Romantic Imports and Exports:
2013 BARS International Biennial Conference
University of Southampton, 25-28 July 2013
Beware of the insipid vanities & idle dissipation of the Metropolis of England: Beware of the unmeaning luxuries of Bath and of the stinking fish of Southampton.
Jane Austen, Love and Freindship, 1790
For the thirteenth BARS conference in 2013, we invite Romanticists to look beyond British Romanticism and towards cross-cultural exchange, at new media in the Romantic period, and at economics and related discourses. Papers and panels might focus both on literatures other than English in Britain (the market for translations and adaptations in the period, for example, or the importation of categories derived from Indian or Far Eastern originals by Hegel, Holderlin or Shelley), and on the fate of British Romantic literature and thought on the Continent and in Canada and the United States.
Topics may include: cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary borrowings and exchanges; translation, adaptation and mediation; revolution as an import; exile and emigration; European and transatlantic exchanges and networks. These indicative topics are intended to be inclusive, and to offer opportunities for all Romanticists to participate, but we would also welcome proposals for panels and papers which interpreted the conference rubric more narrowly, and took inspiration from Southampton’s history as an ancient port: trading routes; marine nature and culture; travelling by water; exotic cargoes from home and abroad; trading places; storms and shipwrecks; pirates and piracy.
The Call for Papers has now closed.