NARS abstracts
Casper Virkkula, Uppsala
Romantic Temporalities. The use of Ancient and Medieval ‘Pasts’ in Swedish Romanticist Literature
In my presentation, I discuss the findings of my dissertation Minnets fosterland, as well as a few ongoing research projects. The unifying topic is how the past as a form of cultural memory or mythologized ‘other time’ takes shape and is (ab)used for various purposes in Swedish Romanticist literature, with a particular focus on the works of P.D.A. Atterbom, E.G. Geijer and E.J. Stagnelius.
Jorunn Joiner, Lund
Remembering the Ancient North in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century
My ongoing doctoral research project studies prevalent themes in portrayals of the ancient North in the British long eighteenth century with a focus on commemoration, arguing that the fascination with this past in the period reimagines the ancient North into a cultural memory.
Anders Mortensen, Lund
Viking Culture and Romanticism: CSS international conference in Lund, Autumn 2024
The theme of the next biennial international conference of Centre for Scandinavian Studies, Lund University, will be Viking Culture and Romanticism. We invite members and friends of NARS to be involved in the planning and networking of the conference.
Martin Arndal, Copenhagen
What if in certain cases Touch acted by itself”? Coleridge on Touch and experiencing nature.
Showing his antipathy to dominant models of epistemologies that prioritized the faculty of sight—regarding them as subjected to a “despotism of the eye”—Coleridge explored the role of touch in perception. But not only that, he contemplated, as the title indicates, the powers of nonhuman touch; of the world, touching him. In my presentation, I would thus like to outline Coleridge’s account of what could be called the autopoiesis of nature’s touch.
John Öwre, Lund
The Limits of Seeing: Sense Perception and Philosophy in the Works of William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge
My doctoral thesis presents the treatment of sense perception in the works of William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge as a dialogue between opposing intuitions of the limits of perception, and more broadly problematizes the narrative of Romanticism as an ‘inward turn’.
Cille Hvass Holm, Aarhus
(Re)constructing the Romantic: Making Sense of the World with Poetic Science
By way of the early German romantics, I am attempting to (re)construct a philosophy of science called poetic science. Such a science, I would argue, is grounded in an aesthetic epistemology – that is, a theory of what and how we now based on aesthetic experience – and privileges poetry as a distinct mode of knowing.
Mats Dahllöv, Stockholm
Benjamin Höijer – the philosopher of Swedish romanticism?
The relation between the Swedish romantics and Höijer, the introducer of German Idealism and Romanticism in Sweden, has long been debated. Having done the first dissertation on Höijer’s aesthetics, I am going to present my major findings and point to possible areas for future research.
Sebastian Ørtoft Rasmussen, Aarhus
Geological Sensibility at the Dawn of the Anthropocene
My PhD dissertation studies what I propose to call a geological sensibility in late 18th to early 19th century British and German romantic literature and art. This refers to a new sense of earthly awareness which, brought to life by the geoscientific revolutions of the period, structures how the romantic artists interpret and represent the natural world – especially that of rocks, minerals, ice, and crystals. I explore three distinct versions of such a geological sensibility – a sense of wonder, a sense of anachronism and a sense of interconnectedness – in a diverse array of romantic authors and artists.
By studying this topic, I have come to realize that these sensibilities are not only present in the romantic period but that they are also prevalent in contemporary cultural representations of the geological world. As such, any notion of a “clean look” at a romantic geological sensibility seems at best an exercise in disentangling the contemporary perspectives from the romantic ones – and at worst a historiographical impossibility. In this presentation, I would therefore like to present a general overview of my project and face this issue of situatedness head-on by also asking: How to compare the romantic and the contemporary? And how to situate a project like this in a contemporary academic and political environment?
Markus Floris Christensen, Flensburg
Night in Romanticism
Night is a pervasive topos in European Romanticism, but it has received scant attention in a Danish literary context. In this presentation, I shed light on the ways in which the topic of night and the night-side of the soul is represented in a few key authorships of the period.
