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Programme with Abstracts
Edgy Romanticism / Romanticism on Edge – Saturday 9th April 2016
Programme
9.30-10.00: Registration and Coffee
10.00-11.00: Keynote 1: Nick Groom: The Edge of Ruin: Archipelagic and Catachthonic Romanticism
11.00-11.15: Coffee Break
11.15-12.30: Panel 1: Romantic Travel
Chair: Michael Bradshaw
1. Elizabeth Edwards: Layered Landscapes – Travel Writing as Romantic Geology
2. Emilee Morrall: “Willingly on the Margin”: Charlotte Smith and the Borders of Romanticism
3. Julia Coole: “Who Shall Now Lead?”: The Notes to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Rewriting of Albania
12.30-1.30: Lunch
1.30-2.45: Panel 2: Women Writers on the Edge
Chair: Steve Van Hagen
1. Bethan Roberts: Charlotte Smith on Edge
2. Anna Fitzer: Fashionable Connections: Alicia LeFanu and Writing from the Edge
3. Diane Duffy: Anna Eliza Bray, 1790-1833: A Woman on the Edge
2.45-3.00: Tea Break
3.00-4.15: Panel 3: Edginess in the Godwin-Shelley Circle
Chair: Tara Neary
1. Richard Gough Thomas: A Fantasy of Submission: Rousseau, Godwin and the Sexual Politics of Pain
2. Merrilees Roberts: Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s Prefaces
3. Claire Sheridan: Mary Shelley on the Outskirts of London: A Transpontine “Last Man”
4.15-4.30: Coffee Break
4.30-5.45: Panel 4: Re-thinking Romantic Generations
Chair: Andy McInnes
1. Steve Van Hagen: On the Edges of the Edges: James Woodhouse in the Press, 1763-65
2. Alex Broadhead: Counterfactual Lives and Coleridgean Consubstantiality: The Romantics Reimagined
3. Michael Bradshaw: ‘What Silence Drear in England’s Oaky Forest’: Myths and Boundaries of a Third Romantic Generation
5.45-6.00: Break
6.00-7.00: Keynote 2: Susan Civale: Women’s Life Writing and Reputation: A Case Study of Mary Darby Robinson
Followed by a Wine Reception
Abstracts
Keynote 1: The Edge of Ruin: Archipelagic and Catachthonic RomanticismNick Groom – University of Exeter
This paper considers Romanticism in terms of racial migration and history,
seventeenth-century political theory, Whig cultural identity, legitimacy, and
commerce. By examining uses of race, heritage, and region I will explain how
antiquarian historical theories are incorporated into developing notions of cultural
identity. In particular, this approach adds a temporal dimension to the spatialities of
archipelagic thinking: historicizing archipelagic understanding to develop a
catachthonic approach that analyses the historicity of historiographical theories of
nationality and identity, effectively through a doubled, or subterranean, history.
Biographical Note: Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter.
His most recent books are The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012), The
Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year (Atlantic, 2013 - shortlisted for the
Katharine Briggs Folklore Award and runner-up for Countryfile Book of the
Year), and editions of The Castle of Otranto and The Monk for Oxford World's
Classics (2014 and 2016, respectively). His next book is a collection of essays for
OUP co-edited with Nicholas Allen and Jos Smith: Coastal Works: Writing at the
Atlantic Edge.
Panel 1: Romantic Travel1. Layered Landscapes – Travel Writing as Romantic GeologyElizabeth Edwards – Research Fellow, University of Wales Centre for Advanced
Welsh and Celtic Studies
This paper presents work-in-progress from the ‘Curious Travellers’ research project,
which is currently (2014-18) reassessing late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century home tourism. It begins with a study of William Smith’s 1815 geological map
of Britain, and takes the theme of geological layering, as revealed by Smith, as a
method for approaching the Romantic-period domestic tour. Home tours were often
written by travellers not known to us today beyond the manuscript tours they left, and
some of them might be understood today as middlebrow texts now finding their time
alongside new studies of magazines and popular novels. Tours from the period
survive in their hundreds, but as an archive they can seem generic in form and
content, collectively homogenous. Focusing particularly on unpublished tours of
Wales, this paper suggests ways of reading that archive, via the concept of layering,
that bring out the individual characteristics of each and every home tour. Dealing
with the least-researched of the ‘four nations’, and with a form whose popularity in its
own time is now little recognised, this paper surveys the current ‘edges’ of literary
Romanticism in terms of both geography and genre.
Biographical Note: Elizabeth Edwards is a Research Fellow at the University of
Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth. Her publications
include English-Language Poetry from Wales 1789-1806 (University of Wales Press,
2013) and Richard Llwyd: Beaumaris Bay and Other Poems (Trent Editions, 2016).
She is currently working on a monograph on Wales and eighteenth-century women’s
writing.
2. “Willingly on the Margin”: Charlotte Smith and the Borders of RomanticismEmilee Morrall – Liverpool Hope University
In Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784-1807 (2011),
Jacqueline Labbe discusses the Romantic nature of, and similarities between, the
poetry of Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, claiming that both literary figures
“[were] equally central to the formation of Romanticism” (17). She also notes,
however, that “by 1833 Smith [had] become a footnote to Wordsworth’s own
compositions” (5); it appears, therefore, that Smith’s position as a Romanticist has
altered over time, to the point that she has become situated at the periphery of
Romantic studies. My paper will expand upon the seemingly peripheral nature of
Smith’s work in order to discuss the ‘edgy’ locations in her novels, and examine her
depictions of geographical borders.
It is difficult to discuss Smith’s writings without commenting on her explicit
engagement with edges and boundaries, as is evidenced in Charlotte Smith:
Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (2003), in which Labbe claims that
Smith’s poetry “repopulates the margin […] until the edge becomes central” (137).
My paper will expand on this notion through an analysis of Smith’s novels, in
particular Celestina (1791) and Montalbert (1795), and will consider depictions of
spatial margins and edges, such the boundaries of home estates. In considering
Labbe’s notion that Smith repopulates and centralises the margin, I will also explore
the relationship between the marginalised status of Smith’s protagonists and the
geographical borderlands where they are often situated, in order to examine the
significance of such ‘edgy’ locations in the works of a writer at the periphery of
Romantic studies.
Biographical Note: I am a first-year PhD student in the English department at
Liverpool Hope University, on a Vice-Chancellor’s scholarship. My PhD research
considers the representation of adolescent characters and depictions of space and
travel in the novels and children’s literature of the eighteenth-century writer,
Charlotte Smith. My research interests include the presentation of domestic and rural
locations, female mobility and agency, and depictions of travel around Europe in
eighteenth-century literature. I am currently in the process of writing a journal article
based on a paper I recently presented at the Difficult Women conference at the
University of York, which focuses on the roles of male and female hunters, the use of
space in hunting techniques and the notion that women are perceived to be
marginalised and animalistic prey in Smith’s novels.
3. “Who Shall Now Lead?” – The Notes to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Rewriting of AlbaniaJulia Coole – Keele University
In both his published works and “private” life, Lord Byron continually stretched the
established boundaries. Never did the two more neatly meet than in Byron’s
European tour (1809-11), which famously produced the material for his most
celebrated work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18). Here, not only did Byron
extend his social boundaries to include acquaintances with Albanian aristocracy – Ali
Pasha – but also expanded the itinerary of the traditional ‘Grand Tour’ to include
areas of land previously unmarked by British boots. As Byron describes in his notes
to Canto I of CHP: “Circumstances, of little consequence to mention, led Mr
Hobhouse and myself into that country [Albania] before we visited any other part of
the Ottoman dominions; and with the exception of Major Leake […] no other
Englishman have ever advanced beyond the capital into the interior” (p.87). But
Byron’s pioneering leaked into his creative efforts. CHP consists not merely of the
well-known poem, but also a sizeable collection of appended notes on his travels,
the people, and geographic material which extended and corrected previous work on
the area by other writers. Byron continually revised and updated these notes in each
subsequent edition to ensure that the factual material was kept up to date and
correct. In doing so, Byron sought to dispel and correct myths relating to European
people which were perpetuated by previous accounts. These notes are to be the
focus of the paper. I will argue that Byron used this corrective method to both
underwrite previous travel narratives (and cultural assumptions), whilst cultivating his
own writing method to create new, accurate cultural representations.
