Michael Gamer, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, presented a talk entitled "Re-collection's Intranquility" to our Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies Colloquium on Wednesday, November 28 at 4:30PM in 40 McCosh Hall. His talk covered the following:
What does it mean to collect oneself, as opposed to waiting for posterity to do the work of preparing one's works after death? In this talk I'll be exploring the bibliographic practices that characterize self-collection, asking why writers -- especially poets -- of the romantic period increasingly turned to reprinting as a means of fashioning and repackaging their works. What did such assembled literary corpuses look like and why? And how does self-collection differ from the activities of literary executors, those explicitly authorized gatherers, architects, and embalmers of the literary career?
Professor Gamer is the author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge, 2000). He is currently at work on two books: Recollections in Tranquility: The Romantic Art of Self-Canonization, 1765-1832; and A History of British Theatre: Staged Conflicts, under contract with Blackwell Publishing. He has edited and co-edited numerous critical editions and has published essays in the journals MLQ, PMLA, Novel, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Studies in Romanticism, among others. He was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2010 prize for best article (for "Mary Robinson and the Dramatic Art of the Comeback") and was a recipient of the Ira Abrams, Lindback, and College of General Studies awards for distinguished teaching.
Professor Gamer also presented at Professor Claudia Johnson's ENG 543 graduate seminar on Thursday, November 29.
Photos from the reception above.
What does it mean to collect oneself, as opposed to waiting for posterity to do the work of preparing one's works after death? In this talk I'll be exploring the bibliographic practices that characterize self-collection, asking why writers -- especially poets -- of the romantic period increasingly turned to reprinting as a means of fashioning and repackaging their works. What did such assembled literary corpuses look like and why? And how does self-collection differ from the activities of literary executors, those explicitly authorized gatherers, architects, and embalmers of the literary career?
Professor Gamer is the author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge, 2000). He is currently at work on two books: Recollections in Tranquility: The Romantic Art of Self-Canonization, 1765-1832; and A History of British Theatre: Staged Conflicts, under contract with Blackwell Publishing. He has edited and co-edited numerous critical editions and has published essays in the journals MLQ, PMLA, Novel, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Studies in Romanticism, among others. He was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2010 prize for best article (for "Mary Robinson and the Dramatic Art of the Comeback") and was a recipient of the Ira Abrams, Lindback, and College of General Studies awards for distinguished teaching.
Professor Gamer also presented at Professor Claudia Johnson's ENG 543 graduate seminar on Thursday, November 29.
Photos from the reception above.