Roland Lysell, Stockholm
Time, Dream and Thought in Shelley’s Drama Hellas
In Albert C. Baugh's A Literary History of England Samuel C. Chew and Richard D. Altick write: ”Sympathies with the Greek revolutionists now bore fruit in Hellas, a topical drama curiously aloof from contemporary events and redeemed from mediocrity only by the splendid choruses” (s. 1239). Later scholars, e.g. Earl R. Wasserman, John Sewell Flagg, Mariann Cecilie Løksø and Jacqueline Mulhallen, have looked upon the play in a different light, however. My own focus is first of all the conception of time in Hellas (one of the fictional characters of the play, Ahasuerus, suggests: "The Past / Now stands before thee like an Incarnation / Of the To-come”, line 852), but also the transitions between thought, vision, dream and 'reality' in the drama. I look upon Shelley's dramas as plays written to be performed, not only as literary texts.
Franziska Bergmann, Aarhus
Alexander von Humboldt and Gothic Literature
Alexander von Humboldt is considered one of the most important polymaths at the beginning of the 19th century. His travel writing in particular, which contains influential geological, botanical, physical and ethnological knowledge, has achieved great fame. At the same time, however, these works are also characterised by a high degree of literariness. Among other things, Humboldt integrates elements from gothic literature or the "schwarze Romantik". I would like to explore these gothic elements in my project.
Mari Komnæs, Lund
Bodies, Work or Working Bodies
To show what I am currently working on, I would like to present a chapter in progress from my dissertation. My dissertation examines the intersection of class, gender and education in the texts of eighteenth-century British women writers. The chapter centres on the presentation of work, bodies and working bodies and how the understanding of the female body operates differently based on class.
Anna Sandberg, Copenhagen
Women Writers in Danish Romanticism and Golden Age Literature
In connection with a project on Danish-German cultural exchanges and Danish literary travelogues in the first half of the 19th Century I will present some considerations on the role of women writers, canonization, material and texts, the current status of editions as well as the state of art in research.
Hélène Ohlsson, Karlstadt
The Things that Surrounded Emilie Högqvist
This is a short presentation of my upcoming research of the mythical Emilie Högqvist (1812–1846), who was a Swedish actress, a courtesan and salon hostess. Some documents of her hand, for example letters have survived, but the main part of the knowledge of her story comes from anecdotes written by her friends that were professional writers. I am not sure how I should relate to these in my research, which I hope to discuss with you. After her death her belongings were auctioned off. Some of her objects have found their way to the archives. In addition, through the estate register and the auction documents it is possible to get an idea of what her home looked like and what things she surrounded herself with. Coming in physical contact, not only with her letters, but also with her belongings, has at times touched me emotionally. Archival researchers Caswell and Cifor believe that it is necessary to stop imagining the archive user as a "detached neutral subject without a stake in records they are using" (2016: 37–8). What Caswell and Cifor suggest is that the encounter with the archive can be an intense emotional meeting. From this starting point, I intend to reflect on how I can use my emotional encounter with Emilie Högqvist's things in my research about her.
Katarina Båth, Umeå
Schiller’s Aesthetic Education Today
Friedrich Schiller's Aesthetic Letters [Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 1795] was written as a direct reaction to the French Revolution. Despite its specific historical context, the work has become an aesthetic-didactic/political classic, and the number of published readings of it, testify to its continued relevance.
Schiller outlines how the human being is freed and given the opportunity to achieve congruence and balance between their subjective desires and objective reality through Spieltrieb - aesthetic ”play drive" - necessary for ethical and loving behavior. According to Marcuse, 1955, Schiller aimed to remake civilization through the liberating force of art, which contains the possibility of a new reality.
