Samuel Johnson and Poetic Labour

"Thou art a Retailer of Phrases; And dost deal in Remnants of Remnants, Like a maker of Pincushions." Unknown artist, 1803, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. 

The Colloquium on Romanticism and the Long Eighteenth Century is delighted to announce its first return speaker - Prof. Frans De Bruyn (University of Ottawa). 

Prof. De Bruyn will give a talk at 2.30pm, on Friday, February the 28th, in the refurbished Gordon Wood Lounge (Dunton Tower 1811) on an intriguing subject - Dr. Johnson and Poetic Labour.  Sumptuous refreshments will be served.

Read a sneak preview here!

“In my talk, I propose to show how Johnson conceives of the art of writing in Virgilian georgic terms, as labour, and how this conception of writing as labour culminates in a characteristically eighteenth-century critical ideal: an aesthetic of laboured style and form. This view of literary creativity as a function primarily of work rather than the unbidden promptings of genius, as much a matter of perspiration as inspiration, makes a significant contrast, as I will show, with prevailing conceptions of the creative act in the historical periods preceding and following the eighteenth century.”

Eighteenth-Century Prints in France and England

CORAL is delighted to announce a talk by Prof. Stéphane Roy, on Thursday, Mar. 21^st, at 2 pm, in the Gordon Wood Lounge (DT 1811). 

One of our co-organizers, Emma, has had the pleasure of hearing a version of this talk, and it was sensational!  Prof. Roy takes a transnational approach, comparing the prestige and influence of French and English prints at different periods of the eighteenth century, and looks at mixed printmaking techniques as performance, spectacle, and narrative.  The way that prints told stories – both as illustrations of novels and as freestanding cycles of images – is really gripping.

Hogarth self-portrait courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London



Prof. Roy's research has included printmaking, propaganda, and the French Revolution, and has branched into book history and travel illustration.  He has served as curator at the Yale Center for British Art and at the Portrait Gallery of Canada.

Refreshments will be served!

Alexander Grammatikos and Emma Peacocke cordially welcome you on behalf of CORAL and the English Department.

A CORAL Double-Header

On April 11, 2012, at 1 pm, in the Gordon Wood Lounge (Dunton Tower 1811), CORAL will be presenting two thrilling speakers on closely related topics.



Mary Wollstonecraft's portrait projected onto the Houses of Parliament in London, courtesy of maryonthegreen.org



Dr. Julie Murray (Carleton University) will be discussing female biography, focusing on literary women of the 1790s and drawing on Agamben's ideas of 'bare life.'

Dr. April London (University of Ottawa) will be discussing Sarah Fielding and touch on the careers of Lucy Aikin and Elizabeth Hamilton.

 



Benjamin West's 'Agrippina', courtesy of the Yale Art Gallery.
Elizabeth Hamilton wrote a life of Agrippina.

 Several people who attended CSECS 2011 said they wished they could have heard April and Julie together - this will be your chance!  Anyone interested in literary biography, novel theory, feminist theory, or politics should come out for this colloquium.

Refreshments will be served.

Union and Division: New Approaches to the National Tale

Speaker: Prof. Claire Connolly, University of Cardiff, the O’Brien Visiting Scholar in Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University

Time: 2.30 pm, on Thursday, Dec. 1

Place: 1811 Dunton Tower (the Gordon Wood Lounge)

CORAL is delighted to announce our second speaker this term: Dr. Claire Connolly, of Cardiff University, currently the O'Brien Visiting Scholar in Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia.  Dr. Connolly is one of the leading scholars working on the Irish National Tale, and has just published A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790-1825 with the Cambridge University Press. 

Her talk is entitled "Union and Division: New Approaches to the National Tale."  The Irish National Tale is highly charged in its sectarian politics, its sexual politics, its visions of Ireland's past and future, and its experiments with different narrating voices.  Although it is rooted in the turbulence of Irish politics during the years of rebellion and the Act of Union of 1801, this genre's concerns resonate with all kinds of literary scholars.

Claire will be coming from Montreal to speak - please come and catch her talk before she returns to the U.K.!

Published by Bowles and Carver in London, c. 1793, after Robert Dighton.  Image courtesy of the British Museum.

our fame has spread to Bath!

The Urge to Purge

On Tuesday, Nov. 1, at 2.30 pm in the Gordon Wood Lounge (DT 1811), Dr. Noelle Gallagher will deliver a talk for CORAL, entitled “The Urge to Purge: Satire as Medicine in the Eighteenth Century.”  The rhetorics of illness and medicine in literature have been a sustained research interest for Dr. Gallagher.  Because Dr. Gallagher is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester, this is an excellent opportunity to meet her in Canada, if you don't run into her at CSECS 2011. 

This is James Gillray's 1792 image of the Prince of Wales, 'A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion'; CORAL's refreshment tables are good, but not that good!

What is the History in History Painting? The Revolution in History Painting Revisited.

Prof. Mark Phillips (Carleton University) gave the Anniversary Address for CORAL, in April 2011, introduced by our inaugural speaker, Ina Ferris.  Contemporary dress was worn.