Monthly Archives: February 2012

Berlin, the Royal Society, and Davy’s ‘Life’

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Dear blog,

I’m just back from a four-day break in Berlin, which was absolutely brilliant. I went to lots of tiny, contemporary art galleries as well as some of the larger national ones. There is so much going on there and it was very exciting to get a glimpse of a such a vibrant cultural world.

I’ve been asked to do one of the Royal Society’s lunchtime talks in the autumn, which are mostly attended by members of the public rather than academics. The organizer is particularly interested in the material I’ve been writing about Mary Wollstonecraft so I think I will do something on that. I’m on sabbatical next semester, which I’m looking forward to very much, so will have more time to think about how to give a paper that is accessible and interesting to the public.

I’ve also negotiated a book contract with Palgrave Macmillan for the publication of my next monograph, ‘Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s’, which is brilliant. I enjoyed working with Palgrave Macmillan (and the Commissioning Editor, Paula Kennedy) very much for Shelley and Vitality and Teaching Romanticism. Now I just have to find the time to finally finish the book.

I’m working in the Portico today, a beautiful library, which has many of the books that I need for the chapter I’m writing on Davy at the moment. I’m currently grappling with his poem ‘Life’, which seems first to have been written in a notebook (now in the Royal Institution), was commented upon by Coleridge in a letter of 9 October 1800, and changed in consequence. John Davy published it in his Memoirs in 1836 under the title ‘Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness’ (referring to Davy’s illness of 1808). Last year, though, I found another version, which Davy published anonymously in a collection edited by Joanna Baillie, called ‘Life’, in 1823. I’m going to look at these poems for evidence of something Davy called the most ‘sublime’ idea of all: that matter changes into other states and other forms.

All best,

Sharon

Reflections for a new Preface

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Dear blog,

I’m in the British Library, which is bliss, writing the new Preface to a paperback edition of my first book, Shelley and Vitality, which Palgrave Macmillan are going to publish this year. I’ve been asked to reflect upon all that has happened in the world of Romantic literature and science since the book was first published in 2005. So much has happened that it will be impossible to cover it all and I am not going to attempt to. Suffice to say that when I wrote the introduction to the book all those years ago, it was necessary still to argue the case that many Romantic writers were in fact interested in and engaged with science, but now this is (at least in the academic world) well known. Since 2005 we’ve seen the flourishing of the sub- or inter-discipline of literature and science in the UK, clearly indicated in the formation of the British Society for Literature (2006) (http://www.bsls.ac.uk/), the Journal for Literature and Science (2007) (http://literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/journal/), the choice of Literature and Science for the English Association’s journal Essays and Studies (2008), and the AHRC has declared ‘Science in Culture’ one of its four emerging themes. This all bodes well for the continuing growth and development of an exciting area of research.

I gave a research paper yesterday at Edge Hill University and there was a great turnout of enthusiastic undergraduate students of Romanticism. I talked about the potential links between sublimation (the chemical process), which Coleridge applies to the poetic imagination in Biographia Literaria and the sublime (the aesthetic category), which Humphry Davy uses to describe science as well as the natural landscape. The paper was part of an excellent series that has seen many great speakers over the past year and it was lovely to be invited to be part of it.

I was interested to read John Pilger in the New Statesmen recently, lamenting the lack of any radical literary voice today and comparing this to writers of past times: ‘No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.”’

Finally, I wanted to urge people to watch the following You Tube video, part of the ‘We Are Frankenstein’ project of Keith M. Collis. This video is the final song of the play sung by the Creature to the Ship Captain following Victor’s death: http://youtu.be/5F-O_JGsPgA

All best,

Sharon