Programme

Rhys Kaminski-Jones ⬧ A Work We Do Not Understand: William Owen Pughe and Romanticism’s Welsh Border

In his periodical The Indicator in 1821, the well-known Romantic poet and journalist Leigh Hunt attempted a half-joking, half-serious review of a Welsh-language work by his acquaintance William Owen Pughe. This review—which admires ‘the evident spirit under which’ Pughe’s work was written, whilst simultaneously bemoaning that it has ‘nothing in it for us Saxons'—epitomizes the paradoxical status of Welsh and other smaller languages in relation to the trans-continental reach of the most linguistically “major” Romanticisms. My paper will use both Hunt’s review and Pughe’s Welsh and English writings to explore the ambiguities of Anglo-Welsh cultural exchange in this era, which saw a growing Welsh Romanticism and a growing interest in Welsh amongst the English, but during which cross-cultural exchanges were necessarily affected by real and imagined linguistic hierarchies. A reading of Pughe’s Welsh-language writings will examine how Welsh work highly redolent of anglophone Romanticism is actually often an outlier in the context of Welsh Romanticism, whilst Hunt’s centring of the combined frustration and excitement of encountering an unknown tongue is read as foundational to anglophone Romanticism’s construction of “minor” literary value.

Brecht de Groote ⬧ The Translational Reinvention of Flanders: Hendrik Conscience Reconsidered

Hailed as the “man who taught his nation how to read”, the author of “the Flemish Illiad”, and nothing short of “the Flemish [Walter] Scott”, who penned novels and short stories with an extraordinary national and international impact, Hendrik (or Henri) Conscience (1812–1883) continues to be a cultural icon, even if his work is now rarely read or studied, even by Romanticist scholars. Using his most famous historical novel, the 1838 The Lion of Flanders (De Leeuw van Vlaanderen), the present paper seeks to situate Conscience in a wider discussion regarding the position of minor and marginal languages within European Romanticism. The paper particularly attends to the paradoxical transnationality of the nationalist constructions operated by the novel, as well as the careful ways in which the novel and its writer seek to (dis)align with various foreign languages and cultures to balance external validation with internal manifestation.

Iona Bot ⬧ Imagining Language in the Romanian Romantic Literature

Language—and, mainly, national language—was a very important topic in the Romanian 19th century cultural debate, as it helped forge a national identity and served to justify important political programs, aimed at creating a (new, independent, European etc.) Romanian state. Romantic writers—through their literary writings, as well as through their political stances—were among the important voices of this debate. Acknowledging this situation as the departing context of my reflections, I will try to focus on something else, namely on poetic experiments based on the theme of language. The Romantic writers were the first to play the “barbarian” character of Romanian language (a Romance language, albeit one unknown to the European mainstream Romance culture etc.) into the theme of the “impossible language”, which would outgrow Romanticism, into modernist language images. I want to discuss the evolution of the “literary theme of language” in Romanian Romantic literature, from the politically motivated topic of the “national language”, to other imaginary constructions, such as the perfect language, the language of the unsayable, the language of mathematic or visual (“illegible”) formulas etc. Following this evolution, one can see how the first Romanticism’s perspective on (national) language later transformed into a rich imagery of literary and linguistic experiments, up to the modernist view of (poetic) language as a unique experiment in artistic creativity.

Nikki Hessell & Vini Olsen-Reeden ⬧ Ngā Ngutu Tātahi/Fluent Lips: Translating Byron’s “Youth and Age” into Te Reo Māori.

In this dialogue, Vini Olsen-Reeder (Ngā Pōtiki a Tamapahore, Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāi Te Rangi, Te Arawa) and Nikki Hessell (Pākehā) discuss a 1925 translation of lines from Byron’s “Youth and Age” in te reo Māori/the Māori language.

Valentina Gossetti ⬧ Multilingual vs Monolingual Poetry Anthologies: Showcasing or Concealing Regional Languages in Nineteenth-Century "France"

In this talk, I shall survey a sample of poetry anthologies, such as Alphonse Séché's 1891 Les Muses françaises. Anthologie des femmes-poètes (Paris: Louis Michaud), Mme Eugène Riom's 1892 Les Femmes poètes bretonnes (Nantes: Société des bibliophiles Bretons et de l’histoire de Bretagne), Joseph Rousse's 1895 La Poésie bretonne au XIXe siècle (Paris: P. Lethielleux), and Adolphe van Bever's 1909. Les Poètes du terroir. Du XVe au XXe siècle, (Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave) to investigate how these anthologists have chosen to deal with poetry in the regional languages of France. Grounded in my argument that anthologists should be considered as cultural mediators, curators of the literary canon, and key to ensuring its constant revision and renewal, this paper will highlight how, in these volumes, the editors decided to engage (or indeed not to engage) with the wider "cultural regionalism" characterising fin-de-siècle France.

