CFP: Keats’s Odes at 200: A One-Day Bicentenary Conference (1819-2019)
1 February 2019, Maison de la Recherche, Université de Caen Normandie
(Université de Caen Normandie / Université Grenoble Alpes)
Plenary speaker :
Stanley PLUMLY (University of Maryland):
Acclaimed poet and author of Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (Norton, 2009), The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (Norton, 2016), Winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (Norton, 2018)
In the spring of 1819, living in the recently built Wentworth Place on the edge of Hampstead Heath, John Keats wrote five of the six poems now commonly referred to as the “Great Odes,” a group of texts whose hyper-canonicity can sometimes make it difficult to appreciate the precarious, unlikely circumstances under which they came into being – let alone to say anything new about them today. Over the course of the last two centuries, countless readers have found themselves enthralled by, and moved to comment on, Keats’s Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, Ode on Indolence, and ode To Autumn (composed in September 1819), generating a vast body of scholarly criticism, as well as a number of reuses or reimaginings of the odes in popular culture. Yet, not unlike the Hellenic urn which permanently remains, in its cold silence, “a friend to man,” the magic of the odes remains undiminished after all these years – and the depth and originality of Keats’s texts remain, miraculously, to be accounted for, still “teas[ing] us out of thought.” It is the aim of this one-day bicentenary conference not only to celebrate but also to continue to probe, question, and rethink the nature of Keats’s achievement in writing, at the height of his young artistic powers, these six “Great Odes”; to reexamine their past uses, and speculate on their lives to come, while teasing out (and, no less fruitfully, being teased by) their ostensible timelessness.
Speakers are invited to approach the odes from any number of angles, including (but not limited to) questions concerning: the composition and editing of the texts (their manuscript drafts, their multiple versions in print and digitization…); the critical reception of the odes in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries (in Britain, America, France, and elsewhere); Keats’s sources of inspiration, and of rupture; the odes and other forms of art (sculpture, music, painting); reuses and reimaginings of the odes in popular culture; their modern adaptations (cinema, fiction), etc.
Please send title of paper and abstract (300 words), in English or in French, with a brief CV, to Jeremy Elprin (jeremy.elprin@unicaen.fr) and Caroline Bertonèche (caroline.bertoneche@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr) by 31 October 2018.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY:
BATE, W. J. John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963. (esp. pp. 486-524)
BATES, Jonathan. “Living with the Weather.” Studies in Romanticism 35/3 (Fall 1996). 431-447.
BEER, Gillian. “Aesthetic Debate in Keats’s Odes.” Modern Language Review 64/4 (Oct. 1969). 742-48.
BLOOM, Harold. “The Ode to Psyche and the Ode on Melancholy,” in Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. W. J. Bate. Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. 91–102
FRY, Paul. The Poet’s Calling and the English Ode. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. (ch. 9 and 10)
GITTINGS, Robert (ed.). The Odes of John Keats and Their Earliest Known Manuscripts in Facsimile. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1970.
GOTTLIEB, Evan. Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. (ch. 5)
MCGANN, Jerome J. “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism.” MLN 94/5 (Dec. 1979). 988-1032.
O’ROURKE, James L. Keats’s Odes and Contemporary Criticism. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998.
PERKINS, David. “Keats’s Odes and Letters: Recurrent Diction and Imagery.” Keats-Shelley Journal 2 (Jan. 1953). 51-60.
RHODES, Jack Wright. Keats’s Major Odes: An Annotated Bibliography of the Criticism. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1984.
ROE, Nicholas. John Keats and the Culture of Dissent. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1997.
SHEATS, Paul D. “Keats and the ode,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. WOLFSON. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 86-101.
STILLINGER, Jack. The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems. Urbana: The U of Illinois P, 1971. (esp. pp. 99-119)
— (ed.). Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats’s Odes. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
VENDLER, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983.
WASSERMAN, Earl. The Finer Tone: Keats’s Major Poems. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1953. (ch. 2 and 4)
WOLFSON, Susan J. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986. (ch. 13 and 14)