Students’ Seminar on Rethinking Romanticism

Concept Note
The Romantic Movement in British literature is said to have initiated with the publication of William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The preface added to the second
edition of this seminal text, and greatly expanded in the subsequent third edition of 1802, has been
widely regarded as the manifesto of the movement. Although the publication of Lyrical Ballads marks
a watershed in the history of European literary and aesthetic thought, a gamut of critical opinions posit
that the Romantic Age had begun much earlier; its roots could be traced back to the dawn of the
eighteenth century. Nor was the pluralistic Romantic ethos confined to the peripheries of Britain; it
flowered in different forms and times across the geo-political boundaries of Europe. Indeed it was an
age of enormous sound and fury. A series of engagements on aesthetics by Enlightenment
philosophers such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, John
Locke, and Alexander Baumgarten, among others, prepared a fertile ground for what we define as
Romantic literature to flourish. Such negotiations with what construed or did not construe beauty
manifested in literary outputs across genres. The evolving notion of the sublime contributed to the rise
of the Gothic novel. The rigidity of reason was combated with the freeflowing imagination of the
human psyche. While the spirit of the French Revolution inspired the spearheads of the Romantic
movement to liberate literature from the monotony of eighteenth century convention, the ecological
effects of industrialisation compelled them to rediscover nature in all its bounty. The Romantic
subject, being at odds with himself and the world around him, sought to experiment with, if not
dismantle, the structures that enclosed him. Incessant articulations of individual and collective
dissidence went on to shape the literary imagination of the age. This was, however, not without
backlashes. Shelley’s radical treatise on atheism resulted in his expulsion from the University of
Oxford. Coleridge’s fresh interpretation of Milton’s Paradise Lost blurred the line between morality
and transgression. The Byronic anti-hero, embodying the courage to desire, seeked to unravel the
darker side of human nature and interrogated the societal formulations of censorship premised on a
binary between the acceptable and the vulgar. Overlooking the Kantian debate on the public and the
private, the Romantic subject lived what he wrote and wrote what he lived. Such a spirit of redemptive
liberation from the clutches of tradition was not merely restricted to men. A visible surge of women
writers at the turn of the eighteenth century—such as Mary Wolstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Mary Lamb,
Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley, among an elaborate list of
long neglected figures—challenged the hegemonic presence of patriarchy in both society and
literature. It also needs to be made clear that Romanticism was not just a literary phenomenon but a
major paradigmatic shift in almost every form of art, be it music, painting, or drama.
The tenets of Romanticism was disseminated by the expanding contours of the British Empire in its
colonies across the nineteenth century. Inspired by the ideals of eighteenth century Enlightenment and
the spirit of Romantic poetry. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a young poet and a teacher at the
erstwhile Hindu College, instilled a rebellious zeal of breaking apart from tradition in his students that
culminated in the Young Bengal movement. Nineteenth century reformers and educationists in India
such as Raja Rammohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, or Debendranath Tagore, were propelled
by the social, political, and cultural developments of eighteenth century Europe in carrying out
attempts of evoking an egalitarian milieu of liberty, equality, and fraternity in their respective
societies. It is impossible to conceive the emergence of the novel in the Indian literary field during the
second half of the nineteenth century without taking into account the corpus of Walter Scott. Nor is it
feasible to deconstruct the canons of stalwarts such as Michael Madhusudan Dutt or Rabindranath
Tagore without understanding the ways in which these literary giants were influenced by the lyrical
ethos of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Adaptations, translations and transcreations of the
works of European Romantic writers into Indian vernacular languages throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries played a crucial role in bringing modern Indian literature into being. The inclusion
of Romantic texts in the curriculams of universities, schools, and colleges across the empire still casts
a profound impact on the production of contemporary literature.
What arrests our interest in this seminar are these numerous transactions on varying aspects of
Romanticism within the historical framework of the empire in the course of the last two hundred
years and beyond. We perceive Romanticism as the facilitation of a dialogue between the orient and
the occident in an attempt to re-imagine the cultural histories that define us. The seminar proposes to
not only reread the Romantic canon but also rethink and reconceptualise how the Romantic age and
philosophy continues to mould the discursive experiences in India. We invite papers, audio-visual
presentations, performances, and posters from postgraduate students and research scholars on, though
not limited to, the following topics
• Foundations of Aesthetic Theory in 18th and 19th Century Europe
• Romantic imaginations of the Orient
• The Romantic (Anti)-Hero
• Romanticism across languages
• Romanticism across genres: Poetry, Prose, Architecture, Theatre, Music, Art, and Cinema
• Legacy of Romanticism in 20th and 21st Centuries
• Indian Responses to Romanticism
• Romantic Imagination and Political Thought
• Afterlife of the Romantic Movement
• Romanticism and Gender