James Thomas ⬧ A Catalan in Exile: the London Years (1815-20, 1823-40) of Antoni Puig i Blanch (1775-1840)

Among Spanish liberals residing in Britain after the 1814 Bourbon Restoration and, more especially, during the absolutist ‘Ominous Decade’ (1823–33) that followed the ‘Liberal Triennium’, 1820-23, a number of Catalan and Valencian intellectuals stand out: guitarist composer Fernando Sor (1778–1839), Bible translator and politician Josep Melcior Prat i Solà (1780–1855), historian-priest Joaquim Llorenç Villanueva i Astengo (1757–1837) and philologist-politician Antoni Puig i Blanch (Antoni Puigblanch, 1775–1840). Though these individuals integrated within the wider Hispanophone communities and those of their British hosts (some working as private Spanish teachers), Puig i Blanch, in particular, is now regarded as a Romantic precurosr to the organised Catalan Renaixença ('Rebirth'), customarily seen as beginning with La Pàtria (1833), an ode by Bonaventura Carles Arribau (1798-1862). Indeed, Catalan scholars argue that Puig i Blanch’s fragmentary Catalan poem Les Comunitats de Castella (c. 1823)—unpublished during his lifetime—circulated privately during the 1820s, providing a blueprint for Arribau. Another important manuscript written in Spanish, Observaciones sobre la lengua catalana (c. 1816 or c. 1829)¬—a response to Josep Pau Ballot i Torres’s Gramatica i apologia de la llengua cathalana (1813, 1815)—may also have been produced for Melcior Prat’s Catalan translation of the New Testament (1832) commissioned by the British and Foreign Bible Society. This paper traces the development of Puig i Blanch’s writings in and on Catalan, relating them to his exile in Somers Town, London, at a time of growing Anglophone interest in medieval Catalan (and its sister Occitan), after John Colin Dunlop’s analysis (The History of Fiction, 1814) of Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanch and Thomas Roscoe’s translation (1823) of Simonde de Sismondi’s De la littérature du midi de l'Europe (1813). Using available correspondence, key primary texts and recent scholarship, it will determine whether British and French Romanticism may have inspired the Catalan Renaixença.

Mary-Ann Constantine ⬧ ‘La langue de Taliesin’: the Romanticizing of Breton Vernacular Culture

This paper explores ‘the complex processes through which “peripheral” cultures were received by the European literary mainstream’, by focusing on the collection and publication of Breton-language songs and stories in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Besides the familiar minority/majority dynamic which shaped Brittany’s ‘writing to Paris’, it considers how the influence of two intensive periods of literary revival in Wales motivated the recovery and presentation of Breton material and–not uncontroversially–extended the terrain in the quest for ‘bardic’ and Arthurian origins.

Asko Nivala ⬧ How Finnish Romanticism became Finnish: The Romantic Background of the Kalevala

Finland is a bilingual country where language has been a major political question. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Finnish was mostly the spoken language of rural population. Until 1809, Finland belonged to the Kingdom of Sweden where the official administrative language was Swedish. During the Napoleonic Wars, Finland was annexed to Russia and became an autonomous Grand Duchy. At the same time, the first Romantic impulses arrived from Sweden, Germany and Britain to the Academy of Turku. The first Romantic journals Aura (1817–1818) and Mnemosyne (1819–1823) were published in Swedish and followed the model provided by German Athenäum (1798–1800) and Swedish Phosphoros (1810–1813). Although most Finnish Romantics spoke Swedish and could not even understand Finnish, the study of Finnish folk poetry had already been an important research interest for Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739–1804) who was a Herderian neohumanist and an enthusiastic reader of The Works of Ossian (1765). Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), a native Finnish speaker, collected and published the first version of The Kalevala in 1835. There were not many readers at that time who could comprehend the work in original language, but its publication attracted the attention of scholars like Jacob Grimm. Although Lönnrot was the first who was able to publish a systematic work based on Finnish oral poetry, he had important predecessors and competitors who are not as well-known today. Carl Axel Gottlund (1796–1875) was Lönnrot’s most important challenger. Gottlund had suggested the possibility of a Finnish epic already in 1817 and he argued that Lönnrot had plagiarised his work. Gottlund’s own attempts with the publication of the competing Finnish epic Runola (1840) were hampered by his poor Finnish skills. The polyglot Anders Johan Sjögren (1794–1855) published a study about Finnish language Über die finnische Sprache und Ihre Litteratur (1821) in German. In his work, Sjögren presented the same hypothesis about the possible existence of Finnish national epic. Sjögren also made significant fieldwork among the traditional folk singers before Lönnrot. Lönnrot himself emphasised the contribution of Reinhold von Becker who supervised his thesis De Väinämöine, priscorum Fennorum numine (1827). Becker had published an 1 article about Väinämöinen in 1819. My paper will focus on the early stages of Turku Romanticism and present how the Romantic idea of the Finnish epic was invented in the context of early nationalism. It is important to avoid the teleological interpretation of some earlier scholars who postulated the existence of the completed The Kalevala in the ancient history. Lönnrot himself openly admitted that he had invented the epic structure of The Kalevala following theories of Herder and the Homer scholar Friedrich August Wolf. However, the individual verses that Lönnrot used in the composition originated mostly in the fieldwork Lönnrot did among the traditional singers of Finnish poetry. However, Johan Gabriel Linsén – who was the leader of Finnish Literature Society – and many of his contemporaries assumed that Lönnrot had reconstructed a lost epic poem based on its remaining fragments. As I will show, Linsén’s ideas of epic poetry were influenced by Friedrich Schlegel. The misunderstood ideas about The Kalevala as a retrieved epic were popular until the beginning of twentieth century and some people might still assume that the version composed by Lönnrot would be an authentic reconstruction of an ancient epic. The Kalevala provided the backbone for the later Finnish national Romantic art as is exemplified in the famous works of Akseli Gallén-Kallela (1865–1931) and Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). It is also important to note that many of Lönnrot’s informants were in fact speakers of Karelian language, which is a Finnic language spoken in the Russian Republic of Karelia. In Lönnrot’s time, Karelian was considered a dialect of Finnish, although contemporary linguists agree that it is a separate language. Because many significant parts of The Kalevala are based on Karelian folklore, some scholars have proposed that giving it the status of the Finnish national epic is in fact cultural appropriation.

