Registration Open for Romantic Wellbeing Summer Lecture, Wednesday August 19 2020

Lectures in Literature via Durham University presents the first of its Late Summer Lecture Series, with a focus on "Romantic Wellbeing". The lecture will take place on Wednesday 19 August 2020, 5.30pm to 7pm (BST) via Zoom.To kick off the theme of "Body and Mind" for this year's Late Summer Lecture series, the first two papers will be discussing physical and mental wellbeing as seen through the lens of 18th century writers such as Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Mary Wollstonecraft.The two speakers are:Dr Amanda Blake Davis (University of Sheffield)"Unbodied Joy": Birds and Embodiment in Shelley and KeatsThe bodies of living birds in Keats and Shelley’s poetry are cast off in favour of ethereal song in poems such as "Ode to a Nightingale", composed in the presence of a living nightingale outside Keats’ Hampstead home, and "To a Skylark", in which Shelley glides between the ethereal and the material. This lecture will explore the Platonic implications of Keats and Shelley’s vacillations between body and mind through their depictions of birds.Alex Hobday (University of Cambridge)The Happiness of the High-Wrought Mind: The Autobiographical Pursuit of Happiness in Eighteenth-Century Literature"And, considering the question of human happiness, where, oh where does it reside? Has it taken up its abode with unconscious ignorance or with the high-wrought mind?" Broken-hearted and soon to be deserted by the father of her child, Mary Wollstonecraft writes these words in her autobiographical travelogue Short Residence. Such questions echoed throughout eighteenth-century culture. What is happiness? And how can we achieve it?Sign up on Eventbrite for Zoom details. Contact latesummerlectures@gmail.com, or see the website, Facebook or Twitter for more information on the event.