Biographical Note: Julia Coole is a first year PhD student from Keele University.
Her thesis explores the medium of travel writing and its effect on cultural
representations and national identity. Her main focus is on the writings of Lord
Byron and Washington Irving, and their efforts to cultivate fresh ideas of cultural
identity through frequented modes of narrative.
Panel 2: Women Writers on the Edge1. Charlotte Smith on the Edge
Bethan Roberts – Lancaster University
This paper will explore the much-discussed place of Charlotte Smith (1784-1806) in
‘Romanticism’ and in ‘Romantic’ literary history, through her most widely read and
anthologised sonnet: XLIV ‘Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex’ (1789).
Many of Smith’s sonnets are set around or describe an ‘edge’, with several taking
the coastal headland or sea shore as a setting. This paper argues that these settings
reflect Smith’s sense of her (marginal) place in relation to literary tradition, and also,
in turn, have come to inscribe that place, as a poet who fell into literary neglect after
her popularity in the late eighteenth century. The churchyard setting of Smith’s XLIV
is on the very ‘margin of the sea’, as Smith’s note to the sonnet tells us, and
attracted a number of commentators and artists to the site – including John
Constable – following its publication, as the church gradually disappeared into the
sea. As well as considering how Smith places herself in sonnet XLIV, this paper will
consider the responses it inspired, to track Smith’s critical fortunes and her place at
the ‘edge’ of Romanticism.
Biographical Note: Bethan Roberts is an associate lecturer at Lancaster University.
Her PhD was on Charlotte Smith and the sonnet, and was completed in 2014 at the
University of Liverpool. She has published journal articles on Smith and is working
on turning her PhD thesis into a monograph. She currently teaches ‘Romantic
Literature’, ‘Victorian Literature’ and ‘Contemporary Literature’ at Lancaster and has
started work on a new research project on the nightingale in the poetry and science
of the long eighteenth century.
2. Fashionable Connections: Alicia LeFanu and Writing from the Edge
Anna Fitzer – University of Hull
Alicia LeFanu was the Dublin-born granddaughter of the novelist and dramatist
Frances Sheridan, and member of a literary dynasty further distinguished by the
theatrical and political dealings of her uncle, Richard Brinsley. Between 1809 and
1836 she published several poems, six multi-volume novels, a critical biography of
her grandmother, and several articles for the Court Magazine. Contemporary critics
made much of her genuine hereditary talent but, by the mid-nineteenth century, the
Literary Gazette misleadingly assimilated her into a different ‘tribe’ – that of ‘the
petticoat novelists who long since enriched the Minerva Press’ with their eminently
forgettable fiction.
This paper develops work I have previously undertaken as editor of LeFanu’s
first novel, Strathallan (1816), and of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs
Frances Sheridan (1824), which explores her complication of ideas of the centre and
the periphery. In focusing more specifically upon the edges of LeFanu’s page, this
paper examines how this interest is figured in LeFanu’s use of the chapter epigraph.
Derived from a range of sources dating from classical antiquity to her own
contemporary moment, LeFanu’s quotations persist across her fiction as a
dimension in which the writer not only reflects upon literary legacies, but also
contests the boundaries of her own print culture. Though this paper concentrates
upon LeFanu, it also aims to consider the significance of her example for a broader
understanding of other women writers ‘at the edges and borders of Romanticism’,
and of their literary networks.
