Silvia Riccardi will present her latest research. Her book explores the dark regions of Romantic imagination in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and art. It uncovers the palpable and pleasing anxiety about the human body in the works of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Mary Shelley, focusing on the negotiations of pleasure and pain, life and death, beauty and monstrