Eighteenth Century Evening at Oxford Brookes University

‘The Cheerful Companion’: Poetry, Music

& Performance in Eighteenth-Century

Poetic Miscellanies

Oxford Brookes University Headington Hill Hall, May 21, 2013, 19.00 h

If we were able to step inside the parlours and drawing rooms of the eighteenth century, we’d find homes busy with home-made culture – book groups and tea table parties; amateur dramatics; groups of women reading and weeping their way through popular sentimental fiction, and men at punch parties singing songs about dogs.

This interactive event (1,5 hours) will explore the varied world of eighteenth-century poetic miscellanies, popular collections of verse, prose and music that were the main way in which many ordinary people consumed literature in contemporary parlours and drawing rooms. 

The evening will consists of a series of short talks, readings and music, followed by an interactive session, in which participants will be able to experience an authentic sewing session of a ‘huswif’ hosted by Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes) – no previous experience needed!

The evening will be a unique collaboration between the Brookes Poetry Centre, and the Digital Miscellanies Index Project at the University of Oxford, supported by the the folk & roots influenced duo Alva with multi-instrumentalist Giles Lewin and the acclaimed singer of medieval, renaissance, folk & contemporary music Vivien Ellis. Wine and refreshments will be served.

If you want to book a place, free of charge, please contact: Nicole Pohl, npohl@brookes.ac.uk.

Trinity Termcard

Dear All, 
Please find the Trinity Termcard attached

Barry Hough, Bournemouth University 
(Week 1) 25 April: ‘Coleridge’s Government Communications: Ethics or Calculation?’ 

Tom Clucas, Christ Church, Oxford
(Week 2) 2 May: ‘“Thou only bliss / Of Paradise that has survived the fall”: Domesticity from Cowper to Wordsworth’ 

Prof. Heather Glen, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge
(Week 3) 9 May: 'Imagining Place: Wordsworth’s Poetry and James Clarke’s A Survey of the Lakes' 

Ann-Clair Michoux, Lincoln College, Oxford 
(Week 4) 16 May: ‘"Wild to buy all": Jane Austen's Wild English Girls and Regency Society’ 

Dino Felluga, Purdue University 
(Week 5) 23 May: ‘Byron’s Don Juan and the Novel’ 

All Welcome to join us for drinks & dinner after the seminar!

Oxford Romanticism Conference, Somerville College
(Week 6) 30 May: registration to open soon!

Convenors: Judyta Frodyma (judyta.frodyma[at]ell.ox.ac.uk) and Olivia Reilly 
(olivia.reilly[at]ell.ox.ac.uk)

Andrew Warren: Romantic Entanglements

**Change in Termcard**

For our final seminar this term, Thursday, March 7th, we would like to welcome Dr. Andrew Warren, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University.

He will be speaking on 'Romantic Entanglements'

Abstract:

The term “entanglement” comes from the Old Norse (tang) for a kind of seaweed. In

Middle English (tangil, tangyl) it became primarily a social or legal term; someone

“entangled” someone else by encumbering, hampering or embarrassing them in human

affairs—legal, financial, social. Entanglement thereby implies a connection both material

and immaterial, and that also does not form a unity. It is more often a kind of burden, a

half-unwanted but seemingly necessary connection; it therefore registers an anxiety or

unease largely absent from a more settled or conventional notion such as “Wholeness” or

“Organic Unity.”

In this talk I will trace a history of this trope which, I argue, becomes particularly amplified

in Romantic and proto-Romantic texts. If in Enlightenment discourses—from empiricist

philosophies of mind, to political theory, to medicine—entanglement is most often used

as a metaphor to describe confusion or metaphysical extravagance, in the Romantic era

entanglement becomes a self-consciously employed concept used to explore a range of

issues. I will focus, in particular, on work by Sterne, Rousseau, Shelley and Wordsworth.

Hilary 2013 Termcard

Dear All,

Here is the termcard for Hilary 2013. I would like to highlight, among many others, talks by Mary-Ann Constantine and James Vigus this term! Looking forward to seeing many of you there!