Biographical Note: Anna Fitzer is editor of Strathallan (Pickering & Chatto, 2008), a
novel first published in 1816 by Alicia LeFanu. She is also editor of the four-volume
Memoirs of Women Writers Part 1 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012), which incorporates
LeFanu’s 1824 biography of Frances Sheridan, and early nineteenth-century studies
of Hannah More and the children’s author and educationalist, Sarah Trimmer. She is
currently engaged in biographical work on the Sheridan and LeFanu families, and is
Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth Century Literature at the University of Hull.
3. Anna Eliza Bray, 1790-1883: A Woman on the EdgeDiane Duffy – Independent Scholar
Eliza Bray can be viewed as a Janus figure looking backwards at a Romantic past
and forwards to a developing Victorian England – a woman on the edge. Her
positioning on the temporal limits of Romanticism was reinforced by her geographical
location on the margins of English metropolitan society, in a country vicarage on the
western edge of Dartmoor. In terms of genre and gender Bray was also writing from
the margins. Her work can be read as a development from Scott’s historical
romance, but while Scott’s fictional world was plausible enough to appear real,
Bray’s fiction used real family history and accurate depictions of landscape, custom,
traditions and material culture. Her commitment to accuracy sprang from her desire
to preserve the past, but it meant that as a woman she must access detailed
antiquarian research which was traditionally a male domain. Similarly Bray’s forays
into the writing of political history contravene the modest reserve expected of
women; Bray herself associates politics with masculine characteristics. Bray, I argue,
managed her challenging position as a writer on the edge of propriety by framing her
antiquarianism and political comment within the regional and domestic, which looks
forwards to the Victorian conception of domesticating Romanticism’s extremes.
Bray’s work was also cutting edge as her region, which retained the last vestiges of
Old England’s cultural traditions, can be viewed as a microcosm of the English, not
British nation, and can therefore be read as an English National Tale.
Biographical Note: After graduating from the University of Manchester with a PhD
in 2011 I have pursued my research on history and identity in women’s writing from
the first half of the nineteenth century giving a number of conference papers on
editing women’s autobiography, women’s travel writing and antiquarianism in the
historical novel. At present I am involved with the Elizabeth Gaskell House in
Manchester where I am currently researching textual alterations to Gaskell’s first
biography in addition to examining new evidence surrounding the death of Letitia
Landon.
Panel 3: Edginess in the Godwin-Shelley Circle1. A Fantasy of Submission: Rousseau, Godwin and the Sexual Politics of Pain Richard Gough Thomas – Manchester Metropolitan University
In The Confessions, Rousseau expressed his desire to devote himself to a woman
and submit himself to her will. By contrast, he had argued in Émile that a woman's
role was to complement a man's strength and that women who commanded were
usurpers of a masculine role. In his novel engaging with these two works, Fleetwood
(1805) William Godwin had his protagonist praise the inequality of marriage and
claim that a powerless woman inspired her husband to greater care and sensitivity.
Godwin's narrative proves this belief to be a chimera, as the protagonist's territorial
feelings drive him to madness. This presentation will explore the contradiction of
Rousseau's position and Godwin's commentary on them in the context of modern
theories of Dominant/Submissive (D/S) relationships. It will argue that Rousseau
constructs a "fantasy of submission" by which the specificity of his submissive
scenario is in fact an unconscious attempt to control his situation in the face of his
perceived social impotence. Fleetwood addresses the same behaviour but Godwin
offers only further questions about dominant and submissive roles in gender
relations. Stephen Bruhm’s much-cited work on Fleetwood foregrounds the
protagonist’s psychological suffering and its relation to the period’s understanding of
torture. This paper seeks to draw a parallel between that reading and Rousseau’s
confession of both sexual desire and shame at having sought out corporal
punishment as a child.
Biographical Note: Richard Gough Thomas is an Associate Lecturer at Manchester
Metropolitan University. He completed his PhD thesis on the educational theory of
William Godwin in 2015. He is the current lead editor of the open-access
journal, Dark Arts. He tweets as @RGoughThomas.
2. Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s PrefacesMerrilees Roberts – Queen Mary
My paper will explore the way Shelley’s prose prefaces reflect his complex
engagement with a triad of interrelated concerns he believed allowed poetry to
explore the limits of the self: psychology, aesthetics and ethics. Shelley’s prefaces
imply that he chose dramatic situations for his poems that would inspire ethical
conflict and confusion in their readers, one reason for this being to catch out
excessively didactic moralistic responses which have yet to be softened by the
benevolent feelings he believed poetry could inspire. The Preface to Alastor is
particularly complex in its manner of posing the question of whether there is a
correlation or slippage between sympathy conceived as a morally relevant emotional
reflex and sympathy seen as an abstract, disinterested artistic sensitivity which,
curiously, Shelley also wanted to claim can instigate moral awareness. It claims that
‘they who keep aloof from sympathies with their kind […] are morally dead’, whilst
also implying that ‘exquisite’ motions of the sympathetic imagination might, despite
Shelley’s own theory of poetry’s innate relationship to ethical expansiveness, be of
direct moral relevance only when these occur inside people who are psychologically
robust enough to harness the power of their own purely artistic sensitivity. Studies of
Romanticism increasingly address these sorts of issues through cultural history
approaches, but I propose that Romantic writing itself harbours the suspicion that
there is a Subject or mode of selfhood that exists at the limits of, and in constant
tension with how we theorise the self through various philosophical discourses.
Biographical Note: I am a second year (part-time) PhD Student in English at Queen
Mary working on ‘Reticence in Percy Shelley’ with Professor Paul Hamilton. My
thesis examines the significance of moments in Shelley’s work where reticence - that
which is unspoken, obscured, withheld, or made to speak in a register other than the
discursive - is a key tactic in Shelley’s poetics. I develop a phenomenological
approach to reading Shelley’s major works based by Wolfgang Iser’s theories on the
productive functioning of textual gaps and omissions to demonstrate how, by
destabilising their own processes, Shelley’s poems produce dynamic inter-subjective
experience.
3. Mary Shelley on the Outskirts of London: A Transpontine ‘Last Man.’ Claire Sheridan – University of Greenwich
George Dibdin Pitt is best known as the playwright of The String of Pearls, familiar to
us as one of the most influential versions of the Sweeney Todd story. But among this
prolific playwright's other productions is a comic domestic melodrama called The
Last Man; or, the Miser of Eltham Green, which was first performed at the Surrey
theatre in 1833. The recent Broadview edition of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last
Man carries an excerpt of Dibdin Pitt's Last Man, chosen for its close verbal parallels
to passages of Shelley's novel. Previous critics have noted other similarities between
the works, such as the presence of a black dog—also linking both works to Byron's
Darkness. My paper will discuss the play as a demotic adaption of Mary Shelley’s
Last Man, making her already edgy apocalypse edgier by locating it in South
London. The action of Mary Shelley’s novel takes place in Windsor: Dibdin Pitt nods
to this idea of outskirts by situating his play in Eltham - also on the edge of London
but in the opposite direction. By looking at its performance history and reception, I’ll
argue that Dibdin Pitt’s play, aimed at a working class audience, highlights the edge
where Romanticism shades into popular culture.
Biographical note: I recently joined the department of literature, language and
theatre at the University of Greenwich, as lecturer in Gothic literature. Before that I
taught for several years at Queen Mary, University of London, where I completed my
Ph.D. in 2012. My doctoral research focused on survival and sociability in the
Godwin-Shelley circles. I have published work on memoirs by William Godwin and
Amelia Opie, the idea of sole survival in Godwin’s novel St Leon, relationships in the
‘Pisa-gang’ after Shelley’s death, and comedy and nostalgia in Hazlitt’s essay ‘On
the New School of Reform.’