I am interested in the transformative power of (art and what Schiller can teach us today, especially with regard to the demands on restructuring society and ourselves, which the climate crisis entails. Schiller's aesthetic philosophy has been acknowledged as particularly significant within the field of environmental aesthetics (cf. Carlson, 2000; Soper, 1995; Parsons, 2008). In my reading I put Schiller in dialogue with Herbert Marcuse, Gert Biesta's Letting Art Teach. Art Education 'after' Joseph Beuys (2017), Lewis Hyde's The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (1983) and Anahid Nersessian's Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (2015).
Ellen Rees, Oslo
Norwegian Romantic Nationalisms (NORN)
NORN examines how collective emotions related to the idea of the nation were harnessed, activated, and constructed through literature and theater, using Norway as a case study. Computational modeling of the entire nineteenth-century literary field will enable an interrogation of periodization and processes of inclusion/exclusion.
Jules Kielmann, Uppsala
Models of Romanticism – Romanticism as Model?
Since 2015, an interdisciplinary research training group at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena has been working on developing a scientific-theoretical model of Romanticism which can be offered as a heuristic. In several studies, members of the group have been investigating the reception and effect of Romanticism in various cultural and national contexts and at the interfaces between various social and epistemic areas. While literary works within the field of German studies, Romance studies, British and American Studies and Slavic Studies have been studied and been merged with musicology, theology, history, computational linguistics and sociology, Scandinavian culture and literature has not been taken into account yet. In my presentation, I would like to investigate if – and how – the Jena-”Model of Romanticism” and a selection of Swedish romantic works can shed new light on each other.
Peter Henning, Umeå
Key and Almqvist: Visions of Modernity
In 1897, Ellen Key famously declared C. J. L. Almqvist to be “Sweden’s most modern poet”. This presentation will outline a new perspective on their relation, paying special attention to Key’s pastiches of Törnrosens bok in Tankebilder I–II (1898).
Anna Schramm Vejlby, Fuglsang Kunstmuseum
Closed circuit
Ideas of friendship and networks have been defining elements in our understanding of the Danish Golden Age. Often without much reflection on the nature of these networks of young men they seem to be understood as vehicles for the development of excellent art. If this is so, how can we then learn more about this constituting factor and its advantages and disadvantages? In an exhibition planned for the Autumn and Winter of 2023/2024 in Ribe Kunstmuseum and Fuglsang Kunstmuseum we ask questions about the nature of networks in the Golden Age – how they were helpful to some and excluding and damaging to others and how these group dynamics have shaped the canon we live with today. In my presentation I will give a short look into our reflections.
Tonje Haugland Sørensen, Bergen
Norwegian wood - a reconsideration of Danish and Norwegian landscape paintings from 1780 to 1850.
The dominance of landscape painting in 19th century Norwegian art is by and large an established fact. The genre started flourishing in the latter half of the 18th century and was to become central to the development of a national romantic art tradition. What this article will explore is if there exists a concurrent approach to understanding the spread and popularity of the landscape genre by focusing on the economical, mercantile and colonial context in which these paintings were made. Specifically it will explore a sub-genre within landscape paintings which is the depictions of waterfalls with saw mills, timber and planks. It will consider the role of lumber as an economic commodity within Denmark-Norway, and reflect on how these motifs can be associated with the economically vibrant lumber industry, its export and its handfull of powerful magnates. Working on the argument by W. J.T. Mitchell that landscape can be a verb as much as a noun, this article will consider works by a selection of artists such as C.A. Lorentzen, Erik Pauelsen, Thomas Fearnley, J.C. Dahl and August Cappelen with the aim of exploring if the these landscape paintings can be equally understood as prospects and as such a form of genre connected with presenting wealth and property.
Lilian Munk Rösing, Copenhagen
Sublimity and Fragments in Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (1823)
I wish to present an analysis of Friedrich’s painting focusing on its depiction of “the glacial sublime” and its composition of fragments, connecting both to the aesthetics of early German Romanticism.