Session Calls
This page displays calls for sessions seeking contributors.
To propose a potential session you would like to assemble, please email us with a description by Friday December 15th, using the main conference email address, BARSConf2024@gmail.com. Please specify whether your proposal is for an in-person or an online session. We will post accepted proposals on this page; potential participants can then get in touch with you directly so that you can submit full details ahead of the deadline using the session proposal form (in person / online).
If you are responding to any of these calls, please do so well ahead of the conference deadline on Friday January 19th 2024.
In-Person Calls:
- Making and Unmaking Forms of Freedom
- Byron and Innovation
- Extractive Arts: The Making of Unmaking
- Horti-culture: The Flowers and Gardens of Romanticism
- Panel for Charles and Mary Lamb Society
- Paratexts, Footnotes, and Context in Romantic Literature
- Romantic Waste
- NASSR Session: Remaking Romanticism / Romantic Remakes
- Contemporary Speculative Reimaginings of Romanticism
- Faustian Romanticism
- Romantic Data: Unmaking and Remaking Romantic Texts
- New Directions in Labouring-Class Writing
Digital Calls:
- NASSR Session: Remaking Romanticism / Romantic Remakes
- Making and Unmaking Character
- Romantic Data: Unmaking and Remaking Romantic Texts
- Making and Unmaking the Future: Manifestos, Uprisings, Rebellions and Revolutions
- New Directions in Labouring-Class Writing
- Extractive Arts: The Making of Unmaking
- Horti-culture: The Flowers and Gardens of Romanticism
in-person sESSIONS SEEKING CONTRIBUTORS
Making and Unmaking Forms of Freedom
Susan Stewart opens her 2011 book The Poet’s Freedom with the image of a boy meticulously constructing a sandcastle over a period of time, before swiftly levelling the whole thing with one good kick. In Stewart’s reflection on the scene, which for her evokes Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, the boy represents “a certain relation we have to making. Without the freedom of reversibility enacted in unmaking, or at least always present as the potential for unmaking, we cannot give value to our making”. This panel explores processes of making and unmaking in relation to poetic freedom and the question of value — the philosophies of personal and social liberty expressed in Romantic poetry, but also, and consonant with Stewart’s reading, the expressive freedoms made possible by the apparently constraining features of meter, rhythm, and rhyme.
To discuss proposing a paper for this session, please contact Dr Chris Townsend: ct97@st-andrews.ac.uk.
Byron and Innovation
Perhaps no other poet was as aware of the nuances of technique, as attuned to marketplace trends, and as keenly attentive to popular topics and debates as Lord Byron. Both his poetry and his public persona show evidence of careful, conscious construction as he responds to, engages with, and (occasionally) ridicules contemporary culture.
The Byron Society is pleased to announce we are sponsoring a special panel as part of the 2024 British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS) conference, which will take place in Glasgow from 23rd July to 25th July.
Forming part of the wider conference theme of making and unmaking, and marking the bicentenary of his death, this special panel invites papers on the topic of Byron and Innovation.
Topics include, but are not restricted to:
- Appropriation and adaptation
- Poetic techniques and innovations
- Construction and destruction of reputation and identity
- Byron, collaboration, and canonicity
- Byron and the mechanics of publication
- Byron’s editing and editorial practices
Bursaries of £250 each will be awarded for the three papers selected for this panel, to cover the cost of travel / registration / accommodation.
Applicants can be at any stage of their career, and living / working in any country.
Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, together with a short professional biography to our Director, Emily Paterson-Morgan at contact@thebyronsociety.com and emily@p-m.uk.com.
Extractive Arts: The Making of Unmaking
Increasing stress of late has been placed on the large-scale energy transformation that took place during the British Romantic period thanks to coal — infamously seeing humankind ‘break free’ of its energy dependency on organic sources. This transformation was however partnered, if not underpinned, by a broader intensification of natural resource extraction which has been given less attention.
Questioning the applicability of the modern insistence on extraction’s invisibility, this in-person panel explores how conceptions of making in Romantic Britain intersected with an awareness of unmaking — the destruction or revolution of existing systems, cultures, and ideas that had persisted before. As well as exploring how extraction achieved new heights of economic, imaginative, and environmental prominence, contributions are welcomed on the topics of:
- How extractive environments — mines, fields, or seas — labour processes and infrastructures — slag heaps, steam engines, or canals — compelled but also challenged existing aesthetic modes and forms of representation.
- How extraction, or unearthed substances like coal or fossils, offered metaphorical inspiration, and/or featured in theories of poetic creation, the poet’s (and humanity’s) place in time, or the nature of historical or cultural progress.
- The possible relationship between natural resource extraction and literary extracts, excerpts, or epigrams, ‘extractive’ literary forms like anthologies, and the materials, layout, and circulation of books.
- The presence of extracted resources within art (or as objet d’art), and the influence of extractive wealth over patronage, publishing, exhibiting, and collecting.
To discuss proposing a paper for this session, please contact Dr Adam Bridgen: a.bridgen@leeds.ac.uk, stipulating whether you’d like to present in Glasgow or in the online sessions.
Horti-culture: The Flowers and Gardens of Romanticism
From Mary Moser’s floral artwork to Catherine Earnshaw’s small garden plot in Wuthering Heights, Romanticism offers a wealth of representations of gardens and flowers, in a conversation between arts, aesthetics and social codes of transcultural and transnational significance.
The organisers of this session welcome proposals examining The Flowers and Gardens of Romanticism from a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective. Topics suggested include, but are not limited to:
- the significance of gardens and flowers and their relationships with the house and household
- literary descriptions of gardens and flowers
- exotic and tropical plants
- natura naturata vs natura naturans
- the dramaturgy of landscaping
- flower arts
- pleasure gardens and the pleasure of gardens
- changing perceptions of gardens and flowers
- creativity and transartistic conversations around the garden
- private estates and public parks
- the garden, sociability and power
- the orchard vs the garden
- Romantic herbaria
Papers addressing literary and cultural traditions beyond England are particularly welcome, in order to create an international dialogue around the cult and culture of Romantic flowers and gardens.
To discuss proposing a paper for this session, please contact Prof. Francesca Saggini, stipulating whether your proposal is for an in person or an online session: fsaggini@unitus.it.
Panel for Charles and Mary Lamb Society
The Charles Lamb Society invites proposals for 20-minute papers on the writings of Charles and Mary Lamb and their circle. We would be especially interested in paper topics that deal with the conference theme of ‘Romantic Making and Unmaking’, and which reflect new critical directions on the Lambs. How might we read the Lambs in the 21st century?
The Society would like to offer a £100 bursary for PGRs/ECRs selected to present as part of this panel, plus a year’s subscription to our peer-reviewed twice-yearly journal, edited by John Gardner, one of the plenary speakers for BARS 2024.
Please contact Dr Adam Neikirk, Communications Officer, Charles Lamb Society at adamneikirk@gmail.com or Felicity James, co-chair of the Society, at fj21@le.ac.uk with a proposal of no more than 250 words.
Paratexts, Footnotes, and Context in Romantic Literature
Romantic texts are often distinguished by the use of paratexts and footnotes. What makes these parts of published works important to our understanding of their main texts? Among the aims of their authors is to show the extent of their scholarship, to provide an alternative to the main text, and to provide a sort of “further reading” for their audiences. Some of these added materials are as long as or even longer than the main text, as in Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, in which the footnotes take up almost half of the printed book.
This session welcomes papers that consider paratexts and footnotes. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- The “genre of the footnote”
- Forwards and introductions
- Lengthy footnotes and their aims and impact on the literary text
- The politics of the footnote
- Footnotes and other paratexts as alternative or disruption
Please submit proposals of 250 words with a brief biography to Reyam Rammahi at reyam.rammahi@some.ox.ac.uk.
