London-Paris Romanticism Seminar: Michael Gamer, 11 November 2016, Senate House, London

 

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Following its successful launch in October, the next meeting of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will take place on Friday 11 November and feature the acclaimed scholar Michael Gamer of the University of Pennsylvania, who will speak on “Re-collection’s Intranquility: Romanticism, Self-Canonization and the Business of Poetry”. Venue: Senate House, Bloomsbury Room (G35), 5.30-7.30. The talk will be followed by a discussion and wine reception, to which all are invited. Admission is free.

Michael Gamer is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (CUP, 2000) and Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry, which will be published next year by Cambridge University Press. He is Associate Editor of the journal EIR: Essays in Romanticism and editor of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (Penguin, 2002) and Charlotte Smith’s Manon L’Escaut and the Romance of Real Life (Pickering and Chatto, 2005). He works on collaboration and is fond of collaborative work, which has included The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (edited with Jeffrey Cox, 2003) and Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800 (with Dahlia Porter, 2008). Essays on poetic collections, gender and performance, the novel, pornography, print culture, authorship, and dramas of spectacle have appeared in MLQ, PMLA, Novel, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in Romanticism, and other journals. Michael is in London for a semester on an exchange programme at King’s College London, and we are delighted to welcome him to the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar.

Regarding the topic of his talk, Michael writes:

“What does it mean to collect oneself, as opposed to waiting for posterity to do the work of preparing one’s works after death? In this talk I’ll be exploring the bibliographic practices that characterize self-collection, asking why writers – especially poets – of the Romantic period increasingly turned to reprinting as a means of re-fashioning and repackaging their works. What did such assembled literary corpuses look like and why? And how does self-collection differ from the activities of literary executors, those explicitly authorized gatherers, architects, and embalmers of literary careers?”