{"id":1508,"date":"2021-02-07T01:28:05","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T01:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/?p=1508"},"modified":"2021-02-08T08:01:33","modified_gmt":"2021-02-08T08:01:33","slug":"london-paris-romanticism-seminar-nigel-leask-online-seminar-friday-19-february-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/?p=1508","title":{"rendered":"London-Paris Romanticism Seminar: Nigel Leask, Online Seminar, Friday 19 February 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The next meeting of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will take place via Zoom on Friday 19 February 2021 at 17.30-19.30 London time (GMT). As our guest speaker, we are delighted to welcome Professor Nigel Leask<\/a><\/strong> of the University of Glasgow, who will deliver a paper entitled “Werry romantic…among these Mountains & Lakes”: John Keats and the Highland Tour. <\/em><\/strong>His illustrated talk will be followed by a discussion in which questions from the audience are invited. The seminar will be chaired by Gregory Dart<\/strong><\/a> (University College London). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The seminar is free and open to everyone. Prior registration is necessary. To book a place via the Institute of English Studies website, click here<\/strong><\/a> and scroll down to the relevant seminar. When you register, you will be provided with a Zoom link and details of how to join the online forum. Whether you wish to contribute or simply to listen in, we invite you to join us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nigel Leask<\/a>\n<\/strong>is Regius\nChair in English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published\nwidely on British, Irish and Scottish romanticism, with a special emphasis on orientalism,\npopular culture, travel writing and \u2018improvement\u2019. His books include British Romantic Writers and the East:\nAnxieties of Empire <\/em>(1992); Curiosity\nand the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770<\/em>\u20131840: ‘From an Antique Land’<\/em> (2002); Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late\nEighteenth-century Scotland<\/em> (2010); and an edition of Robert Burns\u2019 Commonplace Books, Tour Journals and Miscellaneous Prose<\/em>,\nthe first volume of the Oxford Edition of\nRobert Burns\u2019 Writings<\/em> (2014). In 2014-18 he co-directed the AHRC-funded project\n\u2018Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour, 1750-1820\u2019.\nHis latest monograph Stepping Westward: Writing\nthe Highland Tour 1720-1830<\/em> was published in 2020. He is also co-editor of Old Ways and New Roads<\/em>: Travels in Scotland 1720-1832<\/em> (2021), published\nto accompany a Hunterian Art Gallery exhibition that has been transferred\nonline due to Covid. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal\nSociety of Edinburgh, and a Vice-President of the Association for Scottish\nLiterary Studies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regarding the subject of his talk, Nigel writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Keats’s facetious account of his 1818 six-week northern tour with his\nfriend Charles Armitage Brown, particularly the soft \u201cv\u201d in \u201cwerry\u201d, suggests a\ntouch of \u201cCockney carnivalesque\u201d. My talk explores this spirit both in Keats’s\ntour itself, and in the episodic account of it which he furnished in letters to\nhis brother Tom, to George and Georgiana Keats, and friends like Reynolds and\nBailey. I’ll consider his tour writing in relation to other romantic period\ntravel accounts about Scotland, considering the literary influence of\nWordsworth, Burns, and Scott, the latter a significant absence from Keats’s\ntour, in contrast to the narratives of other contemporary tourists. Keats’s\nversion of romantic pedestrianism is an exercise in masculine self-fashioning\nand social mobility, which I read as a cultural performance in its own right,\nalbeit one that proved fatal to his health. Attention is paid to costume and \u201cknick-knacks\u201d,\nto his itinerary, and the guidebooks employed by the tourists, as well as their\nrelations with local people, especially in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands.\nKeats’s accounts of key sites, like Loch Lomond, Inveraray, Mull, Iona, Staffa,\nand Ben Nevis are analysed in relation to the often light-hearted tour poetry they\ninspired. Contemporaries criticized the Highland tour in the post-Waterloo\nperiod as a commodified and cockneyfied cliche, especially in the wake of the\ncraze for Scott’s Highland romances. This is reflected in Keats’s ironical\nnegotiation of the Scottish \u201cbeaten track\u201d, which anticipates the poetic spirit\nof his last years.\u2019  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The next meeting of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will take place via Zoom on Friday 19 February 2021 at 17.30-19.30 London time (GMT). As our guest speaker, we are delighted to welcome Professor Nigel Leask of the University of Glasgow, who will deliver a paper entitled “Werry romantic…among these Mountains & Lakes”: John Keats and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1508"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1521,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions\/1521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}