Romantic Waste
The connection between waste (perhaps the most radical form of ‘unmaking’) and modernity is so close that Marco Armiero has recently proposed that the Anthropocene should be reconceptualised as the Wasteocene.[1] At the dawn of this era, writers of the Romantic period were already conscious of the consequences of industrial revolution and of the effects of its excesses and discards: many literary works of the period express revulsion against the wasting of human lives, habitats, and values amidst the drive to exploit resources for manufacturing. At the same time, writers were exploring an idealised aesthetics of waste that celebrated artistic creation as a form of excessive productivity, one that surpassed mere manufacture or ‘making.’ This session will feature papers that address the complex relationships between the processes of making/unmaking and waste/wasting in the Romantic period. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Representations of waste caused by industry and mass production
- Wasted lands: despoiling the natural world, pollution
- Romantic theories of geological / evolutionary waste
- Literary leftovers and the processes of artistic making and remaking: unused drafts, excisions, leftovers, recycled material
- Waste aesthetics/poetics: essayism, the fragment poem, sublime excess
- Wasted architecture: ruins and rubble
- Wasted lives: dispossession, exploitation, slavery, vagrancy
- The Romantic abject: horror, disgust, and making as othering
- Literary remains: the posthumous corpus, editing, and the making and unmaking of literary reputations
- Wasting time: idleness, wandering, and unproductivity
- World-making: Romantic ontologies / metaphysical theories of waste;
- Waste epistemologies: clearing epistemic ‘rubbish’ (e.g. superstition) from the foundations of knowledge
- Economics of waste: waste, surplus value, commodity culture
Please submit proposals (c. 250 words) to Tim Milnes: Tim.Milnes@ed.ac.uk.
[1] Marco Armiero, Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump (Cambridge UP, 2021)
NASSR Session: Remaking Romanticism / Romantic Remakes
Adding to the conference’s theme of making and unmaking, this panel (or panels – for both in person and digital presentation) aim(s) to consider the remake both in and of Romanticism. The remake is a way of paying homage to an original. It is also a way to recreate and reinvent this original, to argue for its contemporary urgency. The stories we continue to tell about Romanticism are ways of keeping Romantic culture, Romantic thought alive. As such, this panel asks: what elements of Romanticism get remade, or deserve to be remade? As well as: how did Romanticism itself remake genres, tropes, and ideas from the past (eg Romantic medievalism, the Romantic fascination with Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as closer contemporaries like Rousseau and Wollstonecraft)? And: how has Romanticism been remade (from the countless adaptations and remediations of Jane Austen to the work of collectives like the Bigger 6, remaking Romanticism for a more diverse, inclusive, and accessible future?)
To discuss proposing a paper for this session or sessions, please contact Andy McInnes: Andrew.McInnes@edgehill.ac.uk.
Contemporary Speculative Reimaginings of Romanticism
Contemporary peculative fiction—a term which may cover everything from SF and alternative history over fantasy to biofiction—often sources materials from history. When such fiction draws on Romantic sources, setting tales in the Romantic period or organising some form of time-travel to teleport Romantic writers into the present, it calls upon a period which is itself heavily invested in speculative writing, so much so that each of the genres covered under the label may be sourced back to the Romantic period. Examples of such contemporary(ish) speculative reimaginings of Romanticism include Ackroyd, Chatterton; Prantera, Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion; Jellicoe, Shelley; or, The Idealist; Foulds, The Quickening Maze; Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine; Aldiss, Frankenstein Unbound; Holland, The Vampyre; and, most recently, Kuang, Babel.
Though Romanticism clearly features prominently in many recent speculative texts, it has been much less prominent in criticism, with such books as Counterfactual Romanticism (2019) and Romantic Lives (1999) marking important exceptions. Instead, labels like “Neo-Victorian” and “neo-Gothic” are typically used to designate texts which may perhaps be classes as “neo-Romantic.” This panel asks if there is something like a distinct neo-Romantic form of writing, and how we may crituique such neo-Romantic fiction.
The panel will examine recent and not so recent reimagining and uses of Romanticism in speculative fiction. It aims to examine (1) how speculation about past, future and present anchored Romanticism’s understanding of itself; and (2) how reimaginings of Romanticism now anchor our understanding of our present. Further questions include:
- What happens when Romanticism is unmade and remade in novels, films, and other media? What changes, and what remains?
- How and why did Romanticism speculate on itself, and how does such speculation inform current writing?
- Is Romanticism now simply a template of figures, associations, and tropes and perhaps indistuinguishable from loose categories like Neo-Victorian? Or is there a more fundamental examination of the bases of writing, history, and mediation going on?
- How may we square the continuing cultural importance of Romanticism with its relative underrepresentation in speculative fiction?
Papers may address a range of media, and may take up period pieces as well as speculative fiction, bio fiction, fantasy, and the like.
Please send abstracts of max. 250 words or any queries to brecht.degroote@ugent.be.
