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Autumn conference 2023
Members and non-members welcome
Call for Papers
Interfused: imagination, faith and reason in Romantic writers
Day conference
Saturday 4 November 2023
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
The early Wordsworth would describe himself in his reflective poem of 1798 Tintern Abbey as a worshipper of Nature, a pantheist in all but name. But is this a fair representation of the wider Romantic movement? We are inviting conference papers which discuss theory and practice in various texts of the period from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth – from Coleridge who looked in his 1817 book Biographia Literaria to German metaphysics for an absolute, to the wildness in Emily Brontė’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights.
It has been observed that there are a number of Romanticisms, often positioned in antinomies with for example Classicism. In the eighteenth century Rousseau’s elevation of the idea of nature in opposition to the shackling orders of civilisation would have wide influence, and writers like Shelley took a new path from Enlightenment rationalism into the social sphere. Keats expressed an aesthetic sensibility naming truth and beauty as abstractions to be cherished. Yet faith of one kind and another was a property of the movement, and a thinker like Johann Paul Richter could write in 1804 that ‘Romantic poetry can just as well be called Christian.’ Wordsworth and Coleridge embraced Anglican doctrine in their later years. Faith was a field force in the fusion which here and there conjoined disparate elements into forms of Romanticism.
Proposals are invited for papers to be read at the conference in Oxford. The reading time is about 20 minutes, to be followed by discussion. So a proposal of 300 words will be followed later by a paper of about 4,000, which is also offered for publication, if successful, in The Glass early in 2024. We look for associations with Christian and Biblical themes in literary texts.
Send proposals with a provisional title and a few words about your background by 31 May 2023 to Dr Roger Kojeckż, secretary@clsg.org
Some secondary sources
Enquiries to Dr Roger Kojeckż, secretary@clsg.org Conference fee £22, concessions £18 includes a buffet lunch in College.
About the Autumn conference papers
CLSG: exploring Christian and Biblical themes in literature
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