Summer Conference

The 40th Wordsworth Summer Conference, 2011

Monday 1 to Thursday 11 August, at Forest Side Hotel, Grasmere, Cumbria
(see "The Venue" for hotel details)

Blencathra: Photo Richard Gravil

The Wordsworth Summer Conference, founded by Richard Wordsworth in 1970, remains the least utilitarian, most congenial, most conversational, and least sedentary conference in the academic world.

It offers a unique blend of full-scale lectures, well-spaced papers with generous discussion time, and a significant experience of Grasmere and Lakeland.

14 Keynote Lecturers for 2011:

Richard Brantley (Florida)

Frederick Burwick (UCLA)

Jeff Cowton (Curator, The Jerwood Centre)

Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin University)

Kelvin Everest (Liverpool)

Mary Favret (Bloomington, Indiana)
Stephen Gill (Lincoln College, Oxford)

Richard Gravil (Secretary of the Foundation)

Felicity James (Leicester)

Peter Kitson (Dundee)

Ichiro Koguchi (Osaka)

Michael O'Neill (Durham)

Ann Wroe (The Economist)

Sarah Zimmerman (Fordham University)

Format: The conference is in two parts of 4 full days each, with a changeover day on Saturday 6 August.

Costs: The non-resident and registration fee, which includes up to seven excursions, offers exceptional value at £225 for ten days (£175 for five days) if paid by 30 April. Fees rise to £250 (£200) on 1 May for late registrants. Full Board at the conference hotel is available at prices ranging from £475 to £875 (for ten nights), and accommodation and dinner at the YHA from £340 (breakfast and packed lunches available).

Call for Papers: we invite papers on all aspects of William Wordsworth, his contemporaries and the Romantic period. The Conference will include a bicentenary panel and debate about Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem 'Eighteen Hundred and Eleven' and related papers will be welcomed. 2011 is also the bicentenary of 'Sense and Sensibility', Robert Bloomfield's 'Banks of the Wye', Scott's 'Don Roderick', Shelley's 'Necessity of Atheism' and the second edition of Mary Tighe's 'Psyche'. During the Conference the 'Shelley's Ghost' exhibition will be hosted by the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage and there will be opportunities to visit this. Among our excursions will be an all day visit (on changeover day) to Roe Castle, Lanercost Priory, and Hadrian’s Wall. Roe castle, former residence of the Bishops of Carlisle, was visited and admired by both Wordsworth and Coleridge. This was where John Keats's friend Benjamin Bailey was ordained in July 1818, just before his conversation with John Lockhart that led to the 'Cockney School' essay on Keats. The all-day walk is likely to be one of two classic walks to the Western Lake District, climbing Bowfell and Scafell Pike or Pillar, by the North Traverse, from Honister Pass.

Proposals: 250 word proposals for papers of no more than 2750 words together with a brief unformatted c.v. should occupy no more than 2 sides of A4 (they will be copied into a composite file). Please do not send as a pdf. Please e-mail to the Conference Director Nicholas Roe at wordsworthsummerconference@gmail.com by 31 March 2011. All other enquiries should also be e-mailed to this address.

Bursaries: Please see the separate announcement of bursaries offered for the 2011 Conference.

Conference Director: Nicholas Roe

Conference Administrator: Stacey McDowell

wordsworthsummerconference@gmail.com

Until full details and prices are complete for the 2011 conference,
the following description of the 2010 conference and the 2010 prospectus will remain online

A History of the Conference with 45 colour photographs is now available from Lulu.com at £9.99

Grasmere 2010
a selection of thirteen papers from the 40th Anniversary Conference
(ranging from Simon Bainbridge on Romantic Mountaineering to Seamus Perry on Wordsworth's Pluralism)
is now available from Lulu.com at £12.35

The 40th Anniversary
Wordsworth Summer Conference, 2010

Wednesday 28 July to Saturday 7 August, at Forest Side, Grasmere, Cumbria

Part 1 Lectures

Kenneth R. Johnston
Wordsworth at 40: Memoirs of a Lost Generation

Simon Bainbridge
‘The power of hills’: Romantic Mountaineering

Julie Carlson
On Literary Fractures

Angela Esterhammer
Coleridge's ‘The Improvisatore’: Poetry,
Performance, and Remediation

Jeffrey N Cox
Cockney ‘Excursions’

Gary Harrison
Wordsworth, Clare and the Poetics of Acknowledgment

Poetry Reading

Seamus Heaney in St Oswald's Church

Sunday 1 August at 8.30 pm
(there is an admission charge for this event)

Guests of Honour

John Beer (Cambridge)

Marilyn Gaull (Editorial Institute, Boston University)

Part 2 Lectures

Alan Richardson

Neuroscience and ‘Romantic’ Imagination

Damian Walford Davies

Romantic Hydrography: The Tides
of ‘Tintern Abbey’

Anthony Harding

The Fate of Reading in the Regency

David Chandler

‘Home Sweet Home’: Sex and Popular Romanticism

Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey

‘Kubla Khan’ and Orientalism

Seamus Perry

Wordsworth's Pluralism

Downloadable 2010 Conference Programme

Advice on Getting to Grasmere

Main Features

Stay 5 or 10 nights

7 excursions, 7 fell-walks, 6 to 14 lower level walks

12 keynote lectures and 34 research papers

Part 1 of the celebratory 40th anniversary conference concludes with a public poetry reading by Seamus Heaney. Part 2 opens with a Richard Wordsworth Conference Dinner, with John Beer, Marilyn Gaull and Molly Lefebure as Guest Speakers (for resident participants only).
For full details of accommodation and prices please download the pdf Prospectus

Either 4 or 9 full days in Grasmere (two parts, of 5 nights each, with a changeover day)

Registration fee: £205 for both parts; £155 for one part (rising to £225/170 on 28 April):

Full Board Hotel prices for 10 nights: from £450 to £640 shared, £620 to £820 single (for details see Prospectus)

Youth Hostel prices (six two-bedded rooms have been reserved): half board £188 for 5 nights; £375 for 10 nights (£210 or £424 with packed lunches). These prices include one dinner at the conference hotel in each part of the conference.

Some apartments for three may be available at £550 per person (full board)

Excursions to (e.g.) Lanercost Priory, Blackwell, St. Bees, Holker Hall

Up to seventy miles of fell walking including (probably) Pillar and Helvellyn

Registration

All participants must register for the whole of Part 1, or Part 2, or Both and should do so by 27 April 2010. Fees will rise on 28 April. Because both resident and non-resident places are very limited, early registration is advised. Residential costs are payable in full by 25 May, after which date refunds of fees or other costs cannot be guaranteed (participants are therefore advised to take out travel insurance).

Contributions may take the form of short papers (2750 words; 25 minutes) which are scheduled at two papers to a session or workshops (short handout-based presentations leading into an hour or more of discussion). Papers or workshops may address any aspect of British Romantic Studies, including comparative studies, though it is worth noting that 2010 is the bicentenary of the famous Wordsworth-Coleridge 'Quarrel'. Proposals (250–300 words) will be considered by at least two members of the Board, and should include, in the same file, a brief c.v. (in total, no more than 2 sides of A4). Proposals should be submitted by email attachment, in Word, to the Director by 23 March 2010. It is not the culture of this conference that only paper readers attend, and you should bear in mind that although papers may not be finally decided until April, accommodation could well be booked up by that time by non-presenters.