RSAA Inaugural Conference 2011
Romanticism and the Tyrannies of Distance
The Romantic Studies Association of Australasia held its inaugural conference at the University of Sydney on 10-12 February 2011. The conference featured plenary speakers Profs James Chandler (Chicago University), Deirdre Coleman (University of Melbourne), and Nicholas Roe (University of St Andrews), in addition to a stimulating panel discussion with the assembled editors of The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (1999), Profs Iain McCalman (University of Sydney) and Gillian Russell (Australian National University), and Dr Clara Tuite (University of Melbourne). The conference showcased groundbreaking scholarship by established and upcoming Romanticists from Australia and around the globe, with over sixty papers delivered by speakers from eleven countries.
Archived Call for Papers
Romanticism and the Tyrannies of Distance
10-12 February 2011
Plenary speakers:
Panel:
This is the first of the biennial conferences planned for the newly founded Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA), to take place at the
THE EAST COAST of New Holland was discovered and mapped by Captain James Cook, its flora and fauna recorded and categorised by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, in the autumn of 1770, the same year that saw the births on the other side of the world of Wordsworth and Beethoven, making the origin and establishment of the modern Australian nation coincident with the origin and establishment of what we conventionally, if controversially, refer to as the Romantic period. This coincidence, though only one of a number of reasons for forming a confederation of Australasian Romanticists, is nonetheless a compelling one, and we invite scholars of the period from all over the world, as well as from Australia and New Zealand, to join us in marking and celebrating the foundation of the RSAA with a major scholarly event.
The theme of the conference will be ‘Romanticism and the Tyrannies of Distance’, after the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey’s now classic account of the way the geographical remoteness of Australia has shaped its history and identity. From here, it is but a small step to seeing the way in which all kinds of distance – and the will to overcome distance – conditioned and challenged the writers and thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, in the spirit of new beginnings, scholars are encouraged to use the historical distance of the early twenty first century and the geographical and cultural distance of the
Will Christie
University of Sydney
william.christie@sydney.edu.au
Plenary speakers:
Deirdre Coleman holds the Robert Wallace Chair of English at the University of Melbourne and is the author of Coleridge and The Friend, 1809-10 (Oxford, 1988) and Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women's Travel Narratives of the 1790s (Leicester, 1999), and of the major study of Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge, 2005). She is currently writing a biography of the flycatcher Henry Smeathman
Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, founding editor of the journal Romanticism, and the author of several other books that have helped shape the course of Romantic studies over the last twenty five years, beginning with Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford, 1988), and including The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Basingstoke, 1992), Keats and History (Cambridge, 1995), John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford, 1997), and Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (London, 2005). He is currently writing a new biography of John Keats for Yale University Press, and is Chair of the Keats House Foundation, Hampstead.
James Chandler is the Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, author of two influential works of Romantic history and Romantic historicism, Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago, 1984) and England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), and has recently edited The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge, 2008).
Panel discussion of ‘Romanticism In
Iain McCalman, a Professorial Research Fellow and ARC Federation Fellow at the University of Sydney, is author of numerous studies of high and low culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Oxford, 1988), The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (London, 2003), and Darwin’s Armada: How four voyagers to Australasia won the battle for evolution and changed the world (Melbourne, London, New York, 2009).
Gillian Russell, an ARC Professorial Fellow at the
Clara Tuite, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, is author of Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge, 2002) and is co-editor (with Gillian Russell) of Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770- 1840 (Oxford, 2002) and (with Claudia L. Johnson) of The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen (Oxford, 2008).