Oxford Romanticism Conference – The Romantic Medium: Language and Lexicon CFP

University of Oxford

Call for Papers

“The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that eternal language, which thy God / Utters”
(Coleridge, Frost at Midnight, 59-61)

“the reason why I dislike it is that it does not describe the feelings of a rhyming peasant strongly or
locally enough…” (John Clare, manuscript marginalia 1821, quoted in Alan Vardy, John Clare Politics
and Poetry, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: 31)

“Through sad incompetence of human speech” (Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) 593)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Stephen Gill (Lincoln College, Oxford)

Michael O’Neill (University of Durham)

The Oxford Romanticism Conference will seek to bring together academics and postgraduate students in a one-day event for discussion of the current study of ‘The Romantic Medium: Language and Lexicon’.The conference takes its lead from the Romantic Realignments Seminars held weekly in Oxford and will seek to reflect advances in the past decade of Romantic scholarship. Language is to be considered in a broad sense, incorporating topics on genre to metaphor, translation to soundscape, through an awareness of the plurality of languages at play.

The Conference will be structured around three main branches of criticism—a historical approach to vocabulary and the nature of material text; theoretical approaches dealing with questions about the kind of medium language is and how it functions; and finally close readings exploring what Romantic writers were doing with language. The goal of the Conference is to unite what have historically been three separate critical approaches to the study of language in the period. We hope that in hosting this conference, these approaches can be viewed side by side and we can begin to assess Romanticism from a broader and more unified perspective.

Particularly welcome will be those papers considering the relationship between language and political and historical context, the failure of language as a medium, and how the tussle between primitive or vulgar and civilised or cultured language has characterised the new study of Romantic language.
Topics may include but are not limited to:

· Bibliography and/or Romantic vocabulary
· Language as a medium
· Metaphor, allegory and rhetoric
· Inadequacy of language an inarticulacy; need for language borrowed from other spheres
· Post-Romantic (Victorian, Modern, Post-Modern) appreciation and usage of Romantic language, including responses against Romanticism
· ‘English Grammar’
· High/low, poetic/rustic, primitive/cultured language and what these constitute

· Classical and foreign influences on Romantic language

· Purity/chastity of language

· Musicality of language
· Linguistic authority

We welcome also other interpretations of the Conference theme.

Oxford University invites submission of 200 word abstracts to be sent, with name, address and affiliation,
to oxfordromanticismconference@gmail.com. The deadline for submission is 15th December 2012.