The next meeting of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will be held on Friday 17 November 2017 in Room 349 (third floor), Senate House, University of London, starting at 5.30. As our distinguished guest speaker, we are delighted to welcome Laurent Folliot (University of Paris-Sorbonne), who will present a paper entitled Coleridge and Myriad-Mindedness. This will be followed by a discussion and a wine reception, to which all are invited. Admission is free.

Laurent Folliot is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and Cambridge University. He is currently Assistant Professor in British Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He has published a number of articles on British Romanticism (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, William Gilbert), as well as on Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and his book on Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s nature poetry is forthcoming at Lyon/Grenoble University Press. He is also a translator (Hazlitt, Melville, Sterne, William Temple, Dickens, Shaftesbury), and his new verse translation of Thomson’s Seasons will shortly be issued by Classiques Garnier.

Regarding the topic of his paper, Laurent writes:

“My paper revisits the longstanding topos of Coleridge’s  ‘myriad-mindedness’ by taking it, as it were, literally: by focusing on the spiritual myriads or multitudes that recur as a structural motif in his early poetry, notably in ‘Religious Musings’ and ‘The Destiny of Nations,’ which feature various crowds diversely made up of angels, medullary particles, and monads of the physical or moral world. I shall examine the existential, political, philosophical and poetical aspects of the young Coleridge’s investment in multeity, before suggesting that some its implications may go some way towards explaining his later turn away from both pantheistic metaphysics and metaphysical poetry.”