This conference places Romanticism at the core of the British Fin de Siècle. As an anti-Victorian movement, the British Fin de Siècle is often read forwards and absorbed into a long twentieth century, in which it takes the shape of a prehistory or an embryonic form of modernism. By contrast, Fin-de-Siècle authors and critics looked back to the past in order to invent their present and imagine their future. Just at the time when the concept of Victorian crystallized a distinct set of literary and cultural practices, the radical break with the immediate past found in Romanticism an alternative poetics and politics of the present.

The Fin de Siècle played a distinctive and crucial role in the reception of Romanticism. Romanticism emerged as a category, a dialogue of forms, a movement, a style, and a body of cultural practices. The Fin de Siècle established the texts of major authors such as Blake and Shelley, invented a Romantic canon in a wider European and comparative context, but also engaged in subversive reading practices and other forms of underground reception.

The aim of this conference is to foster a dialogue between experts of the two periods.

Conference organisers: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) and Stefano Evangelista (Oxford)

This conference is co-organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the English Faculty of Oxford University with the support of the MHRA.

For more information or to download the conference poster, please visit the website at: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/romanticism-at-the-fin-de-siecle