romantic studies association of australasia 2019 … · 12.30 - 13.30 lunch lecture theatre south...

ROMANTIC STUDIESASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALASIA2019 CONFERENCEEMBODYING ROMANTICISMConference Program21 – 23 November, 2019

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UNSW Canberra

Romantic Studies Association of Australasia2019 Conference

9.00 Registrations Open Lecture Theatre South Foyer

9.50 - 10.00 Welcome Lecture Theatre South R1

10.00 - 11.30 Panel 1 A Lecture Theatre South R3

10.00 - 11.30 Panel 1 B Lecture Theatre South R5

11.30 - 12.30 Keynote 1 Lecture Theatre South R1

12.30 - 13.30 Lunch Lecture Theatre South Foyer



15.00 - 15.30 Afternoon Tea Lecture Theatre South Foyer



17.30 - 18.30 Public Lecture Adam’s Auditorium

18.30 - 20.30 Wine Reception Adam’s Auditorium Foyer

Day 1Thursday 21 November

UNSW Canberra

Romantic Studies Association of Australasia Conference 2019







15.00-15.30 Afternoon Tea Lecture Theatre South Foyer

15.30-17.00 Panel 6 A Lecture Theatre South R3

15.30-17.00 Panel 6 B Lecture Theatre South R5

17.00-18.00 Keynote 3 Lecture Theatre South R1

19.30 - Late Conference Dinner

Day 2Friday 22 November

UNSW Canberra








15.00 - 15.30 Afternoon Tea Lecture Theatre South Foyer

15.30 - 16.30 RSAA AGM Lecture Theatre South R5

Day 3Saturday 23 November

UNSW Canberra



Panel 1 ARomantic Australia

Marguerite GibsonEmbodying Emotion: The Australian Colonial Sublime, Mood and Light Saturation within 19th Century Australian Landscape Art.

Tom Ford and Justin ClemensAustralia in 1819: The Poetics of Terra Nullius

Sarah Comyn‘A taste for poetry may be awakened here’: Romantic Readings and Lectures on the Victorian Goldfields

Panel 1 BBlake and the Embodied Imagination

Lei JieSnake and Tiger: Animals of Orientalist Fantasy and Fear in Romantic-period Writings

Todd DearingFinding Infinite Imagination within the Clay Man: Merlin and Reuben in Blake’s Jerusalem

Keynote 1 Clara TuiteRegency She-Kings: Byron, Keats and the Poetry of Voluptuousness

Panel 2 ALocating Bodies

Amelia DaleAustenocene

Deirdre ColemanCreole bodies

Theresa M. KelleyCreating a Revolutionary Romantic Subject: Toussaint Louverture

UNSW Canberra


Panel 2 BChildhood

Geraldine Friedman“Troubled Pleasure, Troubled Measure”

Jacqueline Manuel and Don Carter“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?”: The legacy of Romanticism in English education

Ruth Dunnicliff-HaganLocked-up or Leaping – Children’s Embodied Experience in Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Chimneysweeper”

Panel 3 ASisterhoods

Emma Gleadhill and Ekaterina HeathGifts of sisterhood and motherhood: the political dimensions of sentimental gift exchange in Russia in the Romantic Period

Francesca Kavanagh“A Thousand Delicate Fibres Link”: The Material Embodiment of Community in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Manuscript Album

Joanna E. TaylorReading at the Limits of Digital Literary Mapping: Following Dorothy Wordsworth up Scafell Pike

Panel 3 BBuilt Environments

Lauren PikóWalking, grief and national heritage in British domestic travel writing, 1930-1990

Peter Otto‘Standing on the shores of heaven, drawing in a world of bliss: fiction, atmosphere, architecture, and apocalypse in Jane and Mary Parminter’s “A la Ronde” and “Point in View” chapel, school, manse, and alms-houses

Rebecca Richardson“A Diversity of Scenery and Characters”: Narrating the (Global) Economy in Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy

Public Lecture Peter Otto

The Architecture of Suffering: Matthew Lewis, Catherine Blake, and William Blake on rebirth, ruination, and loss


UNSW Canberra



Panel 4 ABodies in Art

Elena KorowinA Romantic Gaze at the Male Body

Theodora BillichBallet Bodies and Intellectual Art

Tom McLeanThe Polish Exile in British Art and Literature

Panel 4 BHealing Bodies

Lucy MorrisonPromenades Aériennes in Paris: Bodily Health and Thrills in Society and Literature

Vinita SinghReader-Writer Dynamic and the Logic of Exercise in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Friend

Judith StoveCorinne, or Italy: nation embodied, (treacherous) woman

Keynote 2 Kevis Goodman

“The Dislocation of the Verse”: Reading Pathology and the Embodiment of Motion

Panel 5 ABiological Keats

David LoLyrical Embarrassment and Phenomenology of Flesh in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”

Li-hsin Hsu“I died for Beauty”: Cold Pastoral in John Keats and Emily Dickinson

Mie GotohThe Sympathetic Body and Liberal Knowledge in Keats’s Poetry

UNSW Canberra


Panel 5 BBodies and Machines

Alison BedfordEying the Abject: Real Science and Fictional Frankensteinian Bodies

Jon MeeManchester, Materialism, and Imagination: John Ferriar’s theory of apparitions

Lesley HawkesEnclosing the Body within the Machine

Panel 6 AViolent Bodies

Elias Grieg“The fictional representation of everyone killing everyone”: History as Monster in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad.

Neil RamseySir Walter Scott and Liberal Security

Alex Watson“[H]ope’s last gleam in man’s extremity”: Lord Byron’s notes for The Island, or Christian and His Comrades (1823)

Panel 6 BVisualising the World

Anne CollettReading Nature, Reading in Nature: entangled embodied intimacy

Kara Lindsey Blakley,On Ports and Portraiture: George Chinnery in Canton & Macao

Keynote 3 Will Christie Embodying Knowledge: Romantic Public Lecturing


UNSW Canberra



Panel 7 AImpoverished Bodies

Chris Murray‘Double Touch’: The Meeting with Coleridge and Keats’s 1819 Poetry

Peter DenneyFeeling and Sensing Reform in the 1790s

Diego Alegría CoronaPre-colonial landscapes: Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Machu Picchu

Panel 7 BRadical Bodies, Gendered Restrictions

Claire KnowlesDella Cruscanism in Wartime: finding a space for female poets in the Oracle

Olivia MurphyA ‘sex in minds as well as bodies’?: Anna Letitia Barbauld against the critics

Shane Greentree“Let him mingle his tears with those of the wretched”: Catharine Macaulay’s sympathetic ideal of the patriot king in Letters on Education.

Keynote 4 Kevin GilmartinRaymond Williams’ Experimental History of Romanticism

UNSW Canberra


Panel 8 ARomance and the Body

Mandy SwannBodies of power: Ann Radcliffe’s Magical Sea Women and Percy Shelley’s bulwark against barbarism

Megan BlakeRapt up in Shakespeare’s romantic body

Sarah AilwoodAusten, romantic love and the male body’

Panel 8 BRomanticism, Pedagogy and Indigeneity

Nikki HessellTeaching Wordsworth in the Wharenui

Millie GodferyComplaining but not Forsaken: Contesting Depictions of Native American Women, 1750-1950

Rose Peoples‘Fountains of grief and anger will flow’: Exploring Poetic Constructions of Indigenous Female Anger in Romantic Poetry


UNSW Canberra


One of the key debates about Romantic poetry during the Regency period (and beyond) concerned the so-called poetry of voluptuousness. The central exhibit was John Keats’s Endymion (1818), famously denounced by the British Critic for its “gross slang of voluptuousness” and by the Quarterly Review on account of its “emasculated pruriency,” seemingly “the product of some imaginative Eunuch’s muse.”

Sardanapalus, A Tragedy (1821), Byron’s late enactment of a life-long drama pitting literature against a public career (“poeshie” vs. “Action!”), engages voluptuousness as a problem for masculinity and politics as well as poetic form. A closet drama about the last Assyrian king—effeminate, lascivious and slothful, the inventor of the feather bed, who featured in Dante’s Paradiso as the one who would (scandalously) “come to show to what use bedrooms can be put”—Sardanapalus also allegorizes the failed Carbonari revolution, which Byron supported while living in Ravenna, where he wrote the play between January and May 1821. Hovering in the background, though closer to home for English readers, is the blimp Prince Regent, cued in by references to pavilions yet almost so obvious as to be symbolically inert—the living political eunuch whose relevance Byron explicitly denied.

My paper argues that Byron’s verse drama about the “brave (though voluptuous)” king mediates another more intimate event: the death of Keats in Rome on February 23,

1821, infamously “killed” by the Quarterly’s review. Byron’s scorn for the “Mankin” Keats is well-known and there is a lot of this lordly scorn on record; but there are also some profound affinities between the two poets despite a mutual disrespect. And Byron, like most other contemporaries including Percy Bysshe Shelley, was deeply exercised by the thought that Keats could have been “killed by a critique.” My paper revisits these complex intertextual relations and events to consider the possibility that Sardanapalus’s exploration of the ancient “she-king” “Steeped … in deep voluptuousness” involves a refashioning of—and a kind of conflicted homage to—Keatsian voluptuousness.

At stake in this discussion is an understanding of poetic form as a drama of aesthetic embodiment. The cult of Keats’s death by review, and the heroics of embodiment it instances, have vital implications for how we understand Romanticism’s conception of the agency of poetry and of poetry’s reception.

Keynote 1

REGENCY SHE-KINGS:Byron, Keats and the Poetry of VoluptuousnessProfessor Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne

My paper argues that Byron’s verse drama about the “brave (though voluptuous)” king mediates another more intimate event: the death of Keats in Rome on February 23, 1821, infamously “killed” by the Quarterly’s review.

UNSW Canberra


In light of the turn against critique and “symptomatic reading,” we can learn much from the history of the symptom and the intertwined development of medical and aesthetic theory during the late Enlightenment.

The first part of this talk recovers the sophistication of late eighteenth-century pathology or “medical semiotics.” As the older name suggests, this area involved less the descriptive classification of individual illnesses (nosology) than the philosophical study of the ways in which multiple, historically variable causes of disease (“proximate,” “remote,” “internal,” “external,” “predisposing,” and “occasional”) combine to lodge immanently in their physical effects, especially the disturbances of bodily “motions” that signaled the presence of disease. Pathology’s lesson was that in reading symptoms one becomes more, not less, attentive both to bodily and to textual surfaces as the site where otherwise imperceptible causes appear.

