Caroline Bertonèche (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Transitions chroma(n)tiques : Couleurs et douleurs du romantisme (l’exemple de Keats)
Cette présentation s’intéressera au rôle de la couleur dans l’expression et la représentation de la douleur dans la peinture et la poésie romantiques en s’appuyant notamment sur la spécificité du chroma(n)tisme de Keats.
Diplômée de l’Université d’Oxford en études romantiques et titulaire d’une bourse Fulbright, Caroline Bertonèche est professeur d’art et de littérature britanniques du XIXe siècle et vice-présidente Relations internationales à l’Université Grenoble Alpes. Elle a été présidente du conseil académique de l’UGA entre 2020 et 2024 et présidente de la SERA pendant 10 ans, de 2014 à 2024. Elle est titulaire d’un doctorat de l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle à Paris, d’une bourse doctorale de l’Université de Harvard et d’une bourse post-doctorale du Whitney Humanities Center de l’Université de Yale. En 2001, elle a reçu le Keats-Shelley Second Essay Prize Award. Elle a publié, depuis, plusieurs articles sur le romantisme britannique, sur les modes d’influence dans le discours poétique et médical et sur la réécriture des mythes scientifiques au XIXe siècle. En 2022, elle a été élue membre de la Royal Society of Arts et de la Royal Historical Society.
Antonella Braida (Université de Lorraine)
Mary Shelley’s Rambles across Italian Borders: transition in the genre of travel writing from Grand-Tourism to the Politics of Anglo-Italian identity.es
This paper intends to explore Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844) as a travelogue revealing transition in the genre of travel writing from Grand-Tourism to the politics of Anglo-Italian identity.es. Mary Shelley started thinking about writing a travelogue based on her two European journeys of 1841 and 1842 after meeting the Italian patriot Ferdinando Gatteschi (c. 1813-1845) in Paris in July 1843 and as a means to help him financially. The publisher Edward Moxon published the travelogue in two volumes in 1844: they were positively reviewed in the press, with about twenty-four reviews identified so far.
The sections of Rambles devoted to Italy will be analyzed as a polyphonic, hybrid narrative that draws from many voices, experiences and sources, some translated by Mary Shelley herself at the moment of writing. This work explores the liminal space of travelling across countries and borders/frontiers, and across time. It recounts a single wholistic experience of a woman writer engaged in the process of rediscovering Italian culture in order to forge her own bi-cultural identity. By focusing on Shelley’s choice of sources, this paper will also highlight her reassessment of a tradition of travel writing about Italy in which women found their voices; Rambles will be analysed as a travelogue that merges genres, from art-history, to travel guide, to autobiography and politically inspired narrative.
ANTONELLA BRAIDA is lecturer in English at the Université de Lorraine, Nancy (France), and member of the research center IDEA. After completing her D.Phil at St Catherine’s college, Oxford, she was lecturer in Italian at the University of Durham till 2005, when she moved to France. She is the author of edited volumes and articles on the reception of Dante, on Anglo-Italian relations in the Romantic period, and on women writers, with a special focus on Mary Shelley. She has published the monograph Dante and the Romantics (Palgrave, 2004) and the edited volume Mary Shelley and Europe (Oxford: Legenda, MHRA). She has co-edited the volumes Dante on View (with Luisa Calé, Ashgate, 2007), La Mondializzazione di Dante, I: Europa (with Giuseppe Sangirardi and Giuseppe Cadeddu, Longo 2022), Reflections of Word and Image Across the Arts (with Giuliana Pieri, Legenda, 2003) and Female Voices (with Eva Antal, PUFC, 2022).
Marion Clanet (Université de Lille)
Nostalgia/Solastalgia: Surviving the catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
Mary Shelley’s The Last Man plays the part of a literary cenotaph, idealising romantic discourse and the author’s personal memories a couple of years after second-generation poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron’s deaths. All the while, the most obvious element of the plot, that is, an epidemic of plague arising and wiping off the whole human population, ironically undermines the Romantic fascination for nature. The narrative is centred on the arbitrariness of existence, not only in the face of natural cataclysms but also as random tragic domestic events unfold, further disrupting the notion that human beings have any power or control over their fate. As a consequence, the import of the novel is both post-apocalyptical and post-revolutionary. Soon to celebrate its bicentennial anniversary, The Last Man has recently been academically revived by the new Norton edition, published in July 2023. In my presentation, I propose to read it as a novel of generic, natural and affective transitioning. The novel begins as a roman à clef, barely concealing the characters’ connection to Mary Shelley’s friends and replaying their intellectual and political debates. The tone radically shifts in the middle of the second volume. The narrative ploy of the plague leads to a few meditative passages about nature and civilisation as the narrator crosses desolate landscapes and cities, and about human death, as he witnesses both strangers and his close friends pass away. Yet, despite its Gothic trope of the end of the world, The Last Man’s association to the Gothic genre is much less obvious than in Frankenstein. Although the title of the novel points at the narrator’s final solitude, his prior association to his group of elected friends brings about the true meaning of human life even after historic cities, culture and the remainder of civilisation have collapsed. Mary Shelley’s novel is indeed a grieving plea for the Romantic principle of sympathy, that is to say our affective association to the surrounding world through our most intimate inter-subjective connections. I contend that despite the apparent break it causes in the narrative, the event of the natural catastrophe provides a device to amplify this consistent theme of the novel.
