Conference ‘Romance and Its Transformations, 1550-1750’

Romance and its Transformations, 1550-1750

June 30th and July 1st, 2014, Chawton House Library, UK

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Ros Ballaster, Oxford University

Professor Emerita Mary Ellen Lamb, Southern Illinois University

With a public keynote by Professor Nandini Das, Liverpool University

As a genre, romance is defined by transformation: it is both a recurrent motif within romance and a characteristic of a form that has itself been transformed over the centuries and in different locations. But romance maintains a degree of formal and thematic integrity, as well as its appeal with different generations of readers and across social and cultural boundaries. This conference will explore the appropriation and transformation of romance in Britain and beyond between 1550 and 1750, as writers adopted and rewrote the motifs, storylines, characters, and formal elements of the genre. In doing so, it will bring into dialogue the different ideas about and critical approaches to the genre that are developing our understanding of the significance of romance within historical periods traditionally considered in isolation from one another, including the Renaissance, the early modern period and the eighteenth century.

For the conference website click here