As Wordsworth’s concern about the “multitude of causes unknown to former times” shaping reading habits in 1800 indicates, medical semiotic insights were taken up into aesthetics and poetics in ways we have yet to understand. As one instance, I re-examine the longstanding dispute, nominally about the role of meter, between Wordsworth, Coleridge, and such contemporaries as John Thelwall. All of the concerns about historical dislocation and demographic movement that these writers shared with each other and with contemporary medicine appear powerfully not (just) as theme or topical reference, but in their self-conscious preoccupations with the kinds of motion introduced by verse into the reading process.

Keynote 2

“THE DISLOCATION OF THE VERSE”:Reading Pathology and the Embodiment of MotionAssociate Professor Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley

The first part of this talk recovers the sophistication of late eighteenth-century pathology or “medical semiotics.”

UNSW Canberra


“[A]re books the only channel through which the stream of intellectual usefulness can flow?”, asks Coleridge in the tenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria; “I should dare appeal to the numerous and respectable audiences, which at different times and in different places honored my lecture-rooms with their attendance”.

Public lectures flourished in the eighteenth century and by the early nineteenth century a number of institutions had sprung up to house, foster, and fund them, first and foremost being the Royal Institution where the scientist, Humphry Davy, and the social critic and wit, Sydney Smith, established reputations in chemistry and moral philosophy respectively, and to which Davy invited the poet and literary critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who began his famous lectures there in 1808.

As a rhetorical and quasi-theatrical performance, the Romantic public lecture takes its place no less in a history of sociability and public entertainment than in a history of knowledge transmission, with celebrity lecturers vying with celebrity preachers for the hearts and minds of a public hungry for information and sensation. This paper will reflect on the erotics of knowledge and on the public or “popular” lecture in the Romantic period as a complex, multivalent embodiment.

Keynote 3

EMBODYING KNOWLEDGE:Romantic Public LecturingProfessor Will Christie, Australian National University

This paper will reflect on the erotics of knowledge and on the public or “popular” lecture in the Romantic period as a complex, multivalent embodiment.

UNSW Canberra


In accord with his own public self-fashioning, Cobbett has long been regarded as a singularly embodied writer, and for Raymond Williams this was developed particularly in the early criticism through the sense of figure guided by instinct and impulse rather than intellect.

Yet over the course of his career Williams developed a more complex account in which the rural rider served as a shrewd and systematic critic as well as a physical combatant of Old Corruption. As the romantic period came into focus for Williams as the critical phase in the impact of industrial capitalism, and in the struggle to

understand its workings and chart its future, Cobbett increasingly served as the major literary voice in the period, and as a guide and counterpart for Williams’ own struggle to critique social and economic developments that were of necessity imperfectly understood.

Keynote 4

Raymond Williams’ Experimental History of Romanticism Professor Kevin Gilmartin, California Institute of Technology

This paper will reflect on the erotics of knowledge and on the public or “popular” lecture in the Romantic period as a complex, multivalent embodiment.

UNSW Canberra


The Architecture of Suffering: Matthew Lewis, Catherine Blake, and William Blake on rebirth, ruination, and loss

Professor Peter Otto, University of Melbourne

Catherine Blake is normally given only a minor role in accounts of William Blake’s life and work, although she played an active part in the production of the illuminated books, as printer, printer’s assistant, and colourist. She also, like her husband, drew and painted her own designs, of which three are extant, including a tempera on canvas, ‘Agnes from the Novel of the Monk’, which forms the primary subject of this paper. Catherine produced this design in 1800, at a time when the earliest draft of her husband’s Vala or The Four Zoas (1797–c.1807) was well advanced. It depicts a scene from Lewis’s The Monk (1796), in which Agnes, imprisoned in the dungeon below the Sepulchre beneath the Convent of St. Clare, is seen cradling her dead child. In The Monk (1796), this scene is framed, on the one hand, by the monk Ambrosio’s rape and murder of his sister, Antonio, and, on the other hand, by Lorenzo’s rescue of his sister, Agnes, with the second supposedly healing the cultural disaster evoked by the first. And yet, as we gaze at this painting, with Lewis’s book in our mind, the intensity of Agnes’s gaze draws the trajectories of ruination and emancipation into troubling proximity to each other, in relation to the intractable remainder—loss, suffering, death—that both are trying to sweep aside. As I will argue, this impasse is the starting point for a design that brings ‘Agnes’ into provocative dialogue with The Four Zoas and, in particular, with the political/emotional crisis that would eventually leave that poem in ruins. They also suggest that critics have underestimated the extent to which Catherine was able actively to engage with and debate the views expressed in Blake’s work.

Public Lecture

UNSW Canberra


Speakers

‘Austen, romantic love and the male body’

Sarah Ailwood

‘“As our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings”’, declares Captain Harville to Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s climactic scene at the White Hart Inn in Persuasion. Anne of course challenges Harville’s claim for the constancy of men over women in sustaining romantic love. Yet Austen’s equation of male physical and emotional strength in this scene is worthy of exploration. Throughout her novels, Austen visualises the male body to signify a range of emotions, an innovative narrative technique for a courtship romance novelist who rarely permits her reader access to her male protagonists’ consciousness or narrative perspective. Whereas contemporary screen reimaginings of Austen’s novels tend to eroticise the male body through a gaze shared by the heroine and the viewer, within her novels Austen draws on the male body to reveal masculine rather than feminine emotional experience, particularly romantic love. This paper will explore Austen’s visualisations of the male body in Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, arguably her two novels most aligned with Romantic affect. Austen dramatises the critical tension between the male body and mind ignited by romantic love in Pride and Prejudice as Darcy struggles to mentally suppress and physically conceal his love for Elizabeth Bennet, a conflict that he can only resolve by accepting his fundamental need to become desirable to her. In Persuasion, Austen similarly reveals Captain Wentworth’s heightened emotional state, triggered by his reunion with Anne, first through his control, and later through his lack of control, over the body. Corporally equating masculine selfhood with romantic love, Austen challenges Romantic conceptions of masculine subjectivity aligned with nature, relocating them to heterosexual love and companionate marriage.

‘[S]he would rather be buried in the bellies of her Lords and Masters, whom she loved’: Cannibalism as Intermarriage in Robert Southey’s History of Brazil (1810, 1817, 1819)

Valentina P. Aparicio

Claims of cannibalism as an integral part of social practices amongst natives of the Amazon were widespread since the first arrival of the Portuguese to Brazil in the sixteenth century. Robert Southey’s three volume History of Brazil, a text that compiles knowledge found in a variety of Portuguese and Spanish chronicles and histories, amongst others, reproduces these claims extensively. In this paper I will argue that Southey’s special attention to cannibalism in his History of Brazil should be read in the context of his reflections on intermarriage. Southey famously promoted intermarriage, often as a form of ending slavery through the suppression of the mark of skin colour. Like some of his contemporaries, the poet repeatedly portrays this intermarriage as the union of enlightened European minds and resistant black and brown bodies. With this in mind, I argue that cannibalism symbolises a problematic form of body-dominant intermarriage. I suggest that cannibalism is portrayed as the reversal of Southey’s positive European-centred and mind-dominant intermarriage. Thus, in History of Brazil, cannibalism symbolises a body-dominant expression of intermarriage in which the European-mind is annihilated by virtue of being fully subsumed into the non-European body. To illustrate this, I will contrast cannibalism to Southey’s utopian portrayal of Jesuit reductions, where natives –often ex- cannibals– live with Europeans exchanging knowledge, but strictly avoiding physical contact. I will conclude that Southey’s portrayal of cannibalism as intermarriage evinces underlying contradictions within his own proposal of complete bodily assimilation, shedding light on the limits of of Southey’s ideas on intermarriage.

UNSW Canberra


Ballet Bodies and Intellectual Art

Theodora Billich

This paper will focus on the portrayal of three of the Ballets Russes’ most famous star dancers in French and German press and literature from 1909 – 1914: Anna Pavlova (1881 – 1931), Vaslav Nijinsky (1898 – 1950) and Ida Rubinstein (1885 – 1960). When the Ballets Russes premiered in Belle Époque Paris in 1909, ballet was regarded as a degenerative effemi-nate form of entertainment serving erotic pleasure to a bourgeois audience through the demonstration of sexualized female bodies. The arrival of the Rus-sian ensemble in the French capital heralded two decades of frequent collaborations among choreog-raphers, painters, littérateurs and musicians leading to a renaissance of ballet which became part of the European avant-garde movement. But not only did the Ballets Russes elevate ballet as an art form, to their audience the foreign dancers also embodied a new type of corporal aesthetics. These aesthetics led to a redefinition of dancers’ roles who were no longer regarded as only performers but also as artist who created intellectual art through their bodies. Furthermore, the staging of male and female bodies in the company’s production reflected also a general discourse of corporeality challenging the traditional separation of mind and body as well as common no-tions of cultural, national, sexual and gender identity. Therefore this paper aims to examine the depiction of Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky and Ida Rubinstein in literary texts and press articles with regard to the rhetorical strategies and cultural (body) images that were used to illustrate the three dancers as artist.

Speakers

Eying the Abject: Real Science and Fictional Frankensteinian Bodies

Alison Bedford

Fiction, since Mary’s Shelley’s Frankenstein, has consistently addressed our fear of losing control of our corporeal self, which is ultimately the centre of our sense of identity. As Chris Shilling describes: “ as science facilitates greater degrees of intervention into the body, it destabilises our knowledge of what bodies are, and runs ahead of our ability to make moral judgements about how far science should be allowed to reconstruct the body” (4). This makes the body a key site of anxiety in fiction, particularly the horror and science fiction genres, which have their genesis in Shelley’s novel. Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection gives us an explanation as to why we keep revisiting this anxiety. She asserts, “the phobic has no other object than the abject…thus, fear having bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject” (Kristeva 6). The phobic here is not an individual, but the modern world. Our way of ‘ceaselessly confronting that otherness’ is through popular fiction, where the abject is particularly addressed in horror and science fiction. This paper will discuss Shelley’s exploration of the possible regenerative powers of sciences like Galvanism as a means of addressing our fundamental concerns about our power over our own and others bodies. I argue once new ideas, new threats to the body have been explored, particularly that we have envisaged a worst case scenario, the threat to our bodies is reduced, the object of our imagination may no longer be so abject, as we have approached the boundary, peered over and seen less of a threat than what we imagined, or been offered a way to deal with it. As Barbara Creed states, horror provokes “a confrontation with the abject…in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between human and non-human” (53) and so redefine how we perceive our embodied selves.