Faustian Romanticism
From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Faustian preoccupations pervade the Romantic imagination. In line with the conference’s theme, this panel considers how Faust is a hero both made and unmade, and how Romantic texts might foster a type of ‘sympathy for the devil’ which recasts monstrosity and terror as epistemological experiences. This panel therefore invites papers considering the ambivalent role of Faust-like figures in Romantic literature (and its legacies). In particular, it invites papers addressing the role of Faustian themes in the emergence of a Romantic Gothic environmental awareness, as well as the staging of Gothic transgressions as epistemological processes, beyond narratives of othering.
To propose a paper for this session, please send an abstract (c. 250 words) to Dr Madeline Potter: madeline.potter@ed.ac.uk.
Romantic Data: Unmaking and Remaking Romantic Texts
Digital editions are a well-established part of the Romantic scholarly landscape, and major digital editing and transcription projects (such as the Blake Archive, Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online, Davy Notebooks, The Mary Hamilton Papers, Transcribe Bentham) augment access to print and archival material far beyond institutional walls. But the possibilities of this mass digitisation go beyond access and allow us to remake approaches to literary study. The conversion of text to computer-readable form has opened up new avenues for romanticists working in Computational Literary Studies to engage with these texts as datasets. Thus, this panel seeks to ask what happens when we ‘fashion, construct, produce, prepare’ (in the words of the CFP) such datasets, imposing alternative structures on what is frequently – and as Jerome McGann argues, fallaciously – termed ‘unstructured’ data (such as text, image, sound)? What new affordances are possible, and what, if anything, is lost? How might we see textual structures differently? How do we make datasets meaningful, and how do we read their meanings? We invite proposals that address how computational and data-driven methods both unmake, and remake, scholarly approaches to texts of Romantic period (both ‘texts’ and ‘Romantic’ being broadly defined). We welcome diverse analytical and generative methodologies that could include (but are not limited to) statistical and quantitative analysis, text-mining, social network analysis, machine learning, and linked data. We also invite proposals to consider the concords and discords between literary analysis at small and large scales, between close and distant reading, and the biases and inconsistencies that colour each approach.
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Cassie Ulph (c.r.ulph@leeds.ac.uk) and Justin Tonra (justin.tonra@universityofgalway.ie). Please state in your submission whether you are applying for the Online or the In-Person session.
New Directions in Labouring-Class Writing
This panel seeks to bring together scholars working on labouring-class writing to discuss work — past, recent, or ongoing — which presents a new or generative direction in or approach to this field. Conscious of the way in which Romanticism marked the high point but also the end of the labouring-class poet with Robert Southey’s The Lives of Uneducated Poets (1831), we are particularly interested in contributions that reflect on how the canon of labouring-class poetry has come to be made and, in turn, what we make of that canon. We invite contributions from established scholars as well as those new to the field. Potential themes include, but are not restricted to:
- how labouring-class writers ‘made it’, or were made, into print, and its impact on their writing and reputation.
- the influence of labouring-class poets on the canonical Romantic poets, and vice-versa.
- the development of working-class readerships.
- our current canon of labouring-class poetry and its other possible form/forums.
- labouring-class poetry across borders and the impacts of nationalisms.
- the impact of industrialisation and social change.
- labouring-class poetry and the globe: global, international, and transnational approaches.
- intersectional approaches, that approach class alongside other important group identifiers like gender, age, race, or disability.
- work engaging with ecological ideas or the human/animal divide.
- work intersecting with decolonisation and transatlantic approaches.
To discuss giving a paper for this panel (or panels – whether in person or digital), please contact John Goodridge (johnagoodridge@googlemail.com) and Adam Bridgen (a.bridgen@leeds.ac.uk). Please state in your submission whether you are applying for the Online or the In-Person session.
ONLINE SESSIONS SEEKING CONTRIBUTORS
NASSR Session: Remaking Romanticism / Romantic Remakes
Adding to the conference’s theme of making and unmaking, this panel (or panels – for both in person and digital presentation) aim(s) to consider the remake both in and of Romanticism. The remake is a way of paying homage to an original. It is also a way to recreate and reinvent this original, to argue for its contemporary urgency. The stories we continue to tell about Romanticism are ways of keeping Romantic culture, Romantic thought alive. As such, this panel asks: what elements of Romanticism get remade, or deserve to be remade? As well as: how did Romanticism itself remake genres, tropes, and ideas from the past (eg Romantic medievalism, the Romantic fascination with Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as closer contemporaries like Rousseau and Wollstonecraft)? And: how has Romanticism been remade (from the countless adaptations and remediations of Jane Austen to the work of collectives like the Bigger 6, remaking Romanticism for a more diverse, inclusive, and accessible future?)
To discuss proposing a paper for this session or sessions, please contact Andy McInnes: Andrew.McInnes@edgehill.ac.uk.
Making and Unmaking Character
The conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction continue to shape how literary character is understood, theorised, and discussed. Yet centring realist depictions of character risks overlooking the variety of ways character is made and consumed. The past several decades have seen a critical return to theorising character, and recent scholarship (Frow; Anderson; Felski and Moi) examines character beyond the bounds of the conventionally literary, looking to how character is constructed in digital spaces and in contemporary literary nonfiction. Yet the texts of the past, perhaps even more so than the texts of the present, challenge a model of character yoked to realist fiction. Scholarship continues to identify the Romantic period as crucial to the history of literary character (e.g. Paige; Lynch). Given this, and the importance of the Romantic period to the modern category of “literature”, we invite proposals for papers that focus on characters in texts beyond the “literary.” How are our theories of character made and unmade when we explore the treatment of character outside its conventional remit: in spaces such as Romantic-period celebrity culture, newspapers, ephemeral and pornographic print, paratexts, histories, popular performances, and satires? What role does repetition and citation play in the making of Romantic characters? How are these characters given bodies? Does the construction of character in these texts disrupt or support critical narratives about Romanticism and the individual? How is Romantic-period character commodified and consumed? We are particularly interested in how these characters might trouble categories of genre and form, and welcome accounts of formulaic, citational, strange or forgotten representations of Romantic-period characters.
If you are interested in participating in this panel, please send a proposal of c. 250 words and a brief bio to Dr Nicola Parsons (University of Sydney) and Dr Amelia Dale (Australian National University): nicola.parsons@sydney.edu.au and amelia.dale@anu.edu.au.
Romantic Data: Unmaking and Remaking Romantic Texts
Digital editions are a well-established part of the Romantic scholarly landscape, and major digital editing and transcription projects (such as the Blake Archive, Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online, Davy Notebooks, The Mary Hamilton Papers, Transcribe Bentham) augment access to print and archival material far beyond institutional walls. But the possibilities of this mass digitisation go beyond access and allow us to remake approaches to literary study. The conversion of text to computer-readable form has opened up new avenues for romanticists working in Computational Literary Studies to engage with these texts as datasets. Thus, this panel seeks to ask what happens when we ‘fashion, construct, produce, prepare’ (in the words of the CFP) such datasets, imposing alternative structures on what is frequently – and as Jerome McGann argues, fallaciously – termed ‘unstructured’ data (such as text, image, sound)? What new affordances are possible, and what, if anything, is lost? How might we see textual structures differently? How do we make datasets meaningful, and how do we read their meanings? We invite proposals that address how computational and data-driven methods both unmake, and remake, scholarly approaches to texts of Romantic period (both ‘texts’ and ‘Romantic’ being broadly defined). We welcome diverse analytical and generative methodologies that could include (but are not limited to) statistical and quantitative analysis, text-mining, social network analysis, machine learning, and linked data. We also invite proposals to consider the concords and discords between literary analysis at small and large scales, between close and distant reading, and the biases and inconsistencies that colour each approach.
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Cassie Ulph (c.r.ulph@leeds.ac.uk) and Justin Tonra (justin.tonra@universityofgalway.ie). Please state in your submission whether you are applying for the Online or the In-Person session.
Making and Unmaking the Future: Manifestos, Uprisings, Rebellions and Revolutions
Manifestos, uprisings, rebellions and revolutions seek to both ‘unmake’ a predictable future and ‘make’ a new reality by producing or calling for change. Whether in direct action or through the circulation of texts, writers, insurgents, activists and communities demand change in the present and the creation of a different set of conditions for the future. The Romantic insurgent or writer imagines a future they desire and decries a future they foresee if nothing were to change. This session invites papers on novels, stories, poems, letters, pamphlets or any other text that expresses this break with the present as an act of making and unmaking futures and reconsiders the ripple effects of direct action in uprisings, protests, rebellions and revolutions in Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas.