Panel 4: Re-thinking Romantic Generations1. On the Edges of the Edges: James Woodhouse in the Press, 1763-65Steve Van Hagen – Edge Hill University
Labouring-class poets and poetry have – until recent decades – arguably constituted
a subject at the edges of more canonical concerns within Romantic scholarship. If
so, the centrality of newspaper and periodical culture to the careers of the figures
within labouring-class culture, and to their representation and promotion to a wider
public, has similarly been a focus that has been relegated to the margins of scholarly
enquiry. This paper aims to counter this neglect of an important approach to this
vibrant and vital tradition within Romantic culture by focusing on press
representations of the prolific ‘Shoemaker Poet’, James Woodhouse (1735-1820),
who has emerged in recent decades as a central figure within the recovery of
eighteenth-century labouring-class poets. To reconsider Woodhouse’s career
through the prism of representations of him in the press in the years 1763-65 –
crucial years in his public emergence because of the publication of his first major
subscription volume Poems on Sundry Occasions in 1764 – both reinforces some of
our ideas about his early career, while dramatically challenging others. The paper
will discuss three items by or about Woodhouse in the newspapers during the period,
arguing that all of them have important things to teach us about his early career and
reception. One of them, in particular, I will argue – a letter that may have been
authored by Woodhouse himself that was published in late April 1764 in The St.
James’ Chronicle or, The British Evening Post (Issue 49) – has the potential to
dramatically rewrite assumptions about his early attitudes to his patrons, readers and
public reception.
Biographical Note: Steve Van Hagen is Program Leader for English Literature at
Edge Hill University. His major interests lie in British literature of the long eighteenth
century, especially the labouring-class poetry of the period. He is the author of two
critical studies, The Poetry of Mary Leapor and The Poetry of Jonathan Swift (2011),
and the editor of James Woodhouse’s The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus
Scriblerus: A Selection (2005). He has published articles on Woodhouse and
Stephen Duck, and his own poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals and
magazines.
2. Counterfactual Lives and Coleridgean Consubstantiality: The Romantics ReimaginedAlex Broadhead – University of Liverpool
Since the publication of Hawthorne’s ‘P.’s Correspondence’ in 1845, the lives of the
British romantic poets have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors
of alternate history. Hawthorne’s tale – the first sustained alternate history in English
– imagines a world in which Keats and Byron did not die prematurely but instead
lived to become a haunted recluse and a political turncoat respectively. Among the
many subsequent works which have recontextualised the romantics in timelines
other than our own are those of G. M. Trevelyan (1907), Elinor Wylie (1926), Harold
Nicolson (1931), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990), Orson Scott Card (1987-
present) and Susanna Clark (2004).
To date, alternate history has tended to be read as an offshoot of
postmodernist fiction. But the popularity of the romantics for writers working in this
genre suggests that its roots go back further. In this paper, which focuses on ‘P.’s
Correspondence,’ Card’s Seventh Son (1987) and Andrew Motion’s The Invention of
Dr Cake (2003), I propose that the Byrons and Blakes of alternate history are avatars
of a hybrid form of historical imagination: one that is simultaneously (but not
unproblematically) romantic and postmodern. In the respect that these works draw
attention to the constructedness of received narratives surrounding the lives of the
romantics, they presuppose a postmodern understanding of biography and history.
Yet in their sensitivity to the rich symbolic subtexts of biographical and historical
narratives (factual and counterfactual), the works follow the lead of Coleridge and
Keats. For this reason, they constitute intriguing and valuable examples of the
complex ways in which romantic historiography continues to inform genre fiction.
Biographical Note: Alex Broadhead teaches in the English department at the
University of Liverpool and specialises in Romantic writing. He is currently working
on a book-length study of representations of the Romantics in fiction and film. His
first monograph, The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology and Identity, was
published in 2014.
3. ‘What Silence Drear in England’s Oaky Forest’: Myths and Boundaries of a Third Romantic GenerationMichael Bradshaw – Edge Hill University
Generations do not have essential characteristics, but are defined structurally, in
relation to each other; generational identity is always a matter of representation and
interpretation. The idea that generations can be culturally isolated from each other,
to the extent of mutual incomprehension, is a modern convention: a rebellious
younger generation expresses itself in a radical new language that its elders greet
with bemusement, and regards the values of its predecessors with a cleansing
hostility and intolerance. Inter-generational conflict and miscommunication is a
standard of modern drama, both comic and tragic.