UNSW Canberra


On Ports and Portraiture: George Chinnery in Canton & Macao

Kara Lindsey Blakley

Recent art historical scholarship has begun to expand with studies in cross-cultural convergences and transferences garnering newfound attention. Numerous recent volumes offer nuanced approaches to and interpretations of previously obscured connections between China and the West. Analyses of the work of George Chinnery (1774-1852), however, remain scarce.

This talk, then, seeks to understand Chinnery’s paintings within a Romantic and proto- global context. Chinnery was born in London, and in adulthood, spent five decades in India

(1802-25) and China (1825-52). An Academy-trained artist, Chinnery’s paintings became essential souvenirs for Western merchants and travelers visiting Guangzhou, Hong Kong, or Macao. His œuvre commingles an established Western academic aesthetic with the signifiers of China made well-known by travel artists such as William Alexander.

In this talk, I will focus on two seemingly contradictory bodies: bodies of water, specifically, the Chinese port as a site of global commerce; and female bodies that occupy the domestic interiors. Chinnery’s paintings demonstrate a unique privileged perspective: his domestic portraits all feature, to varying degrees, views of the ports of Guangzhou and Macao while opening up an intimate interior unknown to his European compatriots. Chinnery conveys the importance of the maritime vista in signifying Canton and Macao to European audiences, while simultaneously emphasizing his access—and by extension, Britain’s access—to the spaces therein. Chinnery’s juxtaposition of the domestic with the cosmopolitan through bodies of women and bodies of water exemplifies the West’s yearning for greater access to and knowledge of the Middle Kingdom.

As the connections between China and Britain in the Romantic era become increasingly popularized in scholarship, Chinnery’s artwork must be included in this field. While only a starting point, this paper seeks to contribute to what is known about this early global artist.

Creole bodies

Deirdre Coleman

Kathleen Wilson has argued that it was in the 1760s and 1770s that Englishness emerged as a ‘nascent ethnicity’ with certain ‘racialized assumptions’ contained within it. By focusing on issues of ethnicity, skin colour, and constructed identities, this paper addresses some of the complexities around current and historical understandings of the term ‘creole’ as applied to both individuals and groups. As is well known, the group identity of Caribbean creoles was a negative one. Travellers to the West Indies often commented on creole degeneracy, describing the native-born ‘whites’ as lazy, greedy, cruel, and over-sexed. Perceptions of wealthy creoles returning to England were also negative. This paper examines the racial bodies of two young West Indian creole women in London, as they emerged from the artist studios of Joshua Reynolds and his rival, Francis Cotes.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


‘A taste for poetry may be awakened here’: Romantic Readings and Lectures on the Victorian Goldfields

Sarah Comyn

In a lengthy account of the ‘popular readings’ held at the Sandhurst Mechanics’ Institute in the Colony of Victoria, Australia, the Bendigo Advertiser celebrated the potential of the readings to ‘breath[e] life into the still language of print’ animating the ‘dead voices’ of the ‘books on the shelves’.1 An institute of the Romantic age, the mechanics’ institute emerged in Great Britain in 1821 and then proliferated in the Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and South African colonies to become thriving social, political and cultural hubs. Following the discovery of gold in 1851, mechanics’ institutes were established in the Colony of Victoria with unprecedented urgency. More institutes were created in Victoria relative to population size than in any other colony in the world. This paper explores the cultural and literary phenomenon of the mechanics’ institutes on the goldfields of Victoria, paying particular attention to their sociable activities, such as soirées, conversaziones, lectures and public readings. Extending Jon Klancher’s concept of the ‘administrator as cultural producer’ to the colonial mechanics’ institute,2 this paper considers the institute as both a crucial site of colonial taste-formation and as a disciplinary body promoting the ideology of settlement and responsible citizenry.

1 Bendigo Advertiser, 26 June 1868, 2.

2 Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), 51.

Reading Nature, Reading in Nature: entangled embodied intimacy

Anne Collett

Taking two famous portraits of John Keats by Joseph Severn (of 1821-3 and 1845) as my starting point, this paper considers the significance of relationship between reading Nature and reading in nature. In the earlier portrait, Keats is seated at the window, reading. Light shines on his book through the window that could as easily be a painting as a view to the natural world beyond the domestic space. In this portrait Keats’ attention is given entirely to the book on his knee but his reading could be said to be enlightened by Nature, as visually implied. In the second, later, portrait, Keats has laid aside his open book to give his entire attention to the nightingale but book, bird and Keats’ upturned face are drawn into relationship by the moonlight. Despite various Romantic claims that prioritise reading Nature over reading books (including the lines from Keats’ letter to Reynolds: ‘I have not read any books – the Morning said I was right – I had no idea but of the Morning’), and taking into consideration the notion of Nature as a book available to be read given the right conditions of a Wordsworthian wise passiveness or a Keatsian negative capability, this paper will reflect on ‘the book’ – of Nature and Culture – as object and act of entangled embodied intimacy. Severn contemplates and gives aesthetic form to this relationship in his portraiture.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Creole bodies

Deirdre Coleman

Kathleen Wilson has argued that it was in the 1760s and 1770s that Englishness emerged as a ‘nascent ethnicity’ with certain ‘racialized assumptions’ contained within it. By focusing on issues of ethnicity, skin colour, and constructed identities, this paper addresses some of the complexities around current and historical understandings of the term ‘creole’ as applied to both individuals and groups. As is well known, the group identity of Caribbean creoles was a negative one. Travellers to the West Indies often commented on creole degeneracy, describing the native-born ‘whites’ as lazy, greedy, cruel, and over-sexed. Perceptions of wealthy creoles returning to England were also negative. This paper examines the racial bodies of two young West Indian creole women in London, as they emerged from the artist studios of Joshua Reynolds and his rival, Francis Cotes.

Pre-colonial landscapes: Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Machu Picchu

Diego Alegría Corona

The present paper proposes the existence of a landscape relationship, at both the visual and the acoustic levels, between the epic poems Peru (1786) by Helen Maria Williams and Alturas de Machu Picchu (1950) by Pablo Neruda. Through the historical revision of the Incas and their subsequent Spanish conquest, these texts are situated within, as well as anticipate, different Latin-American processes of emancipation, such as the Era of Independence (1800-1830) and the emergence of the New Left (1950-1975), respectively. On the one hand, Williams’s Peru incorporates Latin-American history as a Romantic literary motif and as an incipient post-colonial critique of Spanish colonization. Nevertheless, through a Christian and European perspective, the epic poem constructs the natural landscapes of the Incas as an unspoiled Miltonic paradise that combines an exotic catalogue of Peruvian flora and fauna, and a recurrent use of soft and moderate alliterations (/w/ and /sp/). On the other hand, Neruda’s Alturas de Machu Picchu demystifies these Edenic representations as it poetically reveals the exploitation and oppression of the working classes by the Incas’ ruling elite. Through a Marxist and Latin-Americanist perspective, the epic poem builds up a historical landscape, where the lyric speaker, as a modern tourist, acoustically resembles the construction of Machu Picchu and the march of the working class, which is rhetorically embodied in the use of hard and strong alliterations (/p/ and /r/). Through a transatlantic perspective, the present paper proposes Romanticism as a global movement and considers the relationship between Latin-American history, British Romanticism and Chilean post-Romantic poetry, today.

Keywords: Transatlantic Romanticism, British Romanticism, Latin-American poetry, landscape, alliteration.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Finding Infinite Imagination within the Clay Man: Merlin and Reuben in Blake’s Jerusalem

Todd Dearing

Merlin and Reuben are two minor characters in William Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion upon which little has been written. Merlin represents the immortal imagination, reiterating the Welsh wizard of Arthurian mythology as a Romantic figure. Reuben, eldest son of Jacob and Leah from the ‘Book of Genesis,’ is to Blake the clay man, the human as matter, imbibed with instinct and urge yet lacking higher cognitive capacity. These two archetypal characters appear together in plates 30-32 of Jerusalem, presenting an allegory for the relationship between imagination and the body from Blake’s perspective.

Taking these two characters of Blake’s as a Romantic conceptualisation of embodied imagination, I ask the question: How do Merlin and Reuben contribute to Blake’s concept of embodiment? The aim is to clarify this mythopoetic instance of Romantic embodiment and then to examine its contemporary relevance by considering Richard C. Sha’s recent work on physiology and the Romantic imagination. How exactly Blake relates imagination to embodiment will be answered within this context.

Keywords: embodiment, imagination, William Blake, Romanticism, physiology.

Speakers

Austenocene

Amelia Dale

To be familiar with Jane Austen’s reception history is to also be familiar with her work being frequently characterized as an embodiment of all that is small or inconsequential, most obvious, perhaps, in the persistent fame afforded to Austen’s facetious description of her work as little bits “(two inches wide) of ivory.” The first published piece of substantive analysis of her work, Walter Scott’s review of Emma, notes how Austen stresses “ordinary commonplace things and characters,” as opposed to what he self-deprecatingly terms the “Big Bow-wow strain” of history writing. Though Austen was once and sometimes still is framed as having a nonrelation to history, her novels have also become a touchstone for changing critical conceptualizations of literature’s relationship with history. This paper asks how we might read Austen’s concern with the microhistorical alongside the vast scale of Anthropocene. Austenien microhistory tracks details within single moments, and amongst these details, I argue, vectorial impulses angling towards modernity, and ultimately, Anthropocenic catastrophe. Focusing on Sanditon, a fragment with an intricate relationship with temporal discontinuity, I argue that both Austen’s work and the longstanding critical debate surrounding Austen’s treatment of history embodies the scalar problems of Anthropocene reading, that is, what it means to practice literary studies in the purview of the vast and fantastic extent of the Anthropocene.

