Preview the new issue of Romantic Textualities

After a lengthy and unplanned delay, the new issue of Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is to be published in its HTML incarnation next month. In the meanwhile, you can preview the print-optimized version of the journal as a PDF, which contains all of the items that will feature in the HTML version in one convenient publication.

Issue 20 contains the following material:

• ‘ “We’ll Wear Out Great Ones”: Maria Pickersgill, Letitia Landon and the Power of the “Improvisatrice” ’ (David Moberly): an article which provides an engaged and persuasive analysis of Pickersgill’s poetry, and its reflections on performativity and gender, through her use of orientalist framing devices, which can be contrasted with those of contemporaries such as Moore and Byron.
•  ‘Hazlitt’s Prizefight Revisited: Pierce Egan and Jon Bee’s Boxiana-Style Perspective’ (David Snowdon): an article that examines the masculine sporting culture that flourished in the 1820s, revolving in particular around the boxing world dubbed ‘The Fancy’.
• ‘Merely an Imitator? The Preponderance of ‘Radcliffe’ in Lusignan or the Abbaye of La Trappe and The Orphans of Llangloed’ (Jacqueline Howard): a lengthy report that puts forward the tantalising—and, no doubt, controversial—view that Ann Radcliffe’s career as a novelist did not stop with the publication of The Italian (1797), based on close textual and contextual analysis.
• Reviews of recent publications by Alex Benchimol, Clare Broome Saunders, Richard Hill, James Hogg, Sarah Houghton-Walker, Maria Purves and Nicola Watson.
• Books Received: a list of books relating to Romantic print culture and intertextuality available for review.

You can download the new issue, by clicking on this link.

You can visit Romantic Textualities @ www.romtext.org.uk.

Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is a peer-reviewed online journal that focuses on the interface between literature, book history and material cultures during the Romantic era. Romantic Textualities disseminates scholarship in a variety of forms: peer-reviewed essays, reports and bibliographical checklists, and review articles. Essays have included studies as diverse as Wordsworth and the rise of copyright, metropolitan art criticism, travel writing, pugilism, sentimental fiction and morality, Gothic bluebooks and discourses of gardening.

Visiting speaker, 18 Oct 2011: Jean Moorcroft Wilson on Edward Thomas

Jean Moorcroft Wilson will be presenting her paper, ‘Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras’, at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 18 October 2011. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
How did Edward Thomas, whose best-known poem ‘Adlestrop’ is about an unaccustomed halt at a deserted country station, come to join the ranks of the greatest First World War poets? Had he, for example, sailed with Robert Frost to America in February 1915 (as he seriously contemplated doing) his story and his work would have been very different. Instead, in July 1915, after months of indecision, he enlisted and by late January 1917 was in France. Just over two months later he was dead, killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras, 9 April 1917. The story of his vacillations and of his eventual enlistment is of particular interest, highlighting, as it does, the myriad different reasons why men like Thomas—‘doubting Thomas’—finally decided to fight.

The talk will be followed by a wine reception.

AHRC Studentship: Editing Robert Burns

Centre for Robert Burns Studies

Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century

AHRC-Funded PhD Studentship

Duration: 3 years; Value: Fees + £13,590 per annum

Project Summary
This project is to produce the first volumes of the Oxford University Press edition of the works of Robert Burns. The successful applicant will benefit from scholarly association with the editorial team, but will be encouraged to pursue independent as well as directed research into the literature and culture of the age of Burns and the Scots Language. Applicants with proposals centred particularly in the areas of the literary use of register and/or dialect are welcomed. (PI: Dr Gerard Carruthers).

Possible/ Suggested Topics for Research
Possible areas for research are given below and further information about each of these suggested topics is available by request to: Gerard.carruthers@glasgow.ac.uk. Applicants are welcome to suggest and develop their own researchproject in collaboration with the research team.

1. Robert Burns and the language of sentiment: This project would investigate Burns’s engagement with the language of sentiment in eighteenth-century writings.
2. The language of Burns’s letters: This project draws upon recent theoretical developments in historical sociolinguistics to offer a new study of Burns’s correspondence.
3. Robert Burns and the invention of Scots: This project would investigate, in a more robust way than has been achieved hitherto, Burns’s handling of Scots, using both major dictionaries (DSL, OED) and a thesaurus-style classificatory system.

Further Information
The PhD candidate will be co-supervised by Professor Jeremy Smith and Professor Murray Pittock, and will be housed in the School of Critical Studies, having full access to the Centre for Burns Studies and regular contact with the team of senior scholars (Carruthers, Leask, McCue, Pittock, Smith) working on Burns.

Criteria
Applicants should have a first-class or upper second-class Honours Degree in a related area of study (language or literature) and preferably have successfully completed a Postgraduate Research Masters degree from a recognised HEI.

* For full terms and conditions of AHRC studentships please consult:
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/GuidetoStudentFunding.pdf

Visiting speaker, 23 Nov 2010: Paul Stevens on Bunyan and WW1

Paul Stevens will be presenting his paper, ‘Heartwork: John Bunyan, the First World War and the Politics of Grace’ at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 23 November 2010. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
The pervasive influence of Pilgrim’s Progress on so much literature of the Great War is well known, but Bunyan’s text is usually treated as a repository for somewhat predictable images of the war’s irredeemable hopelessness—‘waste and horror and loss and fear’, in Paul Fussell’s words. Many of Bunyan’s soldier–readers were, however, much more assiduous and deeply engaged in the dissenter’s complex text than this view allows. What they seem to have discovered in Pilgrim’s Progress was an understanding of the religious concept of grace unusually well-suited to their political and psychological needs. In this talk, Paul Stevens will first try to show how distinctive Bunyan’s model of grace was in its original 17th-century context by comparing it with that of another contemporary dissenter, John Milton, and then how Bunyan’s model as ‘heartwork’ enabled soldiers as diverse as R. H. Tawney and Siegfried Sassoon to come to a radically new understanding of their experience, an understanding that eventually helped encourage a transformation in Britain’s national imaginary or understanding of itself.