The next meeting of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will take place on Friday 30 January 2026 in Room 349 (third floor), Senate House, University of London, starting at 5.30 pm. As our distinguished guest speaker, we are delighted to welcome Professor Luisa Calè of Birkbeck, University of London, who will present a paper entitled Detached Pieces, Loose Leaves and the Poetics of the Unbound Book. This will be followed by a discussion and wine reception. The seminar will be chaired by David Duff (Queen Mary University of London).

This event is free and open to everyone, including postgraduates and members of the public.

Luisa Calè is Professor of Romantic and Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. She writes about the visual and material cultures of reading, viewing and collecting, literary galleries, altered books and print culture. She is the author of Visione e Cosmo: la prospettiva nel Paradise Lost (1997); Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (2006); The Book Unbound: Practices of Reading and Collecting 1750-1850 (2025); co-editor of two books: Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performative Arts (2007) and Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture (2010). She has also co-edited special issues on ‘The Disorder of Things’ for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2011), ‘The Nineteenth-Century Digital Archive’ for 19 (2015) ‘Literature and Sculpture at the Fin de Siècle’ for Word & Image (2018), ‘Sibylline Leaves’ for Studies in Romanticism (2020), and ‘Literature, Invention, and Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution’ for 19 (2024). She is Exhibitions Editor at Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly and Associate Editor at Word & Image.

Regarding the subject of her paper, Luisa writes:

“This talk focuses on detached pieces and loose leaves to rematerialize Romantic books as unbound forms, drawing on my new monograph The Book Unbound: Material Cultures of Reading and Collecting ca 1750-1850.This monograph captures the Romantic bibliographic imagination by examining the dynamic tension between detached pieces, flying leaves and bound forms, taking the corpus of Horace Walpole, William Blake, and Charles Dickens as case studies of unbound textual conditions before and after books are bound. As an object that changed hands in stitched sheets, wrappers, temporary bindings, the book can function as an open-ended collection of loose leaves, a flexible support for etchings, engravings, drawings, maps, letterpress, manuscripts, and other materials. To follow the trajectory of detached pieces, designs, and loose leaves inserted in books is to reveal the porous boundaries between texts within changing milieus of reading, collecting and book-making. This talk takes examples from Walpole’s and Blake’s detached pieces: book parts, proofs, flying leaves, fragments caught up between the textual conditions of the unfinished book, the disbound single leaf, and the cut up miniature.”