The specific application of the metaphor to literary tribes and movements can
be said to have begun with the Romantic age. ‘The Romantics’ and ‘Romanticism’
are retrospective organisational terms, constructed in Anglo-German literary and
aesthetic criticism in the later nineteenth century. But the Romantic generations are
not back-formations of this kind: Romantic-era writers themselves developed the
idea, constructing themselves and others – allies and opponents – within loose but
coherent groups based on age, affiliation, aesthetic taste, and above all in their
stance in relation to the sublime historical moment of the French Revolution.
Through analysis of some key examples of generational self-fashioning and
myth-making among younger writers, this paper will examine the claim for a third
Romantic generation, centring on Beddoes, Darley, Hood, and Landon. The concept
of a third generation, characterised by a pessimistic aesthetic of alienation,
anachronism, and grotesque, will help literary scholarship to better understand the
cultural transitions of the nineteenth century, and maybe even find a home for some
of Romanticism’s most compelling misfits.
Biographical Note: Michael Bradshaw is a specialist in late Romantic poetry and
drama, and has published on themes and authors such as: Beddoes, Darley, Hood,
Keats, Landor, Milman, the Shelleys, The London Magazine, Romantic fragments,
and Romantic generations. His edited collection Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind,
and Text will be published in May 2016. He is currently Head of English, History &
Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.
Keynote 2: Women’s Life Writing and Reputation: A Case Study of Mary Darby RobinsonSusan Civale – Canterbury Christ Church University
In 1780, the stunning actress and poet Mary Darby Robinson sparked a media
frenzy when she began an adulterous love affair with the teenaged Prince Regent.
Robinson then spent the bulk of her adult life transforming her public position from
sex object to writing subject. Wielding an impressive range of authorial personae in
her novels, poems, and periodical pieces, Robinson conscripted discursive self-
fashioning to secure a living and a place of prominence in contemporary literary (and
celebrity) culture. Her Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson (1801), co-written with her
daughter and published the year after death, has been read as a final—but flawed—
attempt to defend her conduct and to rescue a tarnished reputation. Instead of the
confessional intimacy or the robust social satire characteristic of her poems,
Robinson’s Memoirs narrated her life as a pathetic tale of transgression, suffering,
and redemption in sacrificial motherhood. Moreover, the narrative seems to be
destabilised by inconsistencies in structure and gaps in content which are often
discussed by modern critics as shortcomings: evidence of self-censorship, ‘confused’
intentions, or an inability to reconcile her scandalous reputation with an acceptable
feminine persona.
However, a careful examination of Robinson’s Memoirs suggests that her
conspicuous silences may be part of a nuanced strategy of self-presentation. By
flagging the fact that she is withholding information at climactic emotional moments,
Robinson evokes a mixture of sympathy and curiosity, revealing herself whilst at the
same time maintaining the privacy and mystery so important to the enduring
popularity of a celebrity. Though discussed by many scholars as a failure,
Robinson’s Memoirs remained in print into the twentieth century, spurring spin-off
novels, mini-biographies, and periodical articles which testify to the enduring interest
in and engagement with her life writing, long after her poetry and fiction had faded
from public memory. Through a consideration of Robinson’s Memoirs and her
literary afterlife in the long nineteenth century, this paper will argue for her life writing
as both innovative and influential, and will gesture to the benefits of extending the
traditional ‘edges’ of Romanticism both in terms of genre and period.
Biographical Note: Susan Civale is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at
Canterbury Christ Church University. Her research focuses on Romantic literature,
though she has interests in women’s writing of the long nineteenth century, and
especially in authorial and textual afterlives, life writing, and the rise of print,
periodical, and celebrity culture. She is currently working on a monograph entitled
Women’s Life Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Reputation and Authorship,
which is under contract at Manchester University Press. This book focuses on
Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Mary Hays, four women
writers whose auto/biographies, diaries, memoirs and/or autobiographical fiction
influenced their own reputations and also contributed to the development of the
genre of life writing in its formative period.
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