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Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism, 2006

Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism:

A Bicentenary Conference

 

28-29 October 2006

University of Warwick, UK

Plenary Speakers: STUART CURRAN

                              JUDITH STANTON

 

Summary: Marking the bicentennary of Smith's death, this conference will evaluate her current place in British Romanticism and the many ways in which she is being studied by scholars. 

Charlotte Smith died on 28 October 1806, famously commemorated by William Wordsworth as a poet ‘to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’.  This conference seeks to draw together Smith scholars and evaluate her current place in the Romantic canon.  Smith’s poetry, from Elegiac Sonnets on, caught the zeitgeist of a style colored by personal reflection as well as poetical experimentation and innovation and political intervention.  Her novels are models of the late-eighteenth-century interest in sensibility, history, and subjectivity.  Since the early 1990s criticism of her works has burgeoned, and she is now regularly described as central to the formation of a style of Romantic writing made familiar by Wordsworth.  Her complete Works are currently in preparation for publication by Pickering and Chatto, and of her novels, The Old Manor House, Emmeline, Celestina, and Desmond are in print.

The draft conference program is available now; see sidebar.  Please address any questions to the conference organizer, Jacqueline Labbe, j.m.labbe@warwick.ac.uk; Dept. of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.

Pickering and Chatto have expressed interest in publishing a volume of essays on Smith; more information will be available about this soon.

Costs: Waged: £195; unwaged: £165 (all-inclusive of bed [Saturday night], board [Saturday morning tea/coffee-Sunday afternoon tea/coffee], and fee).  To register, please print out and post the registration form.