Download Romanticism and Self

Call for Papers:
Romanticism and Self-Destruction, May 9th, 2014.
Centre for Romantic and Victorian Studies
University of Bristol
The University of Bristol’s Centre for Romantic and Victorian Studies is pleased to announce
a one-day conference on the theme of Romanticism and Self-Destruction. The conference
will be held on May 9th at the University of Bristol, and will include plenary talks by
Professor Andrew Bennett (Bristol) and Professor Caroline Franklin (Swansea). The
conference will be held at 43, Woodland Road.
In the turbulent years of the late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth centuries, the Romantics
witnessed wars and revolutions, riots and public executions, mass protest and its forceful
suppression. Such violence and upheaval found expression in the works the Romantics
produced; but this destructiveness was also notably turned against the self. The theme of
self-destruction is a marked feature in poetry, in prose fiction, and in the drama of the
period. David Hume’s Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul offered
philosophical respectability to the act of suicide when it was published posthumously in
1783; Goethe’s influential The Sorrows of Young Werther, with its famously suicidal hero,
appeared in England in 1779; and Chatterton’s apparent suicide at seventeen in 1770
captured the imagination of Romantic-period writers.
This conference will address questions of self-destruction in Romanticism: is selfdestruction an essential feature of the Romantic project? What is the relationship between
suffering and self-knowledge? Is Romantic subjectivity constituted by the desire for its own
annihilation? The conference will also go beyond literary and other representations of
actual suicides, to investigate wider questions of masochism, self-sacrifice, and self-harm in
Romantic literature. It will ask how far the self-destructiveness of alcoholism and drugaddiction are exploited by the Romantics as ways of transcending the self. To what extent
are these impulses linked to an escape from the self, body and world, on the one hand, and
to the production of literary and philosophical works on the other? And it will seek to
reconfigure aspects of nationality, ethnicity, class and gender within the context of
representations of Romantic suicide and self-destruction.
Topics for papers might include:
Dark Romanticism
Suicide and self-harm
Drug addiction and alcoholism
Masochism
Self-annihilation
Suffering and knowledge
Self-fashioning and self-destruction
The Passive Self: Negative Capability, indolence, prophetic inspiration
Self-sacrifice
Transcendentalism and the loss of selfhood
Travel and death
Writing and the loss of self
The conference organisers would particularly like to encourage participation by
postgraduates and early-career researchers. Please submit abstracts of c.250 words for
twenty-minute papers on the theme of Romanticism and Self-destruction to the conference
organisers, Stephanie Codsi and Jimmy Packham at [email protected]. The
deadline for abstract submission is December 1st. We will be in touch with all applicants by
December 16th.