Romantic Circles Blog

The first issue of the new peer-reviewed venue, Romantic Pedagogy Commons, called “Innovations,” is now available at Romantic Circles. It offers numerous tools for teaching, some that are technologically innovative, others that make use of more traditional classroom practices but transfer them to the web (online slide shows, for instance). These tools are primarily for enhancing Romanticism classes, but some of them apply to any literature courses. Mark Phillipson presents the Wiki as an anti-authoritarian class tool: it de-centers classroom authority and participants produce an on line text book, as it were, authored collectively by the class members. Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker describe IVANHOE, a new program (still in beta testing) that stimulates creative reading practices and interpretive activity among students in a literature course.

The inaugural issue of the Romantic Pedagogy Commons might be of wider interest, however, since it discusses new pedagogical theories and their relation to web tools (the introduction), and defines and explains “Visual Literacy” (three essays by Seiffert, Simmons, and Bjork).

Laura Mandell

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of Blake’s water color and engraved illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Along with the illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the poetry of Thomas Gray, and John Milton’s poems, the Dante series of 102 water colors are among Blake’s most important series of illustrations to another poet. Although he engraved only 7 of the designs from the water color series, these plates show that Blake continued innovative work as a line engraver into the final days of his life. The water colors can be found in the Archive by moving through the following categories: Works in the Archive, Non-Illuminated Materials, Drawings and Paintings, and Water Color Drawings. The engravings can be found by moving through the following categories: Works in the Archive, Non-Illuminated Materials, Separate Prints and Prints in Series, Plates Designed and Engraved by Blake.

The water colors were commissioned by John Linnell, the chief patron of Blake’s final years. Although Linnell did not begin to pay for the designs until December 1825, at the rate of about 1 pound a week, Blake probably began work on the drawings by the fall of 1824. They were left at Blake’s death in 1827 in various stages of completion, ranging from pencil sketches to highly finished water colors. Most show an expressive freedom in the handling of color washes far greater than Blake’s earlier water colors. In 1826, Blake began to engrave large plates based on 7 of the designs; these were also left incomplete at his death. Like Blake’s Job engravings, the Dante plates are pure line engravings without preliminary etching. The water colors remained in Linnell’s collection and estate until their sale at auction in 1918. Through a scheme organized by the National Arts-Collections Fund, they were dispersed among 7 participating
institutions: Ashmolean Museum (3 designs), Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery (6 designs), British Museum (13 designs), Fogg Art Museum (23 designs) National Gallery of Victoria (36 designs), Royal Institution of Cornwall (1 design), and Tate Collection (20 designs). The engravings, first printed for sale in 1838, are reproduced from a set in the collection of Robert N. Essick.

We have also taken this opportunity to publish four more Collection Lists:Ashmolean Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Royal Institution of Cornwall, and Tate Collection. The last in this group is one of the largest and finest gatherings of Blake’s drawings, water colors, and paintings. These lists can be found, along with the eighteen others previously published, under Resources for Further Research on the Archive’s main Table of Contents (Home Page).

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Andrea Laue, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

The Keats-Shelley Association of America announces the inauguration of a three-year Mentoring Project. This project is designed to aid younger members of the profession in the crucial early stages of their careers by increasing the exchange of scholarly expertise and practical professional information between junior and senior scholars. If a senior scholar (who has earned tenure) would like to be a mentor (for one protégé), he or she should notify the Mentoring Committee, outlining briefly for us his or her range of scholarly or professional areas of expertise (e.g., Charlotte Smith, grant writing). Junior scholars who have earned the Ph.D. but not yet received tenure can request a mentor by describing their own scholarly interests and professional concerns. In March, the Mentoring Committee of the KSAA will match prospective mentors with prospective protégés. Mentors and protégés commit to one year of conversation (vocal, written, and/or electronic).

A fuller description can be found on the Keats-Shelley Association Website:

http://www.rc.umd.edu/ksaa/ksaa.html

If you would like to participate, or have questions, contact Jeanne Moskal:

jmoskal@email.unc.edu

The Keats-Shelley Association Mentoring Committee
Jeanne Moskal (chair)
Alan Richardson
Gina Luria Walker

Proposals are now being accepted for the thirteenth annual conference of the
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), “Deviance and
Defiance,” to be held in Montreal, Canada, 13-17 August 2005. Deadline: 15 January 2005.

The conference topic, “Deviance and Defiance,” revisits Romantic transgressions and Romanticism as trangression, how Romanticism is a transgression, is transgressive, and transgresses itself. The topic engages notions of deviance and defiance from numerous perspectives, including the Romantics’ defiance of and deviation from the norms of their own period, including questioning the legitimacy of what is “the norm” or “normal” in Romanticism, what is the norm of Romanticism.

POSSIBLE TOPICS for NASSR 2005:
- Political and aesthetic defiance
- Religious deviations and defiance
- Deviating world views at the turn of the eighteenth century
- Sexual deviance and transgression
- Textual deviants
- Deviations of nation, trangressions of nationality and nationhood
- Romantic criminal deviants and Romantic criminality
- Defiance in the public sphere
- Deviations from nature and the natural
- (Re)defining Romantic norms, normality, and the normal
- Taxonomical deviations
- Defying philosophical and scientific categories
- Defying history; gender transgressions.

We welcome submissions from all disciplines with an interest in the
conference topic. Please e-mail paper proposals (500 words) to nassr@uwo.ca

For the general call for papers and more information about NASSR 2005,
please visit the conference website:

http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/nassr2005

For the special sessions, please visit:

http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/nassr2005/sessions.html

PLENARY SPEAKERS:
Andrew Elfenbein; Tim Fulford; Michael Gamer; and Tilottama Rajan

ORGANIZERS:
Michael Eberle-Sinatra (Université de Montréal) and Joel Faflak (University
of Western Ontario)

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE:
Jason Camlot (Concordia University), Monique Morgan (McGill University),
Peter Sabor (McGill University), Jonathan Sachs (Concordia University), and
Tabitha Sparks (McGill University)

(This year’s NASSR conference will also be dovetailed with the seventh
biennal conference of the International Gothic Association, also focusing on
deviance and defiance, which will be held from the 11th-14th of August at
the same location; see http://www.wlu.ca/~wwwgac/IGA2005.)

Michael Eberle-Sinatra
Universite de Montreal