Please join us for our Fall 2019 reading series called Reading the Romantics.

We will meet on November 19th from 12:30-1:30pm in Angell Hall 3241 to discuss a chapter from Julia S. Carlson’s Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth's Poetry in Fields of Print (2016), called "'Points Have We All of Us Within Our Souls, / Where All Stand Single': Poetic Autobiography and National Cartography." This chapter comes from the first half of Carlson's book which examines how Wordsworth's blank verse was shaped in the context of a burgeoning cartographic culture. Her goal is to show that print encodings of land and language were not separate phenomena but were actually entwined aspects of a "diagrammatic turn" in British culture during the Enlightenment period. This chapter gets into exciting topics like Wordsworth's encounter with the Ordnance surveyors on the mountains of Black Comb in the Lake District in 1811, the appearance of contoured maps at the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition of 1851, and Parliamentary debates in the 1850s about contouring versus hachuring on Ordnance maps. 

We will meet again on December 5th from 12:30-1:30pm in Angell Hall 3154 to discuss the first chapter from Tilottama Rajan's Romantic Narratives: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft (2010), called “The Trauma of Lyric: Shelley’s Missed Encounter with Poetry in Alastor.”

A light vegetarian lunch will be served. Please kindly RSVP to Ani Bezirdzhyan (abezirdz@umich.edu) to receive the pre-circulated reading materials.

All are welcome to attend one or both events in the reading series.