To propose a paper, please contact the session organisers, Evy Varsamopoulou (University of Cyprus) and Maria Varsam (University of the Peloponnese) with a c. 250-word abstract: evy.varsamopoulou@ucy.ac.cy.
New Directions in Labouring-Class Writing
This panel seeks to bring together scholars working on labouring-class writing to discuss work — past, recent, or ongoing — which presents a new or generative direction in or approach to this field. Conscious of the way in which Romanticism marked the high point but also the end of the labouring-class poet with Robert Southey’s The Lives of Uneducated Poets (1831), we are particularly interested in contributions that reflect on how the canon of labouring-class poetry has come to be made and, in turn, what we make of that canon. We invite contributions from established scholars as well as those new to the field. Potential themes include, but are not restricted to:
- how labouring-class writers ‘made it’, or were made, into print, and its impact on their writing and reputation.
- the influence of labouring-class poets on the canonical Romantic poets, and vice-versa.
- the development of working-class readerships.
- our current canon of labouring-class poetry and its other possible form/forums.
- labouring-class poetry across borders and the impacts of nationalisms.
- the impact of industrialisation and social change.
- labouring-class poetry and the globe: global, international, and transnational approaches.
- intersectional approaches, that approach class alongside other important group identifiers like gender, age, race, or disability.
- work engaging with ecological ideas or the human/animal divide.
- work intersecting with decolonisation and transatlantic approaches.
To discuss giving a paper for this panel (or panels – whether in person or digital), please contact John Goodridge (johnagoodridge@googlemail.com) and Adam Bridgen (a.bridgen@leeds.ac.uk). Please state in your submission whether you are applying for the Online or the In-Person session.
Extractive Arts: The Making of Unmaking
Increasing stress of late has been placed on the large-scale energy transformation that took place during the British Romantic period thanks to coal — infamously seeing humankind ‘break free’ of its energy dependency on organic sources. This transformation was however partnered, if not underpinned, by a broader intensification of natural resource extraction which has been given less attention.
Questioning the applicability of the modern insistence on extraction’s invisibility, this in-person panel explores how conceptions of making in Romantic Britain intersected with an awareness of unmaking — the destruction or revolution of existing systems, cultures, and ideas that had persisted before. As well as exploring how extraction achieved new heights of economic, imaginative, and environmental prominence, contributions are welcomed on the topics of:
- How extractive environments — mines, fields, or seas — labour processes and infrastructures — slag heaps, steam engines, or canals — compelled but also challenged existing aesthetic modes and forms of representation.
- How extraction, or unearthed substances like coal or fossils, offered metaphorical inspiration, and/or featured in theories of poetic creation, the poet’s (and humanity’s) place in time, or the nature of historical or cultural progress.
- The possible relationship between natural resource extraction and literary extracts, excerpts, or epigrams, ‘extractive’ literary forms like anthologies, and the materials, layout, and circulation of books.
- The presence of extracted resources within art (or as objet d’art), and the influence of extractive wealth over patronage, publishing, exhibiting, and collecting.
To discuss proposing a paper for this session, please contact Dr Adam Bridgen: a.bridgen@leeds.ac.uk, stipulating whether you’d like to present in Glasgow or in the online sessions.
Horti-culture: The Flowers and Gardens of Romanticism
From Mary Moser’s floral artwork to Catherine Earnshaw’s small garden plot in Wuthering Heights, Romanticism offers a wealth of representations of gardens and flowers, in a conversation between arts, aesthetics and social codes of transcultural and transnational significance.
The organisers of this session welcome proposals examining The Flowers and Gardens of Romanticism from a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective. Topics suggested include, but are not limited to:
- the significance of gardens and flowers and their relationships with the house and household
- literary descriptions of gardens and flowers
- exotic and tropical plants
- natura naturata vs natura naturans
- the dramaturgy of landscaping
- flower arts
- pleasure gardens and the pleasure of gardens
- changing perceptions of gardens and flowers
- creativity and transartistic conversations around the garden
- private estates and public parks
- the garden, sociability and power
- the orchard vs the garden
- Romantic herbaria
Papers addressing literary and cultural traditions beyond England are particularly welcome, in order to create an international dialogue around the cult and culture of Romantic flowers and gardens.
To discuss proposing a paper for this session, please contact Prof. Francesca Saggini, stipulating whether your proposal is for an in person or an online session: fsaggini@unitus.it.