Romanticism and Reading: Some Theories, Some Practices

In this workshop, participants explore recent interventions on Romanticism and reading by one of the world’s leading readers and theorists of Romanticism. Encompassing vital critical debates about literature and society, the Romantic genealogies of close reading, and topics such as sensibility, patience in an age of speed, Percy Bysshe Shelley and non-violence, and Maria Edgeworth’s vision of the novel as a toy and a form of experience, the workshop will explore how the literary experiments of William Wordsworth and others embed an account of emergent modernity that is still recognizable—and relevant—today.

Participant numbers to be capped at 25.

The workshop will be followed by lunch.

Essays to be discussed will be sent to all registrants ahead of the workshop.

Co-hosted by the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture Research Unit (ERCC), University of Melbourne.

Introduction by Professor Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne.

Bio

Professor James Chandler is William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago. He specializes in 18th Century British Literature, Irish Literature, Romanticism Studies, Cinema Studies, and the History of Literary Criticism. His research and teaching interests include the Romantic movement, the study of lyric poetry, the history of the novel, history and criticism, the Scottish Enlightenment, modern Irish literature and culture, the sentimental mode, cinema studies, and the history of humanities disciplines. Professor Chandler is the author of Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984), England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1998), An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (2013) and Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts (2022). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Poetry (2008) and The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (2008). From 2001 to 2018 he served as Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at Chicago. where he led a series of pathbreaking projects on literary history, digital humanities, and environmental humanities.

Enquiries about the program can be sent to Professor Debjani Ganguly debjani.ganguly@acu.edu.au