'Transgressive Romanticism: Boundaries, Limits, Taboos' 45th International Byron Conference (Joint Conference with the German Society for English Romanticism) University of Vechta, Germany 4–8 September 2019

For many participants, this conference, organised by IABS and GER, was their first visit to Vechta, a small town located in the lush countryside of Lower Saxony, south of the Hanseatic city of Bremen. This pastoral idyll nonetheless attracted delegates not only from Europe, but from as far afield as Japan, the US, Lebanon and South Korea. The wider Romantic focus of this conference meant that parallel sessions were necessary, with one session generally being more Byronic and the other more diverse. As a result, this conference report is, unfortunately, unavoidably partial.

Delegates were warmly welcomed by the Joint Presidents of IABS, Jonathan Gross and Naji Oueijan, the President of the GER, Jens Gurr, and local organiser, Norbert Lennartz, and paid their respects to Michael O'Neill and Rolf Lessenich who had both planned to be in Vechta. Denise Gigante (Stanford) gave the first keynote and offered a fascinating insight into taste in her wide-ranging and thought-provoking paper on 'Transgressions in Taste: Libraries Ornamental, Gastronomical and Bibliomaniacal'. She used examples concerning Leonora's library, Grimod de la Reynière, Richard Heber and Charles Lamb, amongst others, to stress how taste transgresses the very distinctions it makes possible. After coffee, the first parallel session focused on 'Transgression in the Shelley Circle' and included Cian Duffy (Lund) speaking on 'Dying Plants and Transgressive Passions in the Poetry of Percy B. Shelley', and then Sophia Möllers (Dortmund) on 'The Historian Turned Anatomist of the Soul: Tracing Transgressive Psychology in William Godwin's Mandeville'. The more Byronic session began with Richard Lansdown (Groningen) subtly exploring the influence of Goethe's Faust and Marlowe's Dr Faustus on Manfred, Cain and The Deformed Transformed, focusing particularly on Faustian transgressions in The Deformed Transformed. Dennis Weißenfels (Duisburg-Essen) then gave some interesting insight into Eaton Stannard Barrett's Six Weeks at Long's (1817), commenting on how a cast of stock transgressive rakes, Byronic heroes, libertines and dandies is used for social comment.

After lunch, delegates reconvened for the Byronic session on 'Transgressive Sexuality', which was unexpectedly short because Madison Chapman (Chicago) was stuck at Amsterdam airport. This left the floor solely to Savo Karam (Tripoli), who used Butler and Irigaray to offer some perceptive insights into Kaled and Lara and gender fluidity, pandrogyny and the epicene in her paper 'Transgression of Sexual Parameters in Byron's Lara'. The parallel session addressed 'Oriental Transgressions', with contributions from Naji Oueijan (Notre Dame) on '19th-century Transgressive Art', and Marvin Reiman (Bonn) on 'Byron's The Giaour: Dismantling the Boundaries between Orient and Occident through Romantic Irony'. Traditional German coffee and cake were provided before the afternoon keynote, where Diego Saglia (Parma) took delegates on an absorbing adventure through human orifices and architectural apertures into forbidden buildings, focusing on Donna Julia, Juanna, Gulbeyaz and Dudu in Don Juan, and also highlighting Beddoes, W.S. Landor, Vathek, The Curse of Kehama, and the erotic epistolary novel The Lustful Turk (1828) in his intriguing paper, entitled 'Of Flesh and Boundaries: Romantic Transgressions of Oriental Gaps and Orifices'. The day ended with a wonderful piano recital by Wolfgang Meschner. Over a welcome glass of wine, delegates enjoyed excerpts from Liszt's Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie and Tre Sonetti di Petrarca—Sonetto 47, Sonetto 104, Sonetto 123, followed by Schumann's Kreisleriana op. 16, a relaxing end to a stimulating day.

On Thursday morning, Andrew Elfenbein (Minnesota) began proceedings with a wide-ranging and insightful keynote on 'What is an Author (in Literary Scholarship)?', where he drew attention to the various different Blakes evident in one passage from Steven Goldsmith's Blake's Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions, and also touched on the Ossian debate, the distinction between high and low literature, and between authorial behaviour and authorial traits, noting how life experience does not become writing without mediation. Parallel session 1 then dwelt on 'Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries', with Tilottama Rajan (Western Ontario) investigating 'Transgressing the Disciplines: John Hunter (1728...