UNSW Canberra


Feeling and Sensing Reform in the 1790s

Peter Denney

The relationship between ‘feeling’ and ‘sensing’ preoccupied many writers involved with the popular reform movement in the 1790s. In popular radical culture, sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell were held to generate certain kinds of emotions, from hope to anger, which could either promote or obstruct political reform. Radical publicists appealed to plebeian readers by associating political ideas like liberty and despotism with particular sensory experiences, grounding abstract discourse in everyday, affective life. The senses and their affiliated emotions were also crucial to the elaboration of social and political identities, as reformers sought to represent themselves as citizens, authorised to participate in public affairs. In consequence, myriad sensory experiences became politicised in the propaganda war of the 1790s, with popular radicalism expressed through handshaking no less than speechmaking, dietary behaviour no less than graphic satire.

This paper will examine the interaction between the senses and the emotions in some writings associated with the London Corresponding Society (LCS). With the twin aims of advocating political reform and promoting moral as well as intellectual improvement, the LCS was concerned with the role of the senses in the production of ideas, the articulation of grievances, and the control of emotions. But while highly managed sensory activity was held to foster civility, serving as a precondition of citizenship, it could also signify an unfeeling response to injustice. As popular radical culture made clear, oppression was a bodily, emotional phenomenon, whether experienced as starvation by the poor or marked by stench in the political order.

Locked-up or Leaping – Children’s Embodied Experience in Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Chimneysweeper”

Ruth Dunnicliff-Hagan

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence are grounded in the bodily experience of children and youth, and preoccupied with children’s perceptions of their own embodied existence. The Songs explore the nature of children’s play and the ways in which children at that time were imposed upon by adults, especially through the exploitation of their physical bodies. This paper will consider the exploration of children’s bodily experiences of themselves in two of the Songs of Innocence: “The Lamb” and “The Chimney Sweeper”. At one level, these poems speak of contrasting experiences – of freedom versus oppression. At another level, the poems inform one another, demonstrating how children could imagine themselves in possession of their own bodies and, through this vantage point, experience themselves in a God-given state of freedom and flourishing. For Blake, they could also perceive themselves as sacred and as a material sign of the Divine within the human and natural world. In the eighteenth century, children had little control over their own lives, especially in employment, and were frequently regarded as the property of adults. Blake personally witnessed children’s living conditions in industrial London as he wandered “thro’ each charter’d street”, and he chose to see children, not as passive victims, but as occasional survivors who sought agency, however limited by circumstances; as wise ones who knew their own true worth beyond their instrumentalisation.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Australia in 1819: The Poetics of Terra Nullius

Thomas Ford and Justin Clemens

In 1819, Barron Field—a friend of Charles Lamb, of Leigh Hunt, of William Wordsworth and of other prominent Romantics—published First Fruits of Australian Poetry, the first book of poetry to appear in Australia. Field was in New South Wales at the time as the colony’s chief judge. While there, he was also responsible for the first formulation of the legal doctrine of terra nullius: the fiction that the continent was unoccupied prior to European settlement, and that its Indigenous peoples did not exist.

We aim to call attention to two main things in our critical category of “the poetics of terra nullius.” The first concerns colonial Romantic poetry’s representation of Indigenous dispossession, and its wider participation in that exterminatory cultural project. In what ways is terra nullius legible in the poetic archive in this founding moment of Australian poetics? The second concerns the more basic meaning of poetics as “making,” which comes from the word’s Greek root, poiesis. We track the making of a legal fiction that underpinned colonial tenure over the country and so also all subsequent Australian national development. In this second sense, the poetics of terra nullius remains operative everywhere in the legal, political and social fabric of Australia today, for it was the imposition of this fiction that is still held to have extinguished native title over most of the continent. The poetics of terra nullius—of Romanticism on the other side of the world, of Australia in 1819—is then both a matter of colonial literary history and of our contemporary moment, for its making continues to be prosecuted.

Speakers

The Italian nation-buildung – Embodiment via translation of Romantic literature

Kathrin Engelskircher

The Romantic period is often very closely linked to nation-building processes in Europe. Italy can be named as one case of these processes and is – at the same time – a prime example for a strong connection between politics and ideas with regard to cultural innovation. A big gap opens up between the so-called classicists as reactionaries and the romanticists as “young rebels” with an overwhelming will to renew the country – as a modern nation.

This entity or “body” of a new Italian nation state is represented by different heads in the 19th Italian landscape. In this context, Giuseppe Mazzini is the leader of the democratic movement and intends to unify the divided Italy as a republic. The “political romanticism”, applicable especially to Italy, is manifested in his translational project of Biblioteca Drammatica, wanting to innovate Italy via translation and commentary of foreign dramas. The subtle “manipulation of literature” has the purpose of educating young Italian poets to write revolutionary, new national literature and, in that way, of educating, furthermore, the Italian people to fight for an independent and democratic nation of Italy – at the same time, embodying cultural and political progress.

UNSW Canberra


“Troubled Pleasure, Troubled Measure”

Geraldine Friedman

This paper is on the “palpable” aspects of the boat-stealing episode in Book I of the 1805 Prelude, where Wordsworth struggles to affirm his sense of poetic election in the face of his inability to write. Likening himself to the “False Steward” in the parable of the talents “who hath much receiv’d / And tenders nothing back,” Wordsworth imagines Nature has invested in him by framing him as a poet, and he is duty-bound to make the investment pay. The “plot” of the passage is about this economy of recompense or return on the physical, figurative, and ethical levels. The child turns back and by restoring the boat to its mooring place makes restitution for his theft. Yet the passage sets up this model only to exceed it. When the child perceives the cliff as following him, he experiences excessive terror relative to his transgression, and excess functions also thematically in the figuration and material aspects of the passage’s language, such as its “cadence” and “measure,” words which appear in the text. However, “measure,” upon which depend the economy of recompense and story of return, becomes indeterminate, most obviously in the syntax of the lines on the “huge and mighty Forms” that preoccupy the boy in the aftermath of his experience. Drawing on recent work on measuring and marking in the Romantic period, I propose to read the impossible logic of “measure” in the passage, emphasizing the relation between movement in it and the movement of its own cadences.

Embodying Emotion: The Australian Colonial Sublime, Mood and Light Saturation within 19th Century Australian Landscape Art.

Marguerite Gibson

Within landscape painting, one of the features most effective at embodying and signifying the emotional intent of the artist and scene involved the masterful use of light saturation. This was especially valid for Romanticism inspired artists, whose goal was to express extreme emotional resonance through an image to the viewer. The extremity and power of light saturation in effectively creating an extreme emotional response or mood was guided by, and a crucial characteristic, of the concept of the sublime. Emotional nuance within landscape was predominantly formed through use of one of three light saturation forms – darkness (night), transitional light and extreme light.

When viewed through the lens of the renewed and contemporary interest in the study of the evaluation of emotions in art by reassessing the value and presence of emotions in past historical eras, the dialogue around the sublime and emotional manifestations of light saturation within the Australian landscape is particularly fascinating. Notions of the sublime, and more specifically, the colonial sublime, have recently been applied to the experiences of people in colonial nations as a means of creating a discourse of narrative relating to their extreme emotional responses. Within my research, I term this concept the Australian colonial sublime.

Through the Australian colonial sublime, this presentation will endeavour to explore and unpack the symbolism, nuances and motifs within nineteenth century Australian landscape art to highlight the utilization of light saturation by artists to express and embody the emotional response to the landscape.

Keywords: sublime; Romanticism; landscape painting; Australian art; colonial.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


“Complaining but not Forsaken: Contesting Depictions of Native American Women, 1750-1950”

Millie Godfery

The Romantic literary period both produced, and became a product of, a transatlantic exchange which appropriated cultural and literary forms. It is fitting then, that the early modern genre of complaint is reinstated in Romantic poetry by both European and Native American writers, making it a product of exchange itself. This paper reveals how complaint is transmuted to serve particular purposes unique to this period of literature. It identifies first-generation poets William Wordsworth and Robert Southey as producing male-authored, female-voiced complaints which engender the Indigenous subject as Romantic in her imagined stoic, savage, and unstable condition. While the complainant is enhanced in her ventriloquized Native American voice to appear more active than the passive early modern woman, this incites a colonial Othering which essentialises and anglicises the Indigenous experience. This paper then highlights alternative engagements in this genre by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe) and Ruth Margaret Muskrat (Cherokee), whose poetry demonstrates how complaint is re-appropriated to re-centre the Indigenous woman’s voice as the locus from which all else is Othered. These contesting depictions of Native American women emphasise the malleability of complaint, which this paper draws attention to for the purpose of, firstly, decolonizing complaint’s Euro-masculine history and, secondly, demonstrating its re-application by Native American women to subvert and explore the rhetorical violence of colonial language and form.

Speakers

Gifts of sisterhood and motherhood: the political dimensions of sentimental gift exchange in Russia in the Romantic Period

Emma Gleadhill and Ekaterina Heath

This paper considers the gifts exchanged between Catherine the Great, her closest female friend Ekaterina Dashkova, and the Anglo-Irish sisters Martha and Katherine Wilmot. Anthropologists have noted that the cumulative linkage of an object to persons or histories can cause it to obtain an ‘inalienability’. The inalienable gift is never fully transferred to the receiver, but is instead lent as a repository of genealogies, myths, ancestors or gods. The gifts exchanged first between Catherine II and Dashkova, and then between Dashkova and the Wilmots, gained their significance not only from representing the relationship between the immediate giver and receiver, but also from their connection to a series of givers, receivers and histories over time.

This paper will use the concept of inalienability to consider the political dimensions of the paintings, jewellery and other accoutrements exchanged between these four women. We will take as our central focus a pair of paintings by Grigoriy Ugryumov. The first showed Tsar Ivan the Terrible conquering Kazan, while the second displayed Tsar Michael Fedorovich being crowned. We will argue that Dashkova used this gift and others to display her displeasure over the displacement of women from the positions of power in science and government by Paul I and subsequent tsars. Initially designed to promote Paul I’s claim to the throne, the painting was recontextualised by Dashkova to communicate quite the opposite. Informed by the moment of exchange and displayed in a new environment, the same painting called attention to Dashkova’s role in the destruction of a dynasty and, on a larger level, the role of women as active participants in European politics.