In December 2023, Marion Clanet defended a doctoral thesis entitled “The Copy: The Replication of the Human in the Laboratory of Fiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, focusing on the posthuman, biopower and the dialogue between science and literature in these three Gothic novels, under the supervision of Professor Catherine Lanone. Under post-doctoral contract at the University of Lille since September 2024, she is working alongside Professor Sophie Musitelli on the WISE project, for a survey and study of British women writers who have written poems inspired from the sciences from the Romantic period to the contemporary era.
Barbara Cousin (Université de Lille)
William Blake : d’une planche à l’autre pour un art de l’entre-deux
Aborder Blake par la notion de transition sera l’occasion de porter une attention particulière à la manière dont il utilise son art visuel et l’enchainement de ses planches afin de créer un art de la transition grâce auquel le spectateur/ la spectatrice va être amené(e) à faire évoluer ses capacités perceptives.
Fonctionnaire d’Etat depuis 25 ans, personnel de direction d’un établissement secondaire depuis 17 ans, Barbara COUSIN a repris son travail de recherche sur Blake en décembre 2018 sous la direction de Monsieur Laurent CHÂTEL (Université de Lille). Son travail doctoral, « La Nature de Blake : Observer, Imaginer, Graver », s’intéresse à l’art visuel de Blake, et notamment au détail visuel qu’elle place au cœur du processus de rééducation de la perception souhaitée par l’artiste. Elle travaille en collaboration avec la Plaine Images de Roubaix à l’élaboration d’un protocole d’immersion visuelle dans l’aquarelle Raphael Warns Adam and Eve (The Butts Set, 1808).
Rémy Duthille (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
A Transition in British Sociability? Excess and Sobriety in Victorian Accounts of Georgian Life
In a sense, this paper chronicles the transition from one cliché to another: that from excessive, bibulous Georgian sociability to Victorian restraint and temperance. Despite evidence of discontinuities in sociability, especially of the radical kind (Pitt and Grenville’s Acts in 1795, anti-Jacobin repression of dissidents, Whig isolation) a narrative established itself presenting the years between the French Revolution and Victoria’s reign as a long transition in sociability, at least if one reads the autobiographies of some actors of the period. This paper considers two such sources which are each classic in a historiographical field but are never confronted. The autobiography of Francis Place (1771-1854) are a fundamental source of the history of English radicalism and Chartism. A paragon of respectability, Jacobin-turned-temperance reformer Place had his critics, like E.P. Thompson who classified him among the ‘milk-and-water’ radicals. Place’s views on the moralization of the London working-class sociability could be reassessed by comparison with those of the judge Lord Cockburn (1779-1854), whose Memorials of His Own Time (published in 1909) are a key testimony for the Scottish historiography of Edinburgh sociability and reform politics in the Romantic and early Victorian eras. Attention will be paid to retrospective value judgements and the fashioning of a narrative of improvement, by Place, Cockburn and those who used their life writings as a model.
Rémy Duthille is Professor of British Civilization at Bordeaux Montaigne University. His research focuses on political discourse and sociability during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has published a monograph, Le Discours radical, 1768-1789 (Voltaire Foundation, 2017) and his habilitation à diriger des recherches examines how British communities welcomed foreign revolutions from 1789 to 1848. His articles and book chapters focus on political radicalism, the memory of revolutions, feminist men and sociability, in particular the toast as a vector of identity in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
John-Erik Hansson (Université Paris Cité)
“Imagination, Religion, and Politics: William Godwin’s Transitions at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century”
William Godwin is usually remembered as a rationalist and atheist radical thinker of the 1790s who slowly went into obscurity in the early 1800s as he disengaged from politics. Challenging this commonplace view, this paper seeks to examine the three related transitions in Godwin’s thought that occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century. The first has to do with a change in philosophical vocabulary. Godwin adopted and politicized the concept of imagination, a term which he had seldom used before 1800. The second concerns his analysis of religion. Though an atheist for most of the 1790s, Godwin eventually adopted a form of (pan)theism and revisited his earlier account of religion. While he retained a critical view of Christianity, he came to consider the potential benefits of a certain “religious sense” (to borrow Rowland Weston’s phrase), not least in relation to the development of the imagination. As I will show, these two transitions are linked to Godwin’s changing views on the temporality and nature of social and political reform in the aftermath of what he saw as French Revolutionary excesses, and the effects of repression in Britain.
