This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore new perspectives
on the political, literary and public culture of Britain during
the Regency, a term derived from George Prince of Wales’s
period as regent between 1811-1820 which is also used to describe
his subsequent reign as King between 1821 and 1830. These two
decades witnessed momentous upheaval and transformation in British
society: the climax of the long war with Napoleonic France;
the rise of post-war radicalism; second-generation Romanticism;
the development of print culture and the formation of the modern
mass reading public; economic dislocation and the financial
panic of 1826; the coming of the railway; and the consolidation
of London as the first modern metropolis. The Regency can also
be described justifiably as inaugurating the modern culture
of celebrity, a term which gains widespread currency for the
first time in this period. Celebrities such as Napoleon Bonaparte,
Lord Byron and George ‘Beau’ Brummell instantiate
specifically modern forms of fame and publicity, and conjure
the spectacular and sensational affective dynamics that mark
this culture of celebrity and its new modes of reading and spectatorship.
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and its strategic settlements
of national and dynastic space, such transnational celebrity
exiles reconfigured social as well as geographical space through
these new modes of sociality, spectatorship and audience participation.
The Regency also sees the emergence of scandal as a powerful
new social, political and cultural currency, as part of a transformation
of traditional relations between public and private. The genre
of the scandalous memoir, such as Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs
(1825), produced the ‘private life’ as a commodity,
and was a major publishing phenomenon across middle-class and
radical readerships.
A reconsideration of the Regency from the perspective of recent
developments in Romantic, historical, and cultural studies is
overdue. A conference on this theme would be an opportunity
to bring together scholars in a range of disciplines in the
field of British studies, continuing the conversation first
generated by the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain
McCalman (1999). 2009 will represent ten years since the publication
of that volume.
Conveners:
Gillian Russell: Gillian.Russell@anu.edu.au
Clara Tuite: clarat@unimelb.edu.au
