Our first 2016/17 event—Pain and Prejudice—is on tomorrow!

2016/17 CRECS Programme now available

We are delighted to announce our programme for the forthcoming academic year, 2016-2017. Events are usually held on Mondays, begin at 5.15pm, take place in Cardiff University’s Special Collections or the John Percival building and are followed by a drinks reception. Information about each event will be publicized on the CRECS blog in advance. All are welcome, but we warmly encourage undergraduates and MA students to attend in order to learn more about our research into the eighteenth century and Romantic period .

Founding members of CRECS are Dr Melanie Bigold, Dr James Castell, Dr Sophie Coulombeau, Alison Harvey, Prof. Anthony Mandal, Dr Jane Moore and Prof. Garthine Walker. You can contact any of us with questions about the programme.

We are currently looking for under- and postgraduate students from Cardiff University to join the CRECS team, assist with organising events and help us to manage our blog and social media. Please get in touch with one of us if you would like to be involved!

First event for 2016/17—Pain and Prejudice: Women and Science in the Romantic Era, 17 Oct 2016

Over the past decade, scholars have become increasingly interested in interfaces between scientific and literary discourses during the Romantic period. How did ideas about cutting-edge science inflect and shape literary productions? How did novels, poetry and life writing mould scientific discourse? And, in an era when women were officially excluded from public institutions of science such as the Royal Society, how did they access, develop and perpetuate scientific knowledge through literary activity?

On the evening of the 17th of October, three members of the CRECS team will explore intersections between scientific discourse, literary innovation and gender in the writings of two of the period’s most important novelists.

CONFERENCE REPORT: ‘Scandal and sociability: New perspectives on the Burney family’.

On September 1^st, Cardiff University hosted the international symposium, ‘Scandal and Sociability: New Perspectives on the Burney Family’. Organizing this event was a high point of my first year in post at Cardiff. For years, I’ve been fascinated with Frances Burney, one of the most successful and influential novelists of the eighteenth century and a central figure in my doctoral research. But ever since I was lucky enough to spend a month in Montreal researching at McGill’s Burney Centre in the second year of my PhD, I’ve also been fascinated with her brilliant, sociable, polymathic and oddly secretive family circle. Between them, the Burneys published dozens of novels, scores of reviews, books on music and naval exploration, and political tracts. They wrote plays, drew popular prints and composed countless pieces of music. They travelled across the world, and knew or corresponded with most British luminaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries working in the fields of literature, art, music, politics, botany, exploration, and court and Church circles.

Report on CRECS Fight Club, 3 Feb 2015

by Alison Harvey

Tuesday night saw the launch of the Cardiff Romanticism and Eighteenth Century Seminar series, which kicked off in style with Fight Club: a no-holds-barred, trash-talking, dirty-fighting academic debate between six of English Literature’s finest. There was standing room only in Special Collections and Archives, with a superb turnout of over 60 undergraduates, postgraduates and staff. Each speaker had just 5 minutes to convince the audience that their chosen author was a true Romantic Genius. 

CALL FOR PAPERS: Scandal and Sociability: New Perspectives on the Burney Family, 1750–1850

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Scandal and Sociability

New Perspectives on the Burney Family, 1750–1850

 

One-day interdisciplinary symposium

Cardiff University

Tuesday, 1 September 2015

 

Keynote speaker: Professor Peter Sabor, McGill University

‘”The march of intimacy”: Dr. Burney and Dr. Johnson’

In recent years, much scholarly interest has moved beyond the novels of Frances Burney to encompass the influence and activities of the rest of her family, including: her father Charles (historian of music and man of letters) her sister Susan (musician and critic), her brother James (rear-admiral who sailed with Captain Cook and acted as interpreter for the famous Tahitian Omai), her brother Charles (bibliophile, collector and schoolmaster), her half-sister Sarah Harriet (author of seven novels 1796–1839), her stepsister Elizabeth (better known as ‘Mrs Meeke’, the author of twenty-six novels 1795–1823), and her cousin Edward Francisco Burney (artist and illustrator). Between them, the Burneys knew most British luminaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries working in the fields of literature, art, music, politics, botany, exploration, and court and Church circles. However, no conference or publication has specifically considered the Burney family as a composite whole, asking how their sociable network and often tumultuous internal dynamics influenced the remarkable spate of cultural and sociable activity carried out by its polymathic members. This interdisciplinary symposium will do so, and will result in an edited collection of papers, proposed to a leading academic press.