Romantic Circles Blog

Recently Romantic Circles’ Poets on Poets section, edited by Tilar Mazzeo, was lucky to be able to post recordings of Shelley poems performed by poet Anne Waldman. For one, a political ode by Shelley written in 1819 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and European restorations, Waldman reads accompanied by music. For the other, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” she alters her voice with interesting echo effects.

(Thanks to Doug Guerra for editing and producing these audio files for Romantic Circles.)

The British Academy is hosting a one-day symposium on “Romanticism and Science,” in association with the British Association for Romantic Studies to be held on 15th September 2006 at the British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1. All are welcome.

In the past, Romanticism has been seen as opposed to science, held as promoting the transcendental and otherworldly above the material and physical. This symposium seeks to interrogate this view, exploring a time before the sciences and the arts had been divided into “two cultures.” Science pervaded every aspect of Romantic life and literature, as the secondary object of exploration detailed in travel narratives, the emergence of new print technologies, the use of anatomy in religious arguments for evidence of Design in nature, or physiological accounts of the effects of an encounter with the sublime in aesthetic theories. The speakers in this symposium will challenge traditional notions of Romanticism, revealing that even the most canonical Romantic writers were aware of and interested in scientific knowledge and discoveries.

9.30-10am: Registration and Tea/coffee

10-11am: Professor Richard Holmes (FBA, University of East Anglia),
‘Scientific discovery and the poets’

11am-12pm: Dr Neil Vickers (King’s College, London), ‘Carcase Coleridge or
Coleridge and the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century medical case’

12-1pm: Lunch

1-2pm: Dr Sharon Ruston (University of Wales, Bangor), ‘Natural Rights and
Natural History’

2-2.30pm: Tea/coffee

2.30-3.30pm: Professor Peter Kitson (University of Dundee), ‘The Limits of
the Human: Frankenstein, Anatomy and Racial Science’

3.30-4.30pm: Professor Timothy Fulford (Nottingham Trent University), ‘The
Anatomy of Racism: What Natural History Saw in Native People’s Skulls’

Organiser: Sharon Ruston, University of Wales, Bangor

To register for this event, please contact:
The Meetings Department
Telephone: 020 7969 5246
Email: events@britac.ac.uk
For further details and to book, please refer to
http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2006/romanticism/prog.html

Centre for Romantic Studies, University of Bristol

Plenary Speakers: Gregory Dart (University College London), John Strachan
(University of Sunderland), Tim Webb (University of Bristol)

A one-and-a-half-day conference organized by the Department of English, taking place in Bristol on Thursday 28th and Friday 29th September, 2006.

“Is there no stopping the eternal wheels of the Press for half a century or two, till the nation recover its senses? Must we magazine it and review [it] at this sickening rate for ever? Shall we never again read to be amused? but to judge, to criticise, to talk about it and about it”: “Lepus” (Charles Lamb), “Readers Against the Grain,” The New Times (January, 1825).

We welcome papers discussing any aspect of magazine publication during a period marked by a highly prolific, competitive, and innovative milieu.

Subjects could include: the city, the country, and the periodical; modes and uses of advertising; the general cultural status of the periodical; juxtapositions of worded and visual texts; cartoons and satire; travel writing and foreign correspondence; the commercial and other implications of technological innovation; inter-periodical rivalries and disputes; reporting the war; the periodical and reform; sport and leisure and the periodical; the critical issues surrounding periodical texts later revised for book-publication.

Proposals for 20-minute papers are now invited, from new scholars and established academics alike. These proposals should take the form of a title and 200-word abstract and should be submitted electronically to Simon Hull at: romantic-studies@bristol.ac.uk in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc format. Please include institutional affiliation and position in the body of the text.

Deadline for submission: 30 June, 2006

A J.M.W. Turner watercolor, “The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise,” has sold at auction for £5.832m–a record for a British watercolour. The painting was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder at Christie’s in London.

(from BBC News)

A new exhibit at Tate Britain opens this month and runs through August 28, 2006: “Constable, The Great Landscapes.”

“This major exhibition offers the first opportunity to view John Constable’s seminal six-foot exhibition canvases together. The ‘six-footers’ are among the best-known images in British art and comprise the famous series of views on the river Stour, which includes The Hay Wain (1820–21), as well as more expressive later works such as Hadleigh Castle (1829) and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831).”