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Romantic Circulations

The 20th International conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)

23–26 July 2009

Roehampton University, London, UK

Some of the most productive recent work on the literature and culture of the Romantic period has explored ideas of circulation. The range of scholarship influenced by this approach includes studies of sociability, reading, publishing, anthologising, conversation, visual and verbal cultures, the history of affect, medicine and disease, and colonialism and slavery. This aim of ‘Romantic Circulations’ was to investigate the transmission of Romantic ideas, knowledge, cultural forms and literary discourses in the context of changing relations between artist and audience, writer and reader, producer and consumer, elite and popular, national and trans-national. Keynote speakers were Jon Mee, Kevin Gilmartin, Gillian Russell and Emma Clery. A review of the conference will appear in the BARS Bulletin in late 2009 or early 2010.

Further information

Previous conferences

2008

The Gordon Riots and British Culture

Wednesday 2 July 2008

The eminent literary critic and art historian Professor Ronald Paulson was the keynote speaker at this one-day conference, held at Roehampton University, London, on Wednesday 2 July 2008. Other speakers included Nicholas Rogers, Tim Hitchcock, Martin Priestman, John Seed, Ian Haywood, Brycchan Carey, John Bowen, and Michael Wheeler. Following the success of the conference, Ian Haywood and John Seed are now editing a volume of essays on the riots for Cambridge University Press, with the provisional title The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Conflict in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain.

2007

Romantic Infidels

19 May 2007

This conference explored the importance of ‘infidel’ thought and writing in the Romantic period. Many of the challenges to orthodox Christianity which had been obliquely hinted at over the preceding century emerged into the open at this time. Invigorated - or tainted, depending on your point of view – by association with the philosophes of the French Revolution, such challenges now ranged from Paine’s fiercely anti-Christian deism to Shelley’s declared atheism, from Richard Payne Knight’s saucy thoughts on religion’s priapic origins to new geological and biological speculations on the age of the earth and the physical sources of life. As circulated through radical and plebeian clubs and publications, such ideas led to a series of cause célèbre blasphemy-trials; while many committed Christians, from Rational Dissenters such as Priestley to radical mystics such as Blake, mounted further, powerfully articulated attacks on ‘state religion’. Speakers included Jon Mee, Martin Priestman, John Seed, Barbara Taylor, and Ian Haywood.

2006

• Romantic Spectacle
  (In association with the Bristol Centre for Romantic Studies)
  7-9 July 2006
  Roehampton University, London
  Speakers: John Barrell, Iain McCalman, Anne Janowitz, Saree Makdisi, Peter Otto.

2001

• Romantic Nationalisms 1750–1850
  28 June-1 July 2001
  Speakers: James Chandler, Katie Trumpener, Marilyn Butler, Martin Thom, Cairns Craig.