BARS, the book, and Shelley’s Ghost

Dear blog,

The BARS conference that I went to at the end of July was excellent. It as really nice to catch up with people, some of whom I’ve not seen for years, and there were some excellent papers. I particularly liked the Lucretius session organised by Rowan Boyson, who gave a great paper, as did Anne Janowitz and Martin Priestman. The session sent me back to Martin’s electronic edition of Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/darwin_temple/), which has such a great introduction by Martin himself. There were great plenary lectures too. My favourite was by Ina Ferris, who talked about contemporary theories of apparitions and how they could be used to describe what Scott was doing in his historical novels. William Christie gave an interesting paper too on the science in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Adding this to the session called ‘Medical Humanities’ that I spoke in, with great papers given by Gavin Budge and Craig Franson, I think we can say that interest in the relationships between literature and science of the Romantic period is healthy and well.

Since then I’ve been working on my book: Creating Romanticism: the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s. I’ve been writing chapter three on the use of contemporary scientific accounts of reproduction, generation and organic growth as metaphors for literary composition. It’s difficult work and it’s very hard to find the time with all the other tasks I have to do. I’ve been reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria this past week, which is possibly the most famous account of literary creativity as organic process.

I’ve also been writing the end of award report for the AHRC LitSciMed project, which has been interesting work, thinking about what was achieved (both planned and unforeseen outcomes) by the programme. We’re working on the website, trying get the resources pages exactly right so that they can be of the greatest use to others in the future. I do hope that some of the collaborations that were formed during the course of the programme continue and flourish; that would be wonderful. The social space will disappear soon; we’ve moved some of the student work over to http://virtual-doc.salford.ac.uk/litscimed/. The LitSciMed blogs have been moved to here now too. Remember that the Facebook page is up and running (though it needs more people to post more events and news on it!) at http://www.facebook.com/LitSciMed.

Upcoming events to watch out for: the Manchester Literature Festival looks excellent again and I’ll be going to lots of it (http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/) and the Manchester Science Festival is poised to publish its programme too (I’ll be doing a talk on Humphry Davy for this): http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/. If you’re in the Lake District this summer, the Shelley’s Ghost exhibition is brilliant too: http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/events/index.asp?pageid=574.

More soon,

Sharon