Global Romanticism Conference

Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA)
presents its second biennial conference

Global Romanticism

to take place at the University of Sydney
from Wednesday to Friday, 3-5 July 2013

KEYNOTES:
Alan Bewell (Toronto), Paul Giles (Sydney), Peter Kitson (Dundee), Liam McIlvanney (Otago)

MUCH of the recent scholarly activity in the area of Romantic studies has concentrated on ‘the four nations’: England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The second biennial conference of the antipodean Romantic Studies Association of Australasia would like to turn that on its head and to ask, again, about British Romanticism’s engagement with the rest of the world, and about the rest of the world’s engagement with British Romanticism. In the past twenty years, scholars like those who have agreed to share their thoughts and findings in keynote lectures at this conference have established the fact that Romanticism and the Romantic period need to be understood in global terms. Far from being a merely national or even European phenomenon, Romanticism – or the cluster of ideas and cultural forms and the structures of feeling associated with Romanticism – is shot through with the experience and imagination of the Americas, including the recently United States with whom Britain was briefly at war; of Africa, north, south, and central; of Russia and the Ottoman empire; of Persia, India, China and the far east; of the penal colony of New South Wales and beyond that the Pacific and its islands. Again, as with our first biennial conference on Romanticism and the Tyranny of Distance, we are inviting scholars from all over the globe to use the historical distance of the twenty first century and the geographical and cultural distance of the Great South Land to reconceptualise and remap the geographical and cultural field of Romantic studies.

We encourage submissions covering the fullest possible range of meanings of ‘global Romanticism’ – including but not limited to -

Romantic exploration, real and imagined: ‘We were the first, that ever burst, into that silent sea’
Romantic places, real and imagined: imaging the exotic and the remote in art and literature
Romantic cosmopolitanism
Romanticism, empire, and informal empire
The globe writes back: Romantic correspondence
The globe writes back: the global interpretation of British Romanticism, then and since
The world as subject: colonialism
The world as specimen: colonies of knowledge
The world as convert: missionary activity
The world as convict: penal colonies
Expanding the canon: foreign literature in translation
Trading goods: company ships, country ships, and pirates
Trading places: transportation, migration, settlement, and repatriation
Trading forms: the global circulation of literature, music and art
Trading people: slavery and the slave trade
‘Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red’: Romanticism and race

Scholars interested in proposing 20-minute papers, or full panels of three speakers and a chair, should submit abstracts of between 250 and 400 words and a 150-word bio by 28 February 2013 through the RSAA’s website http://rsaa.net.au/. For further enquiries, please contact Will Christie (william.christie@sydney.edu.au) or Angie Dunstan (angela.dunstan@sydney.edu.au).