Romantic Realignments

Every Thursday at 5:15pm

Magdalen College, Lecture Room A

Week 1: 17th January
David Higgins (Leeds) Local and Global Geographies in Coleridge’s Poetry of the 1790s

Week 2: 24th January

Jo Taylor (Keele) Hartley Coleridge's sublime spaces

Week 3: 31st January

John Goodridge (Nottingham) Bloomfield, Clare and labouring-class poetry

Week 4: 7th February

Catherine Redford (Bristol) 'What was, what is, and shall be': Empire and the Romantic Last Man* please note the change in title 

Week 5: 14th February

Mary-Ann Constantine (Wales) Here be dragons: the politics of literature in 1790s Wales

Week 6: 21st February

Pedro Carol (Fribourg) “Strike at the root”: Shelley’s Revision of the Creation Myth in "Queen Mab" and "The Revolt of Islam"

Week 7: 28th February

James Vigus (Queen Mary) Wordsworth's 'Poetic Quakerism'

Week 8: 7th March*note the change in speaker

Andrew Warren (Harbard) Romantic Entanglements 

Happy New Year!

Dear All,

We wanted to wish you all the best for 2013--may it be a productive and successful year for all! 

There will be many new things coming up this year and this term, including the first Oxford Romanticism Conference this May 30th, 2013! Although the call for papers is now closed (for more information or questions, email oxfordromanticismconference[at]gmail.com) we encourage you all to join us for a wonderful line up of speakers and papers! 

The conference is on The Romantic Medium: Language and Lexicon. We would like to welcome our keynotes speakers, Michael O'Neill (Durham) and Stephen Gill (Oxford).

Hope to see you all there! Stay tuned for the Hilary termcard will be posted shortly!


Correction: the previous link for the CFP did not work. It may now be found here.

Dr Monika Class on Narratives of mental illness

Dear all, 

Please join us this Thursday evening to welcome our speaker, Dr Monika Class, who will be presenting on "Narratives of mental illness: the psychological case histories of K. P. Moritz".

Abstract:
Late 18th and early 19th-century British physicians praised Karl Philipp Moritz’s collection of psychological case histories, compiled and published in his Magazine for the Study of the Experience of the Soul (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, 1783-93). The author of Inquiry into the Origin and Nature of Mental Derangement, Alexander Crichton observed that ‘in this work, I found what I had not found in any other publication, a number of well-authenticated cases of insane aberration of mind, narrated in a full and satisfactory manner, without a view to any system whatever’ (1798, p. 162). Building on recent insights in the history of scientific observations, the paper elucidates the unique characteristics of Moritz’s case narratives and places them within the tradition of medical case records that began with Hippocratic practices. To this end, the paper compares parochial variations of printed medical case histories in England and the German states in the long eighteenth century. Subsequently, the paper uncovers how some of Moritz’s ‘sad stories’ travelled across the border to Britain in the early nineteenth century. The paper concludes with an interpretation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions’ arguing that it conveys striking similarities with Moritz’s magazine with regard to the education of children with hearing impairment, sign language and the healing effect of the exchange of psycho-somatic experience.'

As always, all are welcome to the seminar, and to join us for drinks and dinner, starting at Chequers from 7pm.

Hope to see you all there!

Charles Lamb Day Conference in London

CHARLES LAMB:

READINGS AND READERS

CHARLES LAMB SOCIETY DAY CONFERENCE

Swedenborg Hall, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London, WC1A 2TH

Saturday 17 November 2012

10.30-11 Coffee

Elian Reading and Welcome by Chair

11-1 First Panel: Lamb’s Readings

Lamb’s Reading Habits

     Dr. Tom Lockwood, University of Birmingham

Lamb and Horace

Professor Richard Gaskin, University of Liverpool

1-2.30 Lunch at local restaurant at participants’ own expense

2.30-4.15 Second Panel: Lamb’s Readers

'Beyond whist sobriety: the Lambs, Crabb Robinson, and their discourse on literature'

     Philipp Hunnekuhl, Queen Mary, University of London

'Charles Lamb's letter-readers and the 'Essays of Elia'' 

     Heather Stone, Brasenose College, Oxford.

4.15-4.45 Tea

4.45-5.30 Round Table Discussions

ALL WELCOME

ATTENDANCE IS FREE OF CHARGE

If possible, we would appreciate knowing in advance if you intend to come; RSVP to

Felicity James (fj21@le.ac.uk), School of English, University of Leicester, LE1 7RH.