Kate-Louise Mathis ⬧ The ‘Outcome of Ossian’: James Macpherson’s legacy in the Scottish Celtic Renascence

The complex relationship of Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry to contemporary and subsequent Gaelic literature has long been recognised, while more recent criticism has acknowledged the concept of ‘Gaelic Romanticism’ in its own right, as what Thomas Clancy has termed a ‘problematic counterpart’ to Macpherson’s widely documented effect on Anglophone Scottish authors. As Clancy and others have observed, Gaelic poets’ adoption of characteristic ‘Ossianisms’ in their own verse arose in part from self-conscious defence of the genuine ballad tradition on which ‘Ossian’ depended, a tradition that continued to evolve in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd both independently and in consequence of Macpherson’s fabricated epic. Less attention, however, has been paid to its longer-term legacy in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, a period in which Macpherson’s popularity declined almost as swiftly as the Gaelic language and a substantial proportion of its former speakers’ oral culture, but also remarkable for the zeal with which the rebirth of ‘traditional’ literature was declared and promoted by the founding members of the so-called ‘Celtic’ Renascence, centred on Edinburgh-based polymath Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). This paper will focus on the work of Anglo-Highland authors, largely ignorant of Gaelic, for whom ‘Ossian’ remained influential, chiefly Alice Macdonell (1854-1938) and ‘Fiona Macleod’, whose alter ego William Sharp (1855-1905) introduced The Works of Ossian, published by Geddes in 1896 for Macpherson’s centenary. It will explore contemporary recreations of Macpherson’s invented tradition and the enduring tension between Gaelic and Celtic Romanticisms, which Sharp identified perceptively as the most significant ‘outcome of Ossian’.

Carmen Casaliggi ⬧ Ugo Foscolo at Holland House

This paper focuses on Ugo Foscolo’s London experience in order to demonstrate that an exposure to cultural and linguistic differences within the European Romantic community of Holland House shapes his literary and cultural identity. Through an analysis of selected letters from Epistolario – those of the period 1816-18 in particular - the aim of this paper is first, to redress the image of Holland House as a place primarily devoted to foster collaboration and friendship arguing instead that the prolific discussions which have taken place there in different languages often involve dissent and disagreement, a quality which I argue is partly responsible for the intellectual dynamism of Romantic salon culture. Such an engagement with transnational interactions and the dynamic tensions inherent within them highlights how Foscolo’s linguistic otherness helps us to rethink Romanticism’s fascination with cultural differences.

Marko Juvan ⬧ Romanticism and the Worlding of National Poets: the case of Prešeren

Romanticism is an epoch of qualitative individualism: writers and artists strove to stylize not only themselves as singular, but also the imagined communities of nations. This is why Romanticism marks the peak of national thought in Europe, especially in the so-called minor literatures. In the long 19th century, the newly invented European figure of the "national poet" (c.f. Nemoianu) played the role of an instrument that calibrated the level of a particular national literature to the canonical standards of world literature, both classical and modern. From a crowd of literary producers, poets elevated as "national" were to participate in the ideology and politics of their national movement and to cultivate their vernaculars aesthetically by narrating the past of their nations. National poets represented their respective nationalist movements in their need for recognition by the Other represented in world literature and empowered by the interstate system dominated by the core nations. In a secularized parallel to the process of canonization in the Catholic Church, "worlding" (c.f. Kadir) a national poet is thus tantamount to the universal acknowledgement of his/her particular national canonization as cultural saint. A "cosmopolitan" and "affiliative" orientation towards universal canon (c.f. Terian) is characteristic of Slovenian national romanticism and its poet, France Prešeren (1800-49). In Slovenian lands, Prešeren came to be relevant as a figure of the singular "national classic" whose work compensates for the apparent lack of classical and modern traditions in the Slovenian language and who is on a par with the peaks of the European hypercanon. The imaginary worlding of Prešeren through perspectives and canonization within the Slovenian literary system has proved ideologically successful. However, his actual presence in the global literary space does not correspond to domestic perceptions of his value.