John-Erik Hansson is lecturer in British History at Université Paris Cité and reviews editor of the Anarchist Studies journal. He is a specialist of the intellectual and cultural history of political radicalism, from the late eighteenth-century to today. In particular, he has worked on William Godwin and his circle, with a special interest in the links between radicalism and the diversity of genre of writings – from philosophical treatises to children’s books. More recently, he has worked on Godwin’s twentieth-century reputation as a precursor of anarchism, to rethink the ways in which anarchists have (re-)constructed their own histories.
Hélène Ibata (Université de Strasbourg)
Landscapes in transition: Industrial ‘Ugliness’ and the Picturesque in British Landscape Paintings, 1770-1830.
The picturesque vision of landscape is often considered to have fostered perceptions and representations of natural environments that were in growing discrepancy with the economic and social realities of Britain, in the context of the first industrial revolution. By offering an ideal of landscape as lived-in and moderately anthropized, it seemed to deny the rapidly growing tensions between the productive, acquisitive logic of Georgian Britain and the living world.
Yet, through its quest (and nostalgia) for a harmonious coexistence of nature and humans that seemed to become increasingly elusive, the picturesque also provided some proto-ecological responses to industrialization. Its theorists and practitioners, for instance, reflected about processes through which natural environments that had been damaged by extractive activities could be mended, in a manner that anticipated our own contemporary reflections about reclaiming industrial and urban wastelands.
As this paper more specifically intends to emphasize, painters of the industrial revolution suggested strategies of resilience by endeavouring to reconcile the conventions of picturesque landscape with their jarring subject matter. Their transposition of these conventions to extractive sites that were deemed ‘ugly’, their attempts to make unfamiliar and unpleasant environments appear more hospitable, but also their desire to place industrial activity within longer temporalities, could be seen as partaking of a broader reflection about adapting to and surmounting the tensions induced by industrialization. The emphasis will be on works by William Williams, Edward Pugh, Julius Caesar Ibbetson, and Penry Williams.
Hélène Ibata is Professor at the University of Strasbourg. Her research interests include art history, the history of ideas, visual studies and the interaction between image and text, with a particular focus on the following areas: British Romantic painting and visual media; the sublime; the representation of ruins in British art; landscape and environmental humanities. Her work has led to the publication of a book by Manchester University Press, The Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art (2018). As part of her recent work on art and the current environmental crisis, she has co-edited an issue of Interfaces, “Contemporary ruins” (2023) and an issue of RANAM, “Landscapes and aesthetic spatialities in the Anthropocene” (2021); she has also co-curated (with Gwendolyne Cressman, Gérard Starck and Olivier Deloignon) two exhibitions at the Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme – Alsace (MISHA).
Marion Leclair (Université Paris Nanterre)
“The Elusive Transition: Novelising the Industrial Revolution in the 1790s”
While the fiction produced in turn-of-the-century Britain is keen to represent, for better or worse, the democratic transformation ushered in by the American, French and Haitian revolutions, in the shape of Parisian crowds, rebellious servants or insurgent slaves, the economic revolution at work proves much more elusive. True enough, the new industrial mode of production was as yet, very localised: Arkwright-type mills employing over fifty workers and the newest machinery were still few and far between, located chiefly in the Midlands and Scottish Lowlands, and because mainly water-powered, somewhat hidden away in the countryside along riverbanks and streams. Conversely, the concentration of the literary scene in London, then a centre of artisan production, kept the two worlds apart. Yet, some novelists did cross paths with the industrial transition underway – and recorded it in their non-fictional writings. Robert Bage owned a paper mill in Derbyshire and was friends, through the Derby Philosophical Society, with some of the Lunar Men. Godwin visited the Wedgwood pottery works in 1797 and developed in the 1810s a friendship with Robert Owen, who was busy turning the New Lanark cotton mills into something of a model factory. Thomas Holcroft grew up picking coal and hawking pottery wares in Staffordshire; and when John Thelwall gave up political activism and settled in Wales to try his hand at farming, he often visited the nearby industrialising Taff Vale. Yet the emerging features of industrialising Britain and the new social relations it entailed are rarely built into the fictional world of their novels. The paper will examine, and seek to explain, this discrepancy.
