well as those who are, we will be including 12 discussion workshops on September 10th and 11th run by the following scholars: James Chandler; Lisa Plummer Crafton; Thomas Crochunis, Elizabeth Fay; Denise Gigante; Theresa Kelley; Dennis Low; Jerome McGann; Brad Mudge; Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk; Anne Wallace and Tony Harrison; and Joshua Wilner. These workshop leaders will guide an intensive group discussion of specific Romantic texts and their implications. For more information on titles and how to register, please go to the NASSR 2004 website.

* * * Third, special session leaders include Joselyn Almeida Beveridge, Julie Carlson, David Clark, Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Dino Felluga, Ann Gardiner, Marilyn Gaull, Gary Harrison, Diane Long Hoeveler, Jerrold Hogle, Celeste Langan, Nigel Leask, Susan Manning, Jane Moody, Timothy Morton, Jan Plug, Tilottama Rajan, Gillen Wood, Paul Youngquist

* * * * Fourth, we will have fun: at the banquet there will be a performance by the Ron Paris Band, presenting “Sweet Soul Music,” followed by dancing. There will also be opportunities to walk on Boulder’s gorgeous mountain trails in the mornings.

Graduate Students: The NASSR 2004 organizing committee is pleased to announce that there will be prizes awarded for the best papers presented at the conference by graduate students who are current NASSR members. Travel Bursaries are also available. For more information, please go to the Nassr 2004 website.

We look forward to seeing you in September!

With all best wishes,
The NASSR 2004 Organizing Committee

Email: nassr04@colorado.edu
Website: http://www.colorado.edu/ArtsSciences/CHA/cfp.htm
Address: c/o Center for Humanities and the Arts
Macky 201 / 280 UCB
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309-0280

Two conference announcements came today. First, for the latest Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers Conference:

The Thirteenth Annual Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Conference: “Women’s Texts and Cultural Contexts” April 14-17, 2005, Hilton Lafayette, Hosted by the Department of English, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Keynote speakers: Catherine Burroughs (Wells College), Linda Hughes (TCU), and Susan Staves (Brandeis University).

There will be a performance of Fanny Burney’s The Witlings during the conference. We welcome a wide range of papers on the conference theme and related issues. Topics might include but should not be limited to the following:

Women Writing Culture, Performing Culture, Sensation Fiction, Religion and Women’s Writing, Women and Science, Women’s Professions, Women in Journalism, New Women and their Impact, Domestic Ideologies, Writing for Children, Images of the Woman Poet, Subversive Women, Women’s Bodies Bodies of Women, Mothers as Cultural Icons, Women and Empire, Women and the Public Sphere.

Please submit 1-2 page abstracts for individual presentations and panel proposals by October 31, 2004. Please include a cover sheet with your name, address, phone number, email address, institutional affiliation and a brief biographical paragraph. Please do not include any identifying information
on your abstract. Proposals may be sent via regular mail to:

British Women Writers Conference
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Department of English
PO Box 44691
Lafayette, LA 70504

Abstracts may also be submitted by email (include name, phone number, mailing address, institutional affiliation and brief biographical paragraph) to: bwwc@louisiana.edu

Additional details about the conference including registration and hotel
information can be found at our website:

http://www.louisiana.edu/bwwc

Christine DeVine
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
And this one from the U.K.:

Midlands Romantic Seminar:
Romanticism and the Midlands Enlightenment

One Day Conference, sponsored by University of Central England and Nottingham Trent University, Saturday 3rd July, 10.00am-5.00pm.

Birmingham and Midland Institute
Margaret Street,
Birmingham,
B3 3BS

Keynote Speakers: George Rousseau and Desmond King-Hele

Registration fee £25.
For further details, please contact:
Dr Gavin Budge
gavin.budge@uce.ac.uk

Walter Scott’s Reliquiae Trotcosienses edited by Gerard Carruthers and Alison Lumsden is to be published today, April 23rd, 2004, by Edinburgh University Press. Until now unpublished, this work was commissioned from Scott in 1830 as a guide to his home and library at Abbotsford. Instead, Scott produced a semi-fictional account of “Trotcosey House” in which he both sent himself up in his antiquarian interests and also, at the same time, insisted that physical artefacts and books have a great deal of meaningful,imaginative human history attached to them. Scott’s son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart and others mindful to protect the powerful reputation of the “Wizard of the North” deemed the work, incomplete at Scott’s death in 1832, unworthy of publication. However, in spite of impaired physical capacities as the result of several strokes, Scott produced a more cogent work than was thought to be the case. Conservative editorial practices in this edition show that beneath the poor handwriting and the seeming semantic difficulty, the text can be made over ninety per cent intelligible. Particularly interesting in the book, perhaps, are Scott’s comments on bibliophile matters and his taste in popular culture (including witchcraft, ballads and popular tracts).

Gerry Carruthers
University of Glasgow

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Europe a Prophecy copy H. The only monochrome copy of the nine extant copies printed by Blake, copy H was printed c. 1795. Now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, it joins copies B, E, and K in the Archive and will be joined by copies A and D in the near future. Europe is dated 1794 on its title plate and the first six copies were color printed that year, followed in 1795 by two more copies. Copies B and E are from the first printing session and copy K is from the last printing session, c. 1818. With the addition of copy H, the printing history of Europe is fully represented in the Archive.
Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Andrea Laue, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

http://www.blakearchive.org/

From an April 12 review by John Rockwell in The New York Times:

“ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 9 — William Bolcom’s gigantic, well-more-than-two-hour setting of William Blake’s complete ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’ poetic cycle is enormously difficult and expensive to perform. Looking down at the forces assembled for the University of Michigan performance in Hill Auditorium here on Thursday night [APRIL 8] was a mega-Mahlerian experience, with a stage extension needed to accommodate the nearly 500 musicians (bigger than the forces of any Mahler ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ I have encountered). All that was missing were lighting effects and projections of Blake’s engravings, suggested in the score. But they were on display in the lobby. . . .” [read the entire review]

This letter came today to the Romantic Circles Editors:

Hiya!

I thought you might be interested of a small local production based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, based on the experiences of the summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati in Geneva.  It is an all original script called “the Monster Makers” written and directed by Louis B. Hobson.

[see this story in the Calgary Sun --SJ]

It puts on a theatre stage an account of what might have transpired between the five characters of Lord George Byron, Dr. John Polidori, Claire Clairmont, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Godwin.  It opens April 13 at the pumphouse theatres in Calgary, Alberta and goes until April 20.  A shortened version recently won the Calgary regional one-act play festival, and this also will be used for the Alberta provincial one-act play festival.

Sincerely,
David C. Hume

Scholar, journalist, and political activist Michael Foot, 90, officially opened a an exhibition on William Hazlitt at the Wordsworth museum in Dove Cottage in Grasmere last Saturday. In interviews Foot confirmed that most of the 1,000 volumes in his Hazlitt collection will pass to the Wordsworth Trust when he dies. The Trust has published a new edition of The Spirit of the Age to coincide with the exhibition and dedicated it to Mr Foot. (See the story in the Guardian.)