Dreaming Romantic Europe at 2019 BARS Conference

The BARS 2019 conference will explore the potency of ‘fact’ and 'fantasy’ both in the Romantic period and during the afterlife of Romanticism. For more information, please visit the BARS 2019 website.

A Senior Scholar Panel devoted to RÊVE (Romantic Europe: the Virtual Exhibition)

This panel addresses the conference’s preoccupations by exploring the question of Romantic (im)materiality. How were Romantic fantasies grounded in the material fact of objects and places? It brings together 9 senior scholars who will focus an aspect of their cutting-edge research through particular ‘objects’ to form ‘exhibits’ for RÊVE.

Claire Connolly (University College, Cork), ‘The Literary Remains of Jeremiah Joseph Callanan’: Irish poetry on the Home Waters’: Connolly explores an unusual manuscript by a young Irish poet trying out exilic Romantic positions in Lisbon, a manuscript with an identity at once national, European, and imperial.

Deidre Shauna Lynch (Harvard University), ‘The handwritten title-page of a transcription of Keats’ Poems, 1828’. Lynch explores the pan-European phenomenon of investment in manuscript and the associated fantasy of ‘the singular book’ as a medium for friendship that emerges at the very moment we think of as the high-water mark in the history of the printed codex.

Ian Haywood (Roehampton University), ‘A map of the Republic of Europe.’ Haywood explores the romantic fantasy of a republic of Europe exemplified in a map.

Emma Clery (Southampton University), ‘A Circular Note from Herries & Co.’ Clery tells the story of how Jane Austen and her banker brother Henry were invited to dinner by the son of Sir Robert Herries, inventor of the travellers cheque, who made a fortune and transformed European tourism.

Anthony Mandal (Cardiff University), ‘The offices of the Minerva Press, Leadenhall’. Mandal resurrects the lost offices of the Minerva Press in 33 Leadenhall Street, London, where hard-nosed business acumen enabled its influential dissemination of Gothic fantasy in Britain and beyond.

Penny Fielding, (University of Edinburgh), ‘Margaret Chalmers’ Tea-cup.’ Fielding explores Romantic domesticity in the household and the writings of a Shetland poet.

Diego Saglia, ‘Beckford’s summerhouse.’ Saglia considers William Beckford’s summerhouse in Bath as an expression of orientalist fantasy.

Sonia Hofkosh (Tufts), ‘Byron’s Decoupage Screen’. Hofkosh explores Byron’s representation of a world of the imagination through an uncharacteristically domestic object.

Take-away free sample:

Nicola J. Watson (Open University), ‘Rousseau’s Tombs’. Watson tells the story of the travels of Rousseau’s remains to explore fantasies about the body of the romantic writer.

...and a partnered workshop

Alice Rhodes (University of York): ‘A ha’pennyworth of sedition, 1796’

Anne-Claire Michoux (University of Neuchâtel): ‘The petition for Robert Lovell Edgeworth to be permitted to stay in Paris, 1803’

Teresa Raçzka-Jeziorska (Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw): ’40 verses of Mickiewicz’s ‘Pan Tadeusz’ given to Ambroży Grabowski for ‘Autographs of Illustrious Men’’

Charlotte May (Nottingham University), ‘The decanter given to Byron by Samuel Rogers’

Workshop script: Nicola J. Watson (Open University): ‘William Cowper’s lavender-water bottle’