Marion Leclair is a lecturer at the Université Paris Nanterre. She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century radicalism in England, focusing on the relationship between literature and politics, particularly in the work of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Thelwall, to whom she has devoted her thesis and several articles. She is also a translator, notably of a short novel by William Morris (A Dream by John Ball, 2010) and, with Edward Lee-Six, of a posthumous collection of essays by historian E.P. Thompson, The Romantics: England in the Age of Revolutions (2023). She is also involved in the collective translation of the New York Daily Tribune articles published in English by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1850s.
Céline Lochot (Université de Lille)
Elusive meaning : De Quincey between fear and hope
As “a late Romantic publishing with Victorian means and concerns” (Gerald Maa), Thomas De Quincey appears as a transitional author par excellence; and yet, he has also been described as an author who never fully adjusted to Victorian times and, “having lived well on into an age which was not his […] died almost an anachronism in 1859” (H.A. Eaton).
De Quincey worries that Progress displaces outmoded lifestyles and values instead of outgrowing them. Like individuals, civilisations, landscapes, or ideas become superannuated and die. If we could read the palimpsest of successive layers of our History, whether individual or collective, we would chance upon “grotesque collisions” for lack of “natural connection” between them. And yet, De Quincey complains that school education does not present the “growth and development” at work in History, looks for permanent laws in economy, and begrudges “loose and rambling” biographies. He also wrote an extensive history of the Cesars, and a biography of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Moreover, he puts nostalgia aside in favour of a lyrical tone to announce the benefits (yet to come) of the French Revolution, and celebrate Progress (improvement of the national spirit and education with the improvement of communications and conversation). Throughout his autobiographical work, he keeps looking for the elusive “nexus” that would reconcile the child he was with the man he became, and make him whole. However, he seems bound to fail, as the insensible change connected to long-term evolution both warps our critical judgement, and distorts our memory, making us forget large parts of our past opinions and feelings, leaving us with a series of disjointed portraits, to be interpreted in the light of a few life-changing events, sudden crises and unexpected parentheses of happiness.
Despite his expertise in style and rhetoric, De Quincey also enjoys casual, humorous transitions between ideas and articles, though they are often more meaningful than they appear, and actually connected to serious concerns.
Céline LOCHOT is agrégée in English and holds a doctorate in Anglophone Studies from the University of Burgundy on Irony in the works of Thomas De Quincey. PRAG at the IUT de Lille since 2009, she has been teaching literary methodology at the Department of Anglophone Studies (University of Lille) since 2016. Her recent publications include “Les destinées romanesques de ‘La Nonne Nautico-militaire d’Espagne’” (Revue Europe, 2024), Complexe de l’ironiste, De Quincey à l’œuvre (Grenoble: UGA Editions, 2021), “Les (Re)construction(s) de Thomas De Quincey” in Inconstances romantiques: Visions et révisions dans la littérature britannique du long XIXe siècle (Nancy: Editions Universitaires de Lorraine, 2019) and “La citation autobiographique chez De Quincey: cet autre moi-même”. in Les illusions de l’autonymie: la parole rapportée de l’Autre dans la littérature (Paris: Hermann, 2019).
Sophie Musitelli (Université de Lille)
Sequences, Circles and Networks: The Strange Temporality of Nonhuman Life and Death in Charlotte Smith’s Botanical Poetry
This paper offers to examine how Smith’s precise knowledge of natural history opens on to a reflection on the constant interchanges between dead and living matter. It focuses on short poems taken mostly from Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1797) and Beachy Head, Fables and Other Poems (1807) that exhibit a fondness for organisms living inside and / or feeding on other living structures. As she looks into the decay of saprotrophs nourishing plants they once fed on, Smith develops a poetics of vitality that reaches towards dead matter. Decaying and developing tissue constantly transition into one another, tearing the poems away from the linear temporality of human life towards the strange temporality of nonhuman life. The poems display a tension between the human subject as a being in time and the temporality of plant and fungal life, mediating between life and death. The poems’ gnarled syntax and phonic networks also participate in the attempt at turning the linearity of writing into entanglements in which the strange temporality of nonhuman life could nest and thrive.
