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The University of Southampton
BARS 2013: Romantic Imports and Exports

Keynote speakers

Image of Professor Simon Burrows
Professor Simon Burrows

Professor Simon Burrows , University of Western Sydney

'Enlightenment Bestsellers?'

Simon Burrows is founder and director of the highly acclaimed French book trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) project, and co-author of the project's freely available on-line STN database (see http://chop.leeds.ac.uk/stn/ ).  He is well known for his studies of French eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century print culture and work on French refugees and émigrés in London. He has also worked on questions relating to gender, diplomacy and cultural transfers. His publications include French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792-1814 (2000); Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution: London's French Libellistes, 1758-1792 (2006); A King's Ransom: A Life of Charles Théveneau de Morande, Blackmailer, Scandal-monger and Master-Spy (2010) and co-edited collections on Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America (2002); Cultural Transfers (2010) and The Chevalier d'Eon and his Worlds (2010). He is currently working on a book based on the STN database entitled Enlightenment Bestsellers on which his keynote presentation will draw.

Professor Burrows is as cosmopolitan in his career as the subjects he has studied. After completing a PhD in Oxford, he lectured in New Zealand at the University of Waikato (1993-2000) before returning to the UK to take up a position in the School of History at the University of Leeds, where he was promoted to a Chair in Modern European History in 2007. At the start of 2013 he took up a Chair by invitation at the University of Western Sydney, where he continues his work on the FBTEE project.

Image of Professor Paul Hamilton
Professor Paul Hamilton

Professor Paul Hamilton , Queen Mary, University of London

‘Future Restoration'

Paul Hamilton is Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London.  His  research is primarily on Enlightenment and Romantic thought and literature and he is well known for his work on the relations between literature, philosophy and political theory. He has also written on critical theory generally and the transitions between modernism and postmodernism. Metaromanticism (Chicago, 2003)  explored historical transformations of the Romantic aesthetic. His most recent monograph is Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic (Continuum, 2007).  He has also published books on Coleridge (again), Wordsworth, Shelley and Historicism.  His current work is towards a comparative study of European Romanticism.

The major imports and exports between Britain and Europe during the Romantic period were examples of Revolution, Heroism and Restoration. The first two were French, although the appropriation of the French Revolution and the demonizing of Napoleon quickly assimilated whatever they might have been originally or authentically to ideological needs. These assimilations were not simply self-serving but also problematic, as Napoleon's destructive influence on ideas of heroism were often ambivalent, whether provoking Coleridge to exaggeration, Keats to incompletion, or Byron to, well, ‘Byron'. Heroinism, whether that of Marianne, Corinne, Lucinde or ‘the female poet', stages its own departures from historical models. The Restoration enacted at the Congress of Vienna, however, will be what I'll concentrate on because it leads to study of a post-Revolutionary sensibility which is second-nature in studies of the English seventeenth century but much less of a focus for Romanticists. Revisionism, though, is a multi-layered phenomenon in second-generation Romantic writing in English and profits from comparison with European counterparts.

Professor Deidre Lynch
Professor Deidre Lynch

Professor Deidre Shauna Lynch , University of Toronto

'Books on the Move'

Deidre Shauna Lynch is Chancellor Jackman Professor and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where she is also affiliated with the university's Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture.  She has published widely on the literature and culture of eighteenth-century and Romantic-period Britain, on the theory and history of the novel, and on the histories of reading and the emotions. Her books include The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning , which won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book in 1999, and (as editor or co-editor) Cultural Institutions of the Novel , Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees , the Oxford World's Classics edition of Persuasion , the Norton Critical Edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the Romantic Period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature . Her edition of Mansfield Park will be published by Harvard University Press in 2014.   She is about to complete At Home in English: A Cultural History of the Love of Literature , a book that engages the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prehistory of English studies in order to give a new account of the state of the discipline and of the state of our literary affections.

'Books on the Move',  her keynote lecture for BARS, will draw from her new project on reading, collecting, clipping, scrapbooking, and friending, and the nature of the book in the early nineteenth century.  This project engages the friendship albums compiled by many women and some men during the late Romantic period -vehicles for the collection of transcribed and original verse, display cases for watercolor landscapes, silhouettes, pressed flowers, and various other examples of fashionable handicraft, as well aides-memoire and prompt books for nostalgic feeling.  These manuscript books, produced in the thousands, afford a unique vantage point on the styles of affective management required in an epoch defined by the accelerating mobility of people and things.  Documents of emigration and partings, they also illuminate what Meredith McGill has called a trans-Atlantic 'traffic in poems.'

Special Event: Professor Kathryn Sutherland (St Anne's College, University of Oxford) will host and speak on a panel on Romantic-Period Manuscripts. She will be joined by Andrew Honey (Bodleian Library) and Freya Johnston (St Anne's College, University of Oxford).

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