1A Luisa Calè: Blake’s Europe: This seminar examines Blake’s Europe as a verbal and visual experiment in prophetic writing through illuminated printing, exploring how to bring home to the British Reader an open-ended continental theatre of inter-related and overlapping revolutions. In the first part of the seminar we will explore the genres, tropes, and conventions of prophetic writing, focusing on the multiple temporalities and structures of feeling associated with revolutionary time to understand how the understanding of continental revolutions is shaped by repetition, commemoration, and anticipation (the revolution as repetition and anticipated dissemination from America to Europe; Europe a Prophecy’s relationship to America a Prophecy; its activation of metereological, seasonal, religious, and revolutionary calendar).
1B Brecht de Groote: Letters and Empire: This seminar studies the Romantic imagination of the British Empire. We will be studying Romantic letters— written to, from and often for past and current colonies—in order to examine why it is specifically letters which offer a rich source of information on the contemporary understanding and imagination of the Empire, and what attending to them may reveal. In our conversations on Romanticism and Empire, we will particularly be thinking about concepts of distance, sympathy and literary colonisation. Readings: Charles Lamb, “Distant Correspondents;” Barron Field, selections from First Fruits of Australian Poetry and Geographical Memoirs; Keats, selections from Letters.
2A David Duff: Cognitive Poetics and the Romantic Ode: This seminar explores the poetics of the ode, setting eighteenth-century and Romantic theories of poetic logic and sublime transport alongside concepts of attention, immersion and narrative transportation from modern cognitive psychology. The rethinking of Romantic poetics in terms of neuropsychology and other forms of cognitive science has opened up new lines of interpretation while also revealing the extent to which Romantic literary theory and practice were themselves grounded in contemporary psychology and brain science. Studying poems by Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, the seminar will identify the Romantic ode as a site of ‘hot cognition’, showing how the apparent emotional and linguistic excesses of the genre conceal an underlying imaginative control and a practice of brinkmanship that produced some of the most daring and powerful works of Romantic poetry.
2B Laurent Folliot: Quaint Romanticism: Romanticism has perhaps been most commonly defined as a grand attempt at comprehensive cultural refoundation, a striving after regenerative visionary potential best expressed through ambitious programmatic statements and lyrical gestures. Yet the literary corpus we commonly refer to as Romantic presents numerous instances and various strands of what may provisionally be called quaintness—i.e. a playful staging of idiosyncrasy which, more often than not, enables writers to toy with established forms and instances of cultural authority whilst ostensibly foregoing them. “Quaint” romanticism, I will be suggesting, typically avails itself of a willful disconnect from the actual and topical, from matters of (the) moment, in order to embrace the obscure, the anachronistic and the bookish; it tends to foreground the quirks of the isolated individual consciousness and the perplexities of human communication, rather than to elevate the poet as prophet or as ‘Man speaking to Men’; and though stopping short of contemporary notions of ‘queerness,’ it mostly eschews the more straightforward or patriarchal expressions of masculinity. The aim of this seminar will be to put this hypothesis to the test by tracing the antecedents of “Quaint Romanticism”—notably in the everevolving legacy of Menippean satire, in the growing taste for antiquarian and folk lore, or in sentimental whimsy—, and by identifying some of its crucial manifestations during the High Romantic period, focusing in particular on representations of cultural peripherality in the early historical novel, on the importance of neglected or antiquated urban spaces to the genre of the Romantic essay, and on the presence of a quaint or fanciful vein of lyricism even in those poets we most readily associate with the major, ‘High’ or canonical aspects of Romanticism.
3A Christoph Bode: The Romantic Sonnet: In this seminar, we will first recapitulate the various forms of the European sonnet (Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare…) and briefly bring to mind what you can do within each form. I will then walk you through a selection of English Romantic sonnets (by William Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley, and John Keats – practicall all canonical) and, in a kind of close reading, reveal what their respective inner logic is, how they ‚tick‘. (Well before time, a handout of these poems will be made available to all those who are interested.) Without giving away too much, one can say that one of the major points will be to show how these sonnets pay homage to great tradition and, at the same time, transcend that tradition in most creative, revolutionary ways: many of these poems, while transgressing the formal rules of the genre, remain true to the spirit of the sonnet tradition, as known from Shakespeare and Milton, for example. It is one of the aims of this seminar to arrive at a deeper understanding of what is actually meant when we speak of „the meaning of the form“. Another is to make you fall in love with poetry (once more).
3B Mirka Horová: Romantic Italy: We will discuss a selection of key British Romantic poems that reflect upon and feed the fascination with Italian art, literature and history as well as the immediate natural, political and socio-cultural reality, significantly influencing the nineteenth-century idea of Italy, and, in some respects, even our own. While Italy’s powerful history naturally looms large in these poems, we will trace the various ways in which the British sense of the Italian cultural capital interacted with or was transformed by the issues of the contemporary present, and how this inspired the Romantic imagination, fostering a bilateral cultural exchange. We will also discuss the ways in which nature in these poems revaluates the ‘traditional’ reception of Italy centred on Roman antiquity and the Renaissance, uncovering how these poems integrate existing literary tropes while innovating across the board. The composite, transhistorical idea of Italy complements its early nineteenth-century ‘reality’ in these texts, inhabited and shaped by the subjective Romantic perspective. We will discuss the significance of the exilic dimension in these poems, as well as the ways in which the Romantic poets adopt and adapt Italy in their own specific ways. Romantic Italy is a land of shared imagination, made of stories and impressions, dreams and hopes as well as despair and decline, personal and collective – dynamic in nature and transgressive in its future potential.
