University of Oxford<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Call for Papers<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligible \/ Of that eternal language, which thy God \/ Utters\u201d \u201cthe reason why I dislike it is that it does not describe the feelings of a rhyming peasant strongly or \u201cThrough sad incompetence of human speech\u201d (Wordsworth, The Prelude <\/em>(1850) 593)<\/p>\n KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:<\/strong> Michael O\u2019Neill (University of Durham)<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The Conference will be structured around three main branches of criticism\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u00b7 Bibliography and\/or Romantic vocabulary \u00b7 Classical and foreign influences on Romantic language<\/p>\n \u00b7 Purity\/chastity of language<\/p>\n \u00b7 Musicality of language We welcome also other interpretations of the Conference theme.<\/p>\n
\n(Coleridge, Frost at Midnight<\/em>, 59-61)<\/p>\n
\nlocally enough\u2026\u201d (John Clare, manuscript marginalia 1821, quoted in Alan Vardy, John Clare Politics
\nand Poetry<\/em>, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: 31)<\/p>\n
\nStephen Gill (Lincoln College, Oxford) <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nTopics may include but are not limited to:<\/p>\n
\n\u00b7 Language as a medium
\n\u00b7 Metaphor, allegory and rhetoric
\n\u00b7 Inadequacy of language an inarticulacy; need for language borrowed from other spheres
\n\u00b7 Post-Romantic (Victorian, Modern, Post-Modern) appreciation and usage of Romantic language, including responses against Romanticism
\n\u00b7 ‘English Grammar’
\n\u00b7 High\/low, poetic\/rustic, primitive\/cultured language and what these constitute<\/p>\n
\n\u00b7 Linguistic authority<\/p>\n