UNSW Canberra


The Sympathetic Body and Liberal Knowledge in Keats’s Poetry

Mie Gotoh

In this paper, I examine the intense corporeality of Keats’s poetic imagery by considering early nineteenth-century literary and medical discourses. Especially I focus on an innovative conception in early nineteenth-century medical science in which the human body emerges as a transformative, holistic “constitution” with its nervous network connecting the entire regions of the body. Correspondingly, the poetic creation of a holistically organized body—the holistic organization of the exterior and interior operations of sensation and volition—leads to the specific corporeality in Keats’s oeuvre.

The poet’s employment of the term “sympathetic” in his poems grounds the poetic creation of a holistically organized body, referring to “sympathetic communication” between the parts of the body. The poetic formulation of “sympathy”— the key element for the holistic organization of the body—is invoked in the medical sense rather than in the usual application of human fellow-feeling, being molded into a Romantic “sympathetic” form against the stabilities of Newtonian mechanics.

Intriguingly, physiological insights were extensively adapted and expanded in the Romantic ideal of liberated knowledge, which traverses and circulates beyond the conventionally established sense of values and geopolitical spaces. Just as the human “constitution” dependent on the nervous network came to hold a transformative power, social structures could be reformative when allied to liberal knowledge. Keats’s progressive ideas in the sense of freedom in the newly communicative body accords with the potentially liberated space of common reason in the “constitution” of the society.

“Let him mingle his tears with those of the wretched”: Catharine Macaulay’s sympathetic ideal of the patriot king in Letters on Education.

Shane Greentree

Letter XXV of Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790), ‘Hints Towards the Education of a Prince’ is often considered as a peripheral and conventional part of a work seen today as a crucial influence upon Mary Wollstonecraft. Read closely however, it not only develops upon Macaulay’s presentation of sympathy in her republican History of England (1763-83), but also responds to Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King (1738), which had refrained from presuming “what regulations might be made in the education of princes.’

In this paper I examine her depiction of a virtuous tutor’s education of a benevolent and sympathising prince, intermingling intellectual cultivation and physical expression. Taught humane principles, Macaulay’s prince anonymously visits scenes of poverty and through weeping develops the sympathies needed to rule virtuously, addressing social inequalities and listening to his subjects’ grievances. Macaulay in these passages challenges eighteenth-century ideas of sympathy, opposing Hume and Burke by presenting it as non-hierarchical, and a quality best formed by observing the everyday pains of wretched living conditions rather than spectacular scenes of royal suffering.

Her ideal of kingship however reveals the extent to which older notions of commonwealth republicanism and its hostility to women in royal courts persist even in her late thought. Macaulay’s ‘Hints’ contradict the radically non-gendered principles of a work which elsewhere argues that “the same rules of education in all respects are to be observed to the female as well as to the male children”, to present her royal subjects as male, denigrating women and even romance as a corrupting influence upon the patriot king.

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UNSW Canberra


Speakers

Enclosing the Body within the Machine

Lesley Hawkes

William Wordsworth’s l844 literary campaign against the proposed railway lines of Kendal and Windermere is well known. Wordsworth was worried about the effect of the railway on the surrounding landscape and environment. He believed the railway’s construction and increase in tourists would destroy the beauty of the landscape. The railways evoked fear for the landscape but also there were fears of what would happen to the body. The rise of railways in the United Kingdom in the 1800s led to fears the body would be so overtaken by the speed of the journey that it would crumple and fall. There was a fear that bodies, especially female bodies, would be unable to handle the movement of train travel. One of the oddest was that a woman’s uterus would fly out of her body because of the speed of the train (Burns, 2015). This paper examines how machines, especially trains, become moving sites of fear. It was not that machines were feared for what they could bring to society but rather they were feared for what changes they may bring to the body. It was unknown what would happen to the body once it entered into the machine and whether on journey’s end the body would emerge changed forever.

“The fictional representation of everyone killing everyone”: History as Monster in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad.

Elias Grieg

In Mary Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein envisions his transgressive project of creating new life as a millenarian break in the unending nightmare of history: “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world”. In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, translated into English in 2018 for the bicentenary, Hadi al-Attag, elderly junk dealer and drunk, describes his own efforts to construct a corpse out of assorted human remains cluttering Baghdad’s streets “like rubbish” in less ambitious terms: “I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish […] and given a proper burial”. Restored to life, the patchwork corpse, termed the “Whatsitsname”, longs not for companionship but revenge: specifically, revenge for each of the dead whose sundry parts make up its composite body. Following this suitably grizzly avatar of recent history – described by Saadawi as the “fictional representation of everyone killing everyone” – in his quest to dispense justice and put himself to rest, this paper interprets Saadawi’s raucously ghoulish novel as both morbid symptom and urgent diagnosis of a post-imperial order caught in the living death of interregnum. Saadawi’s novel, this paper argues, is deliberately entangled with the colonial and imperial histories that shape its narrative and govern its marketing and production. Reassembled from Shelley’s original, the Whatsitsname rises up to scourge the living, but struggles to decipher or compete with the complex atrocities of the present moment, posing urgent questions about the adequacy of literary fiction and the ongoing role of Western culture in exporting and justifying colonial and post-colonial violence.

UNSW Canberra


Panel: Romanticism, Pedagogy and Indigeneity

Chair: Nikki Hessell: Victoria University of Wellington

Panel rationale: This panel presents a pedagogical case study, based around a Victoria University of Wellington course on Romanticism and Indigeneity. It considers the pedagogical principles around the treatment and incorporation of Indigenous materials in the study of British Romanticism, and also showcases the work of Honours students who have taken the course and conducted independent research in this field. The panel engages with the conference theme by considering who gets to embody Romanticism, how we can embody Romanticism effectively in a 21st-century classroom on colonised land, and how embodied subjects were treated by the Romantic authors. Abstracts for the three papers are included below.

Teaching Wordsworth in the Wharenui

Nikki Hessell

Victoria University of Wellington

What does it mean to bring one of the canonical Romantic poets onto a marae (meeting ground)? This paper discusses the pedagogy behind a seminar-based course on Romanticism and Indigeneity, focusing in particular on decisions around teaching spaces and ethical responsibilities. Taking selected poems from the Lyrical Ballads as its central examples, it considers the new readings of Wordsworth that can be generated by reading his poetry not simply alongside Indigenous poets and critics, but inside Indigenous spaces, especially those occupied by tīpuna (ancestors) and toi Māori (Māori art). Placing Wordsworthian notions of belonging, nature, land, and ancestry in conversation with the structures of the wharenui (meeting house), this paper aims to elucidate both the familiarity and the foreignness of Wordsworth’s verse in Indigenous settings.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Snake and Tiger: Animals of Orientalist Fantasy and Fear in Romantic-period Writings

Lei Jie

The Romantic Period witnessed not only the celebration of emotional flow but also the rise of empire and its expansion to the East. As Romanticism turns to nature for inspiration, the animals are significant to their exploration of the Sublimity which consequently leads to two streams of emotional flow, fantasy and fear, both suggest to something unknown or at least uncertain, or in this case fundamentally exotic. As the colonial Other, the Orient and oriental animals were gazed at through orientalist lens. Tiger and snake are two reoccurring animal images in romantic-period writing especially in poetry. Tiger, decidedly not indigenous to Britain, stands out as a symbol against the western rational tradition in William Blake’s The Tyger. Snake, an oftentimes demonized creature, embodies the dangerous and forbidden love in John Keats’ Lamia. On the one hand, snake and tiger incurs fantasy to the unknown natural environment in the East. On the other hand, they also further signify the tension between emotion and reason. All these pose threat to western traditional value. It would be argued that the presence of these two animals in romantic writings are not only concerned with the awe-inspiring beauty of nature but more importantly, an orientalist fantasy and fear that reveal conscious or unconscious colonial prejudice(not necessarily in a bad sense) as well as anxiety.

Key words: animals; Romantic Orientalism; fantasy and fear;

References

Clarke, Bruce. “Fabulous Monsters of Conscience: Anthropomorphosis in Keats’s Lamia.” Studies in Romanticism, 1984, pp. 555–79.

Keats, et al. John Keats, the Complete Poems. Second ed., Penguin, 1976.

Kenyon-Jones, Christine. Kindred Brutes : Animals in Romantic Period Writing. Ashgate, 2001.

Richardson, Alan, and Sonia. Hofkosh. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834. Indiana University Press, 1996.

Rix, Robert. “William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’: Divine and Beastly Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Poetry.” ANQ, vol. 25, no. 4, 2012, pp. 222–7.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Reprinted with a new preface.. ed., Penguin, 2003.

Peltre, Christine. Orientalism in Art. Abbeville Press, 1998.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


“A Thousand Delicate Fibres Link”: The Material Embodiment of Community in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Manuscript Album.

Francesca Kavanagh

During a long period of illness in the spring of 1832, among news-paper clippings, prescriptions, and prose and poetry from literary annuals, Dorothy Wordsworth included in her manuscript album a section of original poetry entitled “Sick-bed Consolations.” Two of these consolation poems were intended not for Dorothy’s album but for those of her niece Dora Wordsworth and her friend Edith Southey. The inclusion of these poems in her consolations, articulates Dorothy’s search for solace by entwining narratives of friendship and practices of manuscript circulation. By attending to this relationship between affect and materiality, this paper aims to examine the Dora and Edith poems within the context of their position within Dorothy’s album to reveal the interrelationship between the poems’ consolatory content and the materiality of the album. It will argue that the thread and wax used to bind portions of Dorothy’s writing into the album and fair-copy transcriptions of her poetry by other female members of her community across its pages, function as a material embodiment of the bonds of friendship between herself and the recipients of the Sick-bed Consolations. Furthermore, the various drafts of the poems evidence a communal process of composition which demonstrates that rather than a single bond between Dorothy and the intended recipient, the thread and ink of the album can be seen to function as a textual body for the affection and intimacy of a community of women through which Dorothy finds consolation in her time of illness.

