Speaker: Prof. Claire Connolly, UCC School of English and Digital Humanities

Wednesday 22nd February @ 5pm in Boole 3

An open discussion and wine reception will follow the lecture

Abstract:

What happens when we put literary concepts and periods to work between and across bodies of water? ‘Watery Romanticism’ offers a new account of Irish culture in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century with a particular focus on the constitutive role of sea crossings. Seas and coasts were part of everyday Irish life in the romantic-era: authors, soldiers, landlords, migrant workers, students and members of parliament moved between our islands and across the empire along with books, letters, wine, food, weapons and cattle. For the lecture, I examine one singular case, the crossing between Port Patrick and Donaghadee undertaken by a young John Keats in the summer of 1818 and his subsequent walk to and from Belfast in the months just before he wrote some of his best known poems.  I draw on the blue, environmental and spatial humanities to analyse Keats’s Irish and Scottish letters and consider the limits imposed upon the creative imagination by the crowded, miserable landscapes of pre-Famine Ireland.    

Bio:

Claire Connolly FLSW MRIA is Professor of Modern English and Head of the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork. She currently leads the Ports, Past and Present research project, funded by the European Regional Development Fund via the Ireland Wales Programme. She is the co-General Editor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-2020 (6 vols, Cambridge UP) and is writing a book on Irish romanticism for Cambridge. For 2023-24, she is Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College.