CFP – Romanticism across Borders International Conference – March 24-25, 2025

CALL FOR PAPERS

Romanticism across Borders International Conference

Keynote speaker: Prof. Nicholas Halmi (University of Oxford)

Université Paris Cité, Hôtel de Lauzun, March 24-25, 2025

Rationale: The concept of ‘borders’ is integral both to British Romanticism and to Romantic studies. Its centrality is primarily related to the considerable instability which, at the end of the eighteenth century, affected and displaced boundaries on simultaneously geopolitical, scientific, and cultural levels at once. On the one hand, the French and American Revolutions, followed by the Napoleonic wars, disrupted borders in Europe, as well as in the rest of the world, at the same time as the borders between private and public spheres became increasingly porous. These events overlapped with an accelerating imperial expansion, which reshaped the relationship between the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. In parallel, the scientific discoveries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to a profound reorganisation of scientific knowledge. Romantic writers and artists internalised these political and epistemological crises by redefining the disciplinary boundaries. This conference – which stems from the « Romanticism Across Borders » international seminar – encourages a contextual approach to these media, hence the need to adopt an interdisciplinary perspective on British Romanticism, as well as other Romanticisms.

The transdisciplinary focus of the conference aims to strengthen academic ties both within and beyond the community of British Romantic studies. It will therefore encourage participants to adopt transnational, ecocritical, and intermedial perspectives on the concept of borders.

Moreover, the conference further intends to broaden the periodization of Romanticism, in keeping with recent findings on ‘Late Romanticism’ and ‘Romantic Legacies’. This orientation will enable to redefine the temporal boundaries of the Romantic movement in literature and the arts. The conference seeks to involve not only scholars working in Romantic studies, but also specialists in the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it thus welcomes research on the Enlightenment, the Gothic, Victorian studies, and Modernism. This flexible approach to periodisation will render the conference more inclusive from both geographical and historical points of view, especially considering that Romanticisms and their respective boundaries vary according to national literary canons, whose formation reaches back to the eighteenth century.

By meshing these approaches to Romanticism, the conference hopes to emphasise and examine anew the profound epistemological transformations, and the ramifications thereof, that originated in the eighteenth century in Europe, and that affected literature, the arts, and the sciences at once.

About the Conference :The conference aims to bring together researchers specializing in Romantic studies, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more generally. An extension of an international virtual seminar that has been running since 2022, this conference aims to reinforce ties between academics beyond national borders. Funded by the ‘Paris Oxford Partnership’ and involving scholars from both Université Paris Cité and the University of Oxford, it particularly hopes to extend already existing ties between these institutions. The conference will be followed by a collection of essays, achieving a long-term impact by fostering further collaborative partnerships. The theme of borders in the Romantic period, moreover, was originally designed to correspond to the activities of the research group ‘Frontières du Littéraire’ which is part of the LARCA Research Unit at Université Paris Cité, and of the Paris-Oxford Partnership.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Cross-cultural and cross-border exchanges in the 18th and 19th centuries
• The merging of disciplines (literature, arts, sciences) during the Romantic era
• Romantic responses to scientific discoveries and technological advancements
• Romantic travel narratives
• Geopolitical borders in the Romantic age
• The impact of imperial expansion on Romantic writers and artists
• Romanticism and / in Translation
• Ecocritical perspectives on Romanticism
• Cross-genre innovations in Romanticism
• Intermedial perspectives on Romanticism
• The global legacy of British Romanticism
• Romanticism and Enlightenment thought
• Romanticism’s influence beyond the Romantic age
• Re-examining the temporal boundaries of the Romantic period

Conference website: https://romanticismacrossborders.com/ X: https://x.com/roacrossborders

Conference Organisers:

Camille Adnot (Université Paris-Est Créteil), Félix Duperrier (Université Paris Cité), Pauline Hortolland (Université Franche-Comté)

Scientific Committee:

Caroline Bertonèche (Université Grenoble Alpes), Luisa Calè (Birkbeck, University of London), Oliver Clarkson (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford), David Duff (Queen Mary University of London), Laurent Folliot (Sorbonne Université), Jean-Marie Fournier (Université Paris Cité), Paul Hamilton (Queen Mary University of London), John-Erik Hansson (Université Paris Cité), Erica McAlpine (St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford), Sophie Musitelli (Université de Lille), Frédéric Ogée (Université Paris Cité)

Indicative Bibliography:

Casaliggi, Carmen, and Paul March-Russell, eds. Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Chao, Shun-Liang, et John Michael Corrigan (eds.), Romantic Legacies Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts, Routledge, 2019.

Constantinesco, Thomas, et Sophie Musitelli, Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking in Literature, Routledge, 2015.

Gardner, John, et David Stewart (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s, Cambridge UP, 2024

Gottlieb, Evan, (ed.) Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820, Bucknell UP, 2014.

—. Romantic Globalism, British Literature and Modern World Order, Ohio State UP, 2016.

Gray, Richard T., Nicholas Halmi, Gary J. Handwerk, Michael A. Rosenthal and Klaus Vieweg, Inventions of the Imagination: Romanticism and Beyond, University of Washington Press, 2011.

Hall, Dewey W., Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies, Lexington Books, 2016.

Halmi, Nicholas, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, Oxford UP, 2007.

—, ‘The Literature of Italy in Byron’s Poems of 1817–20’, in Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia (eds.), Byron and Italy, Manchester UP, 2017, pp. 23–43.

—, ‘The Greco-Roman Revival’, in David Duff (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 661–74.

—, ‘European Romanticism: Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch’, in Warren Breckman and Peter Gordon (eds.), The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, Cambridge UP, 2019, vol. 1, pp. 40–64.

—, ‘Universal Histories’, introduction to special issue of Intellectual History Review, 33.3, September 2023, pp. 367–74.

Hamilton, Paul, Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics, Oxford UP, 2013.

—. Orientation in European Romanticism: The Art of Falling Upwards, Cambridge UP, 2022.

Hunt, Stephen. Green Romanticism: The Natural World and Human Well-Being, 1775-1900. Sarrebruck: VDM Publishings, 2011.

Mee, Jon, Networks of Improvement: Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution, Chicago UP, 2023.

Musitelli, Sophie, and Céline Sabiron (eds.), Romanticism and Time, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021.

Robertson, Ben P., Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780–1830, Lexington Books, 2015.

Saglia, Diego, European Literatures in Britain, 1815-1832: Romantic Translations, Cambridge UP, 2019.

Sandy, Mark, Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism, Edinburgh UP, 2021.

Sha, Richard, C., Imagination and Science in Romanticism, Johns Hopkins UP, 2021.

Stafford, Fiona, Local Attachments, The Province of Poetry, OUP, 2010.

Vincent, Patrick, ed. The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature, Cambridge UP, 2023.