Romantic Studies Association of Australia 2019 Conference: Embodying Romanticism
UNSW Canberra
Canberra, Australia
November 21-23, 2019
Although the body has preoccupied literary scholarship for some time, there has been a renewed attention in Romantic studies to the complex ways in which literature encodes and reproduces our awareness of embodied experience. Challenging views of Romanticism as bounded by visionary and idealist expression, such work reflects a reorientation of criticism around the materiality of Romantic culture, whether configured as part of the age of sensibility or in relation to the era’s natural and social sciences. The Romantic period was, moreover, a time when control of the body emerged as a key political issue in workshops, homes, battlefields and colonies, when bodies were subject to rapidly evolving ideas of gender, class and race, while new bodies of knowledge and corporate political bodies emerged to regulate the affairs of nations and empires. This was a period when bodies were subject to ever more intensive modes of analysis and management, at the same time that bodies imposed their transgressive physicality through new understandings of environments, vitalism, trauma, slavery, disease and taste. Attentive to such developments, Romantic studies in turn dovetails with a broader materialist emphasis that explores how bodies are shaped in relation to affect, biopolitics, speculative realism, post-humanism and eco-criticism. Alain Badiou has recently proposed that our modern, liberal ideology can today only perceive two objects: bodies and language. Aligning itself at the conjuncture of these two terms, this conference invites papers that broadly consider how embodiment was evoked, challenged and understood in Romantic cultural life.
The conference invites proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspects of Romanticism and embodiment. Proposals may be for individual papers or for panels of 3-4 papers.
Papers might consider such topics as:
- Affects and embodied emotions
- Sensibility and materialist epistemologies
- Materials, objects, things
- Life, organicism, vitality
- Theatre, bodies on stage, celebrities
- Spaces, environments, atmospheres
- Architecture, buildings and the body
- Medicine, surgery
- Slavery and transportation
- Biopolitics/biopower and the body politic
- Labour, work, maternity
- Sexuality and gender
- Corpses, death, graves
- Race, empire, colonialism
- Disabled bodies, monsters, illness
- Planetary bodies, heavenly bodies, cosmology
- Texts and paratexts
- Bodies of knowledge
- Animals and humans
- Organisations and institutions
Abstracts of approximately 250 words are due by 30 June 2019. Please send abstracts to the conference convenor, Neil Ramsey, at n.ramsey@unsw.edu.au
Postgraduate bursaries are available. See the conference website for details: https://unsw.adfa.edu