‘Romanticism on Edge / Edgy Romanticism’ – a one day symposium on 9th April 2016
The traditional boundaries of Romanticism – six male poets; the definite articles of Romantic image, imagination and ideology; an implicit focus on Englishness – have been comprehensively contested to transform the discipline into the study of Romanticisms, including novels, plays, polemic, periodicals and print culture alongside a widening canon of poetry; questioning the ideology of the Romantic Ideology; and expanding borders spatially, to include Four Nations, archipelagic, Europe-wide, transatlantic and postcolonial approaches, and temporally, beyond the 1790s and early nineteenth century to imagine a Romantic century running from ca. 1750-1850.
This one-day symposium, hosted by Romanticism @ Edge Hill University, asks: where are the edges of Romanticism now? How do we define the boundaries of the discipline today? What is happening at the edges and borders of Romanticism, whether that be in the margins of the page; inscribed on the body, at nervous, physical or psychological limits; regionally – broadly defined – away from the metropolitan centre; or aesthetically, at the avant garde?
Proposals for individual papers, panels of 3 speakers and a chair, or innovative presentation formats, are invited on the following topics (although they are certainly not limited to them):
– Romanticism and changing conceptions of canonicity, spatiality and / or temporality
– shifting definitions of genre and generic boundaries
– Romanticism on the edges of the page
– the nervous Romantic body
– regional, archipelagic, transatlantic, or postcolonial Romanticisms and their borders
– Romanticism and the avant garde
– the limits of Romanticism
Please submit abstracts of 250 words for individual papers, or panel proposals / innovative presentation formats of 500 words (including a brief introduction and details of each paper), along with a short biography of presenters, to Andrew.McInnes@edgehill.ac.uk by 29th February 2016.
There is an opportunity for selected papers from the symposium to be revised for a special edition of the journal Romanticism.
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Nick Groom, University of Exeter
Dr. Susan Civale, Canterbury Christ Church University