Speakers

Creating a Revolutionary Romantic Subject: Toussaint Louverture

Theresa M. Kelley

In a recent essay Marlene Daut assesses the poetics of the Haitian Revolution created by early nineteenth-century Haitian writers. That poetics, Daut shows, crafted a conceptual and territorial ground for Haitian Romanticism as distinct from its European counterparts. In this paper, I turn back to this Revolution’s first leader, Toussaint Louverture, to think about how he crafted a revolutionary and literary persona which stitched itself to the territories of Haiti as he proclaimed each battle and victory, and then reappeared, again restitched, in Louverture’s public speeches and printed declarations. These, I contend, work in tandem with his private (often also public) letters and reported anecdotes. My argument concerns how Louverture “lives” across these documents, beginning with the most repeated of those reports, which suggested that he read the Abbé Raynal’s prediction that a Black Spartacus would one day rise up to free Caribbean slaves. The coincidence of this anecdote with Louverture’s highly crafted history of his leadership of the Haitian Revolution points to the rhetorical poetics of revolution that Louverture inaugurated this paper, which then throughs through the friction between this Louverture and the persona and Romantic subject he conveys in letters and publications. My claim is that, as the first Haitian writer and actor in the Haitian Revolution, Louverture lived and crafted a Romantic consciousness and subjectivity that was less predictive, less assured of Haiti’s future (and his own). I suggest further that the textual record of Louverture’s writing ushers in a Romantic subject and acclaimed hero who was not the sublime poetic subject that English and German Romantics vested with the task of creating human freedom as an inner state which could advance political change. Louverture effectively inverts this European paradigm by projecting a public identity that stitched itself over the limits and inhibitions that mark his practiced wariness of the future of Haiti, and his own. In doing so, he conveys the underside of Romantic visionary promise, an underside that remains under-reported in claims about what Romanticism was and what its writers believed would happen. Louverture’s career as a military strategist and writer marks, then, a new story about Romanticism written large, across its global spaces.

UNSW Canberra


Della Cruscanism in Wartime: finding a space for female poets in the Oracle.

Claire Knowles

The paper explores some of the ramifications that the advent of war with France had on the shape of Della Cruscan-influenced poetry in the newspapers in the latter part of the 1790s. Although Della Crusca (Robert Merry) and Anna Matilda (Hannah Cowley) infamous correspondence in the World had petered out by 1789, there were still no shortage of poets attempting to emulate its success in various newspapers as the century drew to an end. Arno and Laura Maria wrote a series of poems to each other in the Oracle in 1791, just as Cesario and Laura had done in 1790. But this heteroerotic epistolary mode so characteristic of Della Cruscanism dies out altogether in 1793, never to be resurrected. With the country increasingly focused on events occurring both in Parliament and in France, there seems to have been little room for the light-hearted poetry of coquetry and conquest in which the Della Cruscan poets had specialized. I argue in this paper that this shift away from what Daniel Robinson terms “ludic” Della Cruscan poetics has particular implications for the women who wrote in the newspapers, who find themselves having to negotiate a space that had become more hostile to this kind of approach to poetic production. This paper explores the attempts of a number of female poets to carve out a space for their writing in the newspapers in the increasingly hostile literary climate of wartime England.

A Romantic Gaze at the Male Body

Elena Korowin

In this paper I want to focus on three paintings, which stand for a reborn concept of the male body in the Romantic period. Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer (1835-36) by Jean- Hippolyte Flandrin, Simeon Solomon’s Dawn (1871) and Demon (1890) by Mikhail Vrubel. Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer which was produced during a study trip to Rome, became an icon to a new glance on the nude male body until our time, as seen in various ways of productive reception e.g. Robert Mapplethorpe. Although strictly classicist in its form this work shaped the idea of a new representation of the male body in the paintings of artists dedicated to romanticism in art in the late 19th century. Regarding the nude male body in art- history it is imperative to combine the classicist tradition with the romantic impetus as we see in Dawn and in the later Demon. These paintings are representations of an idealized male body which doesn’t correspond with the idea of masculinity in the late 19th century. They are challenging the understanding of masculinity on the one side and of beauty on the other, therefor these works became icons of the queer culture in the 20th century. Concentrating on sensuality, these artists wanted to oppose the Puritan and Philistine society to pure forms of beauty, which were borrowed from the Greek tradition, allegorical or poetic motifs. The aim of this paper is to discuss which iconography was used in the three case studies, how it was shaped by cultural contexts and what impact it made on further artistic production.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


“I died for Beauty”: Cold Pastoral in John Keats and Emily Dickinson

Hsu, Li-hsin

The paper proposes to look at the connection between poetic martyrdom and physical decomposition in John Keats and Emily Dickinson, rethinking their shared concerns about the notions of beauty, fame and immortality. It plans to examine how the two poets aestheticize the process of physical and natural decomposition in conjunction with their consistent preoccupation with the preservation of beauty (albeit in distinctly different manners). I explore what Keats calls “cold pastoral” in a number of their poems about the chilling effects of pursuing, preserving or sacrificing one’s life for beauty. Poems such as Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (written in May 1819/published in January 1820) and “To Autumn” (written in September 1819/published in January 1820), and Dickinson’s “I died for Beauty – but was scarce” (Fr448/written about late 1862), “Beauty crowds me till I die” (Fr1687/unknown date) and “A faded Boy - in sallow Clothes” (Fr1549/around 1882) tend to associate the urge for beauty with a frostier embodiment of poetic transformation. These works suggest a subtle critical turn in the transatlantic attempts to respond to, account for or wrestle with the tension between the Romantic vision of pastoral ideal and the reality of mortality from a potentially more (proto)ecological perspective. By probing their aesthetic propensity for a colder poetic “temperature” in these poems, the paper intends to investigate the role the Keatsian notion of “cold pastoral” plays in Dickinson’s putrefaction poems, examining how the Romantic notion of biological (as well as natural) decay is transmitted (or decomposed) across the Atlantic Ocean in the mid-nineteenth-century.

Speakers

Lyrical Embarrassment and Phenomenology of Flesh in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”

David Lo

Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is a problem case in literary criticism. On the one hand, M. H. Abrams situates the poem in the greater Romantic lyric, which foregrounds subjectivity; one the other hand, T. S. Eliot reads it as an exemplar of objectivity. The capacity of Keats’s “Ode to Nightingale” to hold two opposing readings at the same time illustrates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh of an embodied subject. In the moment of sensing, the experiencing entity is both sensing as a sentient and being sensed as a sensible at the same time. Keats in the ode depicts the nightingale as an antithesis of the mortal speaker and dramatises the resulting difficulty in their communication. With a heightened awareness of the decidedly failed communication, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” epitomizes the lyrical embarrassment suggested in Jonathan Culler’s essay “Apostrophe”. However, through this recognition of the other resisting to assimilation, Keats also asserts the autonomy of the other and comes to the realisation that he himself is also the other for the nightingale. In doing so, Keats mitigates the egotistical sublime associated with Wordsworth’s lyrical poetry. Foregrounding the transcendence of art for the mortal perceiver in listening, Keats portrays what Emmanuel Alloa calls the “resistance of the sensible” in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. With the attention to the sensing self simultaneously as the sensed other, Keats accordingly demonstrates the capability of lyrical poetry in accommodating the other.

UNSW Canberra


“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?”: The legacy of Romanticism in English education

Jacqueline Manuel and Don Carter

From its inception in the school curriculum in the early 1900s, the identity and distinctive project of subject English was shaped by an ideological commitment to encoding certain “epistemic assumptions” (Reid, 1996) that can be traced to the seedbed of the works of Romantic poets. In particular, it was the educational philosophies, vision and literary aesthetic of Wordsworth that exerted a formative influence on the emerging Progressive education movement and the conceptualisation of English as a subject in the school curriculum in Britain and Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. Wordsworth’s poetics of individual growth through language; the transformative potential of the human imagination; and embodied knowledge engendered through quotidian experience were not only instantiated in curricular versions of subject English in schools: it remained an enduring touchstone in the iterative development of English syllabuses for more than a century (see Carter, 2012).

In this paper, we draw attention to the legacy of Romanticism to historical and contemporary conceptualisations of subject English in schools. Based on evidence from our historical curriculum research and scholarship, we contend that the hitherto embedded “epistemic assumptions” (Reid, 1996) and disciplinary norms attributable to the reach of Romanticism in the shaping of English education are now at risk from the paradigmatic shifts towards a more instrumentalist and utilitarian curriculum, driven by imperatives of high-stakes testing regimes and commodified models of literary and aesthetic education. We propose that critical research and scholarship in Romantic studies conducted in tertiary contexts has a vital role to play in to restoring “to critical consciousness some of the ideals, values and beliefs of the Romantic Period” (Halpin, 2006), thereby strengthening and extending the epistemological and ontological argument for a Romantically-inflected English curriculum schools. In turn, this research and scholarship may contribute to the sustainability of influence of Romantic ways of knowing, thinking and being in a twenty-first century educational environment.

References

Carter, D. (2012). The Influence of Romanticism on the NSW Stage 6 English Syllabus: Interwoven storylines and the search for a unifying narrative. Unpublished PhD thesis. Sydney: The University of Sydney.

Halpin, D. (2006). Why a Romantic conception of education matters. Oxford Review of Education, 32 (3), 325-345.

Reid, I. (1996). Romantic Ideologies, Educational Practices, and Institutional Formations of English. Journal of educational Administration and History, 28 (1), 22-41.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


The Polish Exile in British Art and Literature

Thomas McLean

No written work shaped British representations of the Polish exile more profoundly than Jane Porter’s 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw. Porter’s fictional protagonist, Thaddeus Sobieski, became a model of male behavior and created an image of the Pole as brave and honourable but also defeated and homeless. In this presentation, I will discuss some of the discoveries made while preparing the first new edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw in over a century. Porter’s image of Poland is the result of her encounters with Polish refugees, her borrowings from recent historical and travel publications, as well as her imaginative use of landscapes she visited in Lincolnshire. Her representation owes a considerable debt to the most famous Polish exile of her era, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and especially to the visual images of Kosciuszko that were familiar in nineteenth-century Britain. Porter confirmed the link when she added a new ending to Thaddeus in 1805, in which Kosciuszko and Sobieski are reunited. In the final part of this presentation, I will examine some of Thaddeus Sobieski’s literary descendants, including Will Ladislaw of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) and Ladislas Pulaski of Walter Besant and James Rice’s By Celia’s Arbour: A Tale of Portsmouth Town (1878).

