Unknown Tongues
Romanticism's Minor and Marginal Languages
24 September 2021
Unknown Tongues is a symposium on Romanticism's minor and marginal languages. On 24 September 2021, invited leading scholars will gather online to debate and discuss what a closer study of (trans)national Romanticisms through their languages can bring to Romantic and nineteenth-century studies, and what relevance a recovery of these traditions may have for our sense of the present. This event is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing conversation, which may result in more initiatives and a publication in due course.
To facilitate a lively debate on the day of the symposium, our event will have a two-stage structure. A few weeks before the symposium, prerecorded talks will be made available through this website. The symposium itself will be devoted to discussion and exchange on the basis of these talks.
The symposium is open to all: upon registration, you will be granted access to the conference materials as well as a Zoom link to the sessions. For any queries or comments, please contact one of the conference organisers either personally or through the Contact button.
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).