Sophie LANIEL-MUSITELLI is Professor at the University of Lille (France). Her research focuses on the interactions among literature, the sciences and philosophy in the Romantic era. She has written books, articles and chapters on the works of Erasmus Darwin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy B. Shelley, John Clare and Thomas De Quincey. She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Sciences of the Senses in Romantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and on the research program WISE (Women Poets Inspired by the Sciences since the Romantic Era).
Kimberley Page-Jones (Université de Bretagne Occidentale)
« ‘Merry England’: l’utopie festive renouvelée dans les écrits de William Hazlitt et Leigh Hunt »
Cette communication souhaite inscrire quelques essais de Leigh Hunt et William Hazlitt dans la tradition de caractérisation des peuples qui, selon A.M. Thiesse, permet de penser le peuple de la nation comme ‘communauté transsociale’ à l’époque romantique. Dans ces textes littéraires, les hors-la-lois accèdent au statut de héros et de résistant. Les allusions à Robin des Bois sont pléthores chez Hazlitt et Hunt, et sont moins l’expression d’une nostalgie pour un âge d’or perdu qu’une manière de forger de nouveaux héros contemporains, les boxeurs, joueurs de cricket et autres sportifs. Il s’agira également de réfléchir à la fonction éthique et politique de la notion de ‘merriment’ dans ces textes, dans le prolongement des écrits de Joseph Addison et David Hume sur la gaieté anglaise (cheerfulness).
Kimberley PAGE-JONES est MCF à l’Université de Bretagne Occidentale à Brest. Ses travaux de thèse ont porté sur les carnets de ST Coleridge (Énergie et mélancolie: les entrelacs de l’écriture dans les Notebooks de S.T. Coleridge (Grenoble: UGA, 2018). Elle est membre du laboratoire de recherche HCTI et du GIS Sociabilités. Elle est l’une des éditrices de l’encyclopédie numérique DIGIT.EN.S. Encyclopedia. Elle a récemment co-édité avec Valérie Capdeville l’ouvrage Sociabilités et espaces en Europe et dans les colonies (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles). Pratiques, identités et réseaux, paru aux Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2023. Elle termine actuellement une monographie sur l’écriture des fêtes révolutionnaires et de la liesse populaire dans les récits de voyages britanniques.
Alexandra Sippel (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès)
“Making Transition Acceptable: Popular Education Promoting the Poor Law Report”
In his recent and extensive research regarding paupers’ attitudes to the Poor Laws, Old and New, Steven King laid particular emphasis on how familiar they were with the law, both with its very existence and with the details of what they were entitled to depending on their circumstances. The Speenhamland system that had been adopted in 1795-1796 to make up for falling wages was the target of the rising stars of political economy, even more so after Malthus published his Inquiry into the Principle of Population (1798). The economist Nassau Senior (1790-1864) was highly influential in drafting the Poor Law Report that was to lead to the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834). Like Malthus and fellow political economists, Senior was convinced that winning public opinion over would not be easy and yet that it was absolutely indispensable. It was all the more crucial as discontent was widespread after the adoption of the 1832 Reform Act that failed to extend the suffrage to working men, and shortly after the Swing riots that had agitated the country in 1830. So Senior turned to the Lord Henry Brougham, the founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and to his editor Charles Knight who were both quite keen on trying to diffuse the liberal economists’ analyses of the Old Poor Law and its detrimental consequences both on the workers’ lives and on the country at large. Political economy had until then been the preserve of the better educated, but times were ripe for it to be shared with the literate working class. Among the many publications that were produced under the aegis of the SPUK, Jane Marcet’s collection of tracts, John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy (1833) is of particular interest. In this paper, I will focus on the fourth tract entitled “The Poor’s Rate, or Treacherous Friends” to show how she manages to sketch out the life of a typical working-class family and the reasons why it was compelled to turn to the parish for relief, as well as the typical objections provided by a supporter of the Poor Law Report and the upcoming reform. What makes Marcet’s discussion of poor relief particularly interesting is that she stages both John Hopkins and his wife, offering an insight into how men and women felt about poor relief, as well as into the arguments that “their betters” would resort to in order to make them adhere to the Malthusian strand of political economy.
Alexandra Sippel is a lecturer in British intellectual history and a member of the Centre for Anglophone Studies (CAS, EA 801) in Toulouse. He current research mainly addresses the emergence of political economy and its diffusion to the lesser educated part of the population (women, literate workers and their children). She is also interested in early socialism, both in Britain and France. Her short introduction to early nineteenth-century French socialism Découvrir les premiers socialistes should be released in 2025 and her latest publications in English have had to do with early nineteenth century radicalism (with Rachel Rogers): Peterloo 1819 and After: Perspectives from Britain and Beyond, Caliban, 65, 2022.