Symposium: ‘Writing Romantic Lives’

‘Writing Romantic Lives’
A One Day Postgraduate Symposium, hosted by Romanticism @ Edge Hill University & Keele University
25 November 2017

This postgraduate conference is held in celebration of the 200th anniversary of S. T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), an experimental combination of life writing, philosophy, and literary criticism. Coleridge’s interest in the self, creativity, imagination, and the relationship between poetry and cultural life forms part of the wider Romantic exploration of individuality and collectivity.

This one-day symposium, co-organised by Edge Hill and Keele Universities, asks: what kind of value is placed on auto/biographical writings of the Romantic period? How does life writing in the Romantic period engage with philosophical, theological and literary critical theories? What would Romantic writers have to say now, if given the chance?

Proposals for individual papers, panels of 3 speakers and a chair, or innovative presentation formats, are invited on the following topics (although they are certainly not limited to them):

Coleridge and the bicentenary of Biographia Literaria (1817)
The historical/cultural/literary significance of life writing (auto/biographical)
Poetry, prose and essays by and about key and marginal Romantic figures
Adaptations and re-imaginings of Romantic lives
Female biography and gender
Explorations of the link between creativity and the primary/secondary imagination
Health, illness and disability
Literary and memoir musings on 18th/19th century life
Romantic ecologies
Romantic life sciences and medicine
The evaluation and interpretation of literature
Memorial and elegiac writing
‘Spirit(s) of the age’
The ‘vitality’ debate
Romantic afterlives and legacies

Please submit:

Abstracts of 250 words for individual papers / creative responses

or panel proposals / innovative presentation formats of 500 words (including a brief introduction and details of each paper), along with a short biography of presenters

to krystan.best@go.edgehill.ac.uk by 18th September 2017.

Find out more by visiting https://writingromanticlives2017.wordpress.com

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