Unknown Tongues

Romanticism is often credited with focusing literary interest on linguistic cultures that might otherwise be considered peripheral: the Celtic-speaking cultures of western Europe, the smaller vernaculars of the European continent, the Indigenous languages of the colonised world, and so on. However, mainstream Romantic authors rarely knew or learned these languages, and anglophone Romantic Studies remains principally (and perhaps paradoxically) focused on the “major” European traditions, with little direct attention given to “minor” or marginal tongues. This situation can obscure the complex processes through which “peripheral” cultures were received by the European literary mainstream, and more fundamentally obscures the Romantic significance of these literatures and languages themselves. Our conference seeks to address this issue by bringing anglophone Romanticists together with those specialising in a wide range of smaller languages, examining how Romanticism does (and does not) translate across these linguistic borders. Languages outside the “major” European traditions were by no means all alike: from widely-spoken but administratively marginalised tongues like Slavonic under the Habsburgs, to small but semi-tolerated languages like Welsh, and the Indigenous languages whose speakers were subject to racialized colonial violence. The conference does not seek to homogenize their situations, but rather to explore the complex ways in which linguistic “minority” and marginality have been constructed in a Romantic cultural framework, and to reveal how a more engaged approach to Romantic Studies’ linguistic blind spots can help us rethink Romanticism’s fascination with the culturally specific, marginal, and peripheral.

Organised by Brecht de Groote (Universiteit Gent ⬨ University of Ghent) and Rhys Kaminski-Jones (Prifysgol Cymru y Drindod Dewi Sant ⬨ University of Wales Trinity Saint David).