Manchester, Materialism, and Imagination: John Ferriar’s theory of apparitions

Jon Mee

The broader context for this paper are the debates on materialism at the heart of the early years of the British industrial revolution. It builds upon the claims of economic historians Joel Mokyr and Margaret Job that the industrial transformation was as much about the circulation of useful knowledge and the commitment to progress as it was to technical innovation in itself and the profit-motive pure and simple. The textile industry around Manchester is usually identified as the key area for this transformation. Its transformation is celebrated in John Aikin’s Description of the Country for Thirty Miles around Manchester (1795) just as the steam engine was to make its appearance as the major source of energy. Aikin was one of several literary physicians involved with the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, identified by both Jacob and Mokyr as a key knowledge institution. I argue it provided a locus for debates about materialism that involved literary physicians like Aikin. These were focussed both on the physical bases of the individual mental phenomenon and the ability of the built environment - prisons, factories, schools - to shape ‘character’ more generally. They were also invested in arguments about faculties like ‘genius,’ taste,’ and ‘imagination,’ which proved influential to larger debates and to individual writers like Coleridge, Keats, and the Shelleys, most obviously through John Ferriar’s Essays towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813). In the issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that famously excoriated Keats as a Cockney poet, the magazine announced its ‘decided anti-ferriarism.’ The paper will explain the bases of this judgment, its origins in Manchester materialism, and its significance for thinking about the embodied imagination in the romantic period.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Promenades Aériennes in Paris: Bodily Health and Thrills in Society and Literature

Lucy Morrison

At the nineteenth century’s start, as Denise Gigante reminds us, “the manner in which the sentient being processes the world was far from clear.” Of course, bodily discipline and regulation can hardly be maintained or depended on during a ride at forty-eight miles per hour, which was the average speed of the montagnes russes (rollercoasters) in Parisian gardens coming back to life after Napoleon’s departure. Thomas Moore’s Fudge Family have encounters with these rides. Their impacts upon health and mind were touted, so that a ride on montagnes russes becomes a version of the “cures” sought so widely in other leisure opportunities across Europe. While John Abernethy’s Surgical Works (1815) touted the need of exercise to facilitate good digestive practices, F. F. Cotterel’s Promenades Aériennes ou Montagnes Françaises, considérées sous la rapport de l’Agrémens et de la Santé, contenant la description de l’éstablissement Beaujon (1817) recommends such a curative effect from the ride experience (as Moore also notes). My paper explores Cotterel’s recommendations for riding so as to better health and how these montagnes russes engage and challenge conventional bodily operations in the early nineteenth century. Cotterel promotes montagnes russes for many health benefits, claiming that riding a rollercoaster cleanses lungs and can help “nervous women” who can barely manage a walk, since the “passive exercise” may encourage them to let go of their “melancholy”; my paper examines the adrenalin rush’s impact upon a body’s inner workings.

A ‘sex in minds as well as bodies’?: Anna Letitia Barbauld against the critics

Olivia Murphy

Throughout her career, Anna Letitia Barbauld struggled with gendered assumptions about her education, writing and politics. In her lifetime her femininity was attacked, and her posthumous reputation has been viewed with, at best, ambivalence by feminists. The charge that Barbauld was insufficiently, or improperly feminine mutated over two centuries into the charge that she is insufficiently, or improperly, feminist, but these criticisms share a problematically essentializing view of women’s lives and women’s writing. Reading Barbauld’s work - work that resists such gendered restrictions (while never ignoring the realities of restrictions on women’s agency) - helps us challenge easy assumptions about what women could think, write and be in this period.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


‘Double Touch’: The Meeting with Coleridge and Keats’s 1819 Poetry

Chris Murray

Both Keats and Coleridge recalled their meeting on Hampstead Heath in April 1819 with reference to touch. Years later, Coleridge claimed to have felt, prophetically, ‘death in that hand’. Keats’s humorous catalogue of the subjects broached in the older poet’s monologue includes reference to ‘double touch’. This paper examines Keats’s 1819 poetry in light of Coleridge’s speculations on tactility. The episode has been beloved by biographers but relatively neglected by critics. Yet Coleridge’s theory of double touch exerts a (suitably) ghostly presence in the poetry that Keats wrote following their conversation. Both the narrative verse and the major odes of 1819 enact Coleridgean processes in which tactile stimulus provokes mental reflection which, in turn, creates a wish for sensory reverification. This procedure, by which we determine what is real, pervades a set of poems in which Keats grounds himself in sensual enjoyments, agonises over the nature of love, and imagines encounters with phantoms. To adopt double touch as an interpretative tool offers new comprehension of how Keats’s canonical works are touched by Coleridge.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


‘Standing on the shores of heaven, drawing in a world of bliss: fiction, atmosphere, architecture, and apocalypse in Jane and Mary Parminter’s “A la Ronde” and “Point in View” chapel, school, manse, and alms-houses’.

Peter Otto

The cousins Jane (1750-1811) and Mary Parminter (1767-1849) built ‘A la Ronde’ (c.1796-98) on land near Exmouth, East Devon. Designed probably by the former and based loosely on the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna (c.526-47), this sixteen-sided building has at its centre an octagonal hall, rising sixty feet into the air, encircled by a series of rooms, each connected to the next by a triangular closet fitted with sliding doors. A narrow platform, reached by a slim staircase, hugs the inner walls of the hall, about 40 feet from the ground, giving access to a clerestory of eight diamond-paned windows. After settling into this remarkable building, the Parminters filled it with their books, handiwork, keepsakes, and artwork; turned the staircase into a grotto and the hall’s upper walls into a shell gallery (with perhaps 25,000 shells); and amplified the existing character of A-la-Ronde as an immersive work of art. As the house took actual/virtual shape, so too did the garden around it. However, the ensemble to which house and garden belong was completed only in 1811, when the ‘Point in View’ chapel, school, manse, and alms-houses were built.

This remarkable building/environment is one of the few known to have been designed by women in the eighteenth century. Further, its architect/s stipulated that it was to be inherited, in each generation, only by an unmarried female relative of the owner. It is therefore usually taken to be a site of female arts and crafts, domesticity, quiet feminism, and eccentricity. Without ignoring the matter of these accounts, in this paper I want to paint a different picture of A la Ronde: first, as an immersive environment addressed to the senses, which brings earth into communion with heaven; next, as an experiment in vision, which attempts actively to change habitual modes of seeing; and third as a device designed to intervene in the flow of time, by conjuring its beginning and hastening its end. The paper concludes by arguing that histories of fictional/architectural space during the long 18th-century need to make room for A la Ronde, which offers a defamiliarizing double of its more famous contemporaries—such as Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, Soane’s House Museum, and Bentham’s Panopticon.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


“‘Fountains of grief and anger will flow’: Exploring Poetic Constructions of Indigenous Female Anger in Romantic Poetry”

Rose Peoples

This paper examines depictions of Indigenous women’s anger, violence and power in Romantic-era poetry. It focuses on two veins of poetry: depictions of powerful Native American women by British Romantic poets, and self-representations by Native American women that recollect or demonstrate their power or anger. Anger had a prominent position within the British public consciousness at this time, influenced by the French Revolution manifesting the violent result of public anger, as well as a prevailing uneasiness with female passion and anger. Compounding this sociological context, British Romantic poetry took part in a colonising framework which tried to comprehend powerful Indigenous women, leading to contradictory representations of Indigenous women, in which they were equated with both the powerfully sublime and the vulnerable and dispossessed. Such dynamics will be considered in the poetry of Felicia Hemans, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. Alongside these authors, this paper also considers the writings of Indigenous women poets, such as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft/ Bamewawagezhikaquay (Ojibwe), Ann Plato, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (Montaukett) and Mabel Washbourne Anderson (Cherokee). In these poems, not only do the characters create a compelling counter-narrative of female Indigenous power, but the poets themselves project power through their own poetic voices. But is there a compromise being made when writing poetry in English – a picking up what Audre Lorde called ‘the master’s tools’? Or is there a subversiveness in doing so, in using a form that had been used against them to challenge narratives of ‘savagery’ and victimhood?

Walking, grief and national heritage in British domestic travel writing, 1930-1990

Lauren Pikó

Abstract: This paper argues that British domestic travel writing during the twentieth century, particularly from 1930 to 1990, can be interpreted as a sub-genre of neo-romantic writing, centred around mystical representations of place, antipathy to modernism and to processes of historical change. Such literature developed with reference to self-referential canon, from Cobbett to Priestley to Nairn, and framed its affective, mournful and grief-laden language as representative of both subjective and objective reality. By reading historic landscape forms as containers of meaning which had been disrupted, breached and violated through the imposition of new forms such as modernist architecture, postwar urban design, the expansion of motorways, and the adoption of new agricultural methods, this genre used narratives of personal journeys through rural and urban space to map a wider trajectory of national and imperial decline from an idealised past. Domestic travel writing therefore provided a framework for locating political anxieties about processes of change, understood as a loss of historical continuity, within embodied and emplaced authorities. By locating this literature within its wider historical contexts, the paper argues that these literatures contributed to wider culturally conservative narratives of bodily exclusion, fixed and absolute meanings of place, and a vitalist orientation towards the binding connections of ‘blood’ and ‘soil’, articulated through narratives of walking across the British landscape. The paper concludes by considering continuities between these literatures and other vitalist embodied narratives of connection to landscape in British political rhetoric.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Sir Walter Scott and Liberal Security

Neil Ramsey

Although set in the 1790s, at the height of fears of French invasion, Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary is nonetheless a novel that seeks to keep war within the bounds of civility and liberalism. War constantly threatens to bring violence to this community but the novel renders conflict into an inclusive discourse formed out of a gentle humour and its rejection of romance. Nonetheless, as Philip Shaw has argued, civility never fully manages to impose its operation, this is a world in which conflict and strife are never far from the surface. To come to grips with these issues of an underlying violence, this paper turns to Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s theorisations of biopolitics to look at how conflict is supplanted into a new kind of knowledge about life processes that circulate within the community, in which liberalism might be understood in relation to forms of governmentality or even as the pacification of a civil war. What this paper considers are the ways in which The Antiquary orients itself not simply around a discourse of civility but around a discourse that must both dispense with political violence and yet where violence everywhere remains embedded within the structures of the community. Discourse is, in the novel, thoroughly militarised: the eponymous antiquary Oldbuck builds his knowledge from old battlefields, the military officer Lovel writes literature, the veteran beggars, king’s bedemen like Ogillie, are the oracles of the community. The novel might excise war, but only in so far as the military are rendered into a force who transcend national conflict through their status as both protectors and interpreters of the nation. A history of war in Scott’s novel is both woven into a narrative of liberal progress and into a narrative that forms the grounds of social administration and security.

