國立政治大學英國語文學系

We are pleased to announce that Amelia Dale, Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the Australian National University, will deliver the 53rd EARN public lecture online, titled “Romanticism and Real Estate” on Wednesday, 1 May 2024. All are welcome. 

Speaker: Amelia Dale ( Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the Australian National University)

 Title: Romanticism and Real Estate

 Chair: Irene Chan (English, NCCU)

 Time: 10- 12 am Wednesday 1 May 2024

 Venue: Ji-Tao Building, Rm 340407 (季陶340407) / Online link: https://nccutw.webex.com/meet/johsu 

 Abstract:

 Romantic-period literature intersects with the modern formation of contemporary markets for land through its celebration of the natural environment and water views. Reacting to the enclosure movement and mass urbanisation in England, Romantic literature rhetorically commodified “wild” and “natural” spaces, creating and popularising tropes for linguistically packaging land, tropes which continue to be deployed in real estate copy today. Jane Austen’s last novel Sanditon (1817) suggests that Romantic poetry celebrating the ocean contributed to the popularity of English seaside resort towns and impacted the viability of speculative coastal developments. This talk will attempt to trace the close interconnections between Romanticism and the modernisation of the land market in England, dwelling on Austen, Wordsworth, and culminating in the copy of infamous nineteenth-century auctioneer George Robins. Robins might be, for some scholars, the “father” of modern real estate advertising but he was also sardonically characterised in newspaper columns as a landscape poet. This talk argues that these two things are inseparable.

 Bio:

Amelia Dale is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the Australian National University and co-edits The Shandean. She is author of The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain, and a range of articles on gender, genre, literature and the environment. Recent work appears in Romanticism, the Australian Humanities Review and the Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts. She is currently working with Nicola Parsons on a monograph on character and Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies (1760-1794), and recent articles on the topic have appeared in The Library and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, with another forthcoming with The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.