“A Diversity of Scenery and Characters”: Narrating the (Global) Economy in Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy

Rebecca Richardson

Published late in the Romantic period in the early 1830s, Martineau’s Illustrations can be read as an attempt to imagine the increasingly global economy. As Martineau writes in the preface, in order to represent different states and contexts of economic activity, her tales involve “a diversity of scenery and characters.” The first tale in the series, Life in the Wilds, opens with a description of the Cape Colony setting⎯the “delightful climate,” the “pure and wholesome” mountain air, and the “fertile” plains. And across Martineau’s tales, these very particular settings emerge as better or worse not only for economic activity, but also for human populations’ wellbeing.

Drawing out the import of the setting for communities’ economic and physical health, many of Martineau’s plots hinge on natural disasters. In Weal and Woe in Garveloch, the island farmers and fishers suffer a famine caused by drought and⎯further blurring the line between manmade and natural disaster⎯overfishing. In Demerara, the West Indies plantation owners face personal and economic disaster when a destructive storm hits (a storm the enslaved population sees coming, but has no incentive to warn the masters about). Using such tales as examples, this talk examines how Martineau draws parallels between the health of the environment and of human communities. The Romantic-era attention to such overlaps is particularly interesting, I argue, given our own contemporary rhetoric, which too often sets up a zero-sum game among the health of human communities, the environment, and the economy across globalized systems.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Reader-Writer Dynamic and the Logic of Exercise in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Friend

Vinita Singh

In a notebook entry, recorded in 1794, Coleridge discussed a ‘strange’ dream:

There was a Desk […] School & Desk &c it always will be when I am ill; so deep has been the impression of those days in which my ill-health no doubt originated! […] with [this] was blended a series of images entirely dependent […] on the state in which Flatulence had placed the different parts of my Body […] all this without surprize –1

This notebook entry demonstrates how Coleridge’s childhood and adulthood experiences of sickness were dynamically related to each other and his feelings associated with the former were recalled each time he fell sick as an adult. Each new experience of physical sickness reminded him of the ill-health that he experienced as a child because the ‘impression’ of those days was ‘too’ deep in his mind. This idea of the constant presence of the memory of his childhood ill-health offers a valuable entry-point from which one can begin to understand the significance of childhood health for Coleridge. In my paper, I argue that Coleridge responded to the contemporary medical ideas about physical exercise being conducive to children’s health to re-imagine the relationship between readers, authors and the text. Several physicians in the late-eighteenth century England presented excessive reading and thinking as one of the most pernicious causes leading to nervous disorders among children as well as adults. William Buchan was, for example, a representative of the time when nervous disorders of the mind were considered to have proceeded from the diseases of the body, especially the digestive system. Outlining the causes of nervous disorders, Buchan noted, ‘Everything that tends to relax or weaken the body, disposes it to nervous diseases’.2 But there were two major causes for a person to develop nervous disorders: an ‘intense application to study’ and a lack of exercise.3 An intensive study not only weakened the body and fatigued the mind, it took one away from exercise which ‘in nervous disorders [was] superior to all medicines’.4 As his autobiographical letters reflect, Coleridge clearly acknowledged having committed both of these Buchan-ian gross errors in this regard: an intense reading as well as a lack of physical exercise. If, according to Buchan, excessive reading, thoughts, contemplation, engagement in acts of imagination caused nervous disorders among children, did Coleridge accept the bleak certainty that every child would become nervous by following imagination: my paper explores this question. I will read a letter written to Robert Lloyd by Coleridge, in 1809, where the latter outlined his plans for The Friend, as a response to this question. This exploration will not only outline how Coleridge adapts the newly-developing paediatric ideas into his writing, but it will also reinforce the idea that Romantic literature and medicine were quite in dialogue with each other.

1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Merton Christensen, and Anthony John Harding, 5 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, London: Routledge, and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957-2002), II, p. 2539.

2 William Buchan, Domestic Medicine: or, a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Disease by Regimen and Simple Medicines (London: T. Cadell, 1772), p. 1. (All citations from this book, unless otherwise mentioned, are from its Second Edition), p. 532.

3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. p. 541.

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Corinne, or Italy: nation embodied, (treacherous) woman

Judith Stove

Germaine de Staël composed Corinne (1807) during a period in which she was bodily excluded, by Napoleon’s order, from much of the physical space of France. Her heroine, Corinne, is drawn as representing in her person, both the virtues of her nation, Italy - its beauty and creative force - and also its characteristic failings, as seen from the viewpoint of Anglo-Scottish aristocrat Nelvil.

In Corinne, De Staël created a pioneering work, formative towards a nineteenth-century tradition which was to depict Italy as the site of bodily malaise, in particular the miasma associated with malaria. The ‘serenest welcome’ of Italy’s landscape, the temptations of a warm climate – in contrast with the bald coldness of northern Europe - hid the threat to life and health.

This ‘deception’ was integral to the attractions offered by Italy to her ‘lovers’ from other European nations, the tourists striving to lay claim to an Italy of the imagination. Italy, and Corinne, represent a mortal danger made more poignant by their power to attract. De Staël plays upon the themes of hidden menace and physical fragility in depicting the national character of an Italy long subdued and surpassed by stronger (masculine) nations, but ever resisting and surviving beneath the crude excrescences of Gothic (‘northern’) conquest. This paper will examine De Staël’s treatment of the body and health within the novel, an alternative framing which is complementary to the more familiar one of the nation.

Bodies of power: Ann Radcliffe’s Magical Sea Women and Percy Shelley’s bulwark against barbarism

Mandy Swann

Far from striving for purely visionary or idealistic expression, Romanticism is very much a bodily affair. Romantic writing reveals a preoccupation with altering mental processes, achieving material gains and the role of poetry in social functioning. Even so, the pursuit of the ideal and the visionary are inherent to the poetry and the poetic theory of Ann Radcliffe and Percy Shelley; what their work describes is a synergy between visionary ideals and the body through the experience of language, and the mental and social changes that result.

This paper explores the work of two unlikely bedfellows: Radcliffe and Shelley. Radcliffe’s interpolated poems in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) demonstrate the physical effects of poetry and the role this bodily affect has on securing female freedom and power. Through these poetic interpolations, Radcliffe’s heroines balance emotional excess and emotionlessness to ultimately ensure relative financial independence. Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821) invokes notions of the collective body, the foundations of human civilisation and the crucial role of poetry in its existence

Speakers

UNSW Canberra


Reading at the Limits of Digital Literary Mapping: Following Dorothy Wordsworth up Scafell Pike

Joanna E. Taylor

– and not simply by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam[.]

The message at the heart of Eavan Boland’s poem, ‘That the Science of Cartography is Limited’, is a straightforward one: that maps are good at representing where something is, but not at showing why it matters. Digital maps exaggerate these limitations. Notwithstanding attempts to represent digitally the experience of standing in a location (Google’s Street View being the most obvious example), digital maps – like their analogue precursors – cannot comprehend an embodied sense of place. This paper seeks to demonstrate incorporating embodied data alongside a literary text in a mapping environment might transform both how we read, and how we understand the role of embodiment in historical and contemporary place-making.

To do so, it takes as a case study one particular text: Dorothy Wordsworth’s epistolary account of her pioneering ascent of England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike, on October 7 1818. It reads this letter alongside data gathered from a recreation of this walk – precisely 200 years later – by a party of researchers, artists and mountaineers who followed in Wordsworth’s footsteps. In part, this was a recreation of an important moment in British Romantic literature and mountaineering history. But, as this paper claims, the recreation was also an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between active reading and digital technologies, wherein the maps created by walking this route might transform the ways we read and respond to the texts the initial ascent inspired. The paper’s ultimate claim is that bringing these two types of data – those generated by author and by reader – together can foreground a phenomenology of place that induces new readings both text and map.

“[H]ope’s last gleam in man’s extremity”: Lord Byron’s notes for The Island, or Christian and His Comrades (1823)

Alex Watson

In The Island, or Christian and His Comrades (1823) Lord Byron draws on real-life accounts of the Pitcairn Island settlement—the community of the nine Bounty mutineers and a group of Tahitians—to create the fictional story of the daring flight of the Tahitian woman Neuha and her Scottish husband Torquil from European capture. Byron adds a series of pithy notes, in which he acknowledges his reworking of figures and tropes from classical history and Middle Eastern literature, and cites as his main sources William Mariner’s An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands (1817) and William Bligh’s A Narrative of the Mutiny on board his Majesty’s Ship Bounty (1790)—even presenting a thirteen page extract of the latter as an “Appendix”.

Byron’s combination of epic verse narrative and conversational annotation and extensive sources recalls his earlier “Oriental” blockbusters, such as The Corsair (1814). Yet paying closer attention to Byron’s paratexts complicates Nigel Leask’s characterization of The Island as a reworking and resolution of the poet’s earlier Eastern tales into “one of Byron’s deepest indictments of European colonialism”.1 While, in his notes to his earlier writings, Byron displays his direct experience of travelling across Albania, Greece and Turkey, his notes to The Island reveal his representation of the Pacific to be drawn exclusively from his reading and thus a textual construct. I argue that examining more closely Byron’s annotation shows his portrayal of British-Tahitian community as utopian society to be tempered by a concern that this lofty vision may only be realizable in the poetic imagination not political reality.

1 Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 64.

Speakers

www.unsw.adfa.edu.au

UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force AcademyNorthcott Drive, Canberra ACT 2600

+61 2 6268 8112

[email protected]

394729824CRICOS No. 00098G

romantic studies association of australasia 2019 … · 12.30 - 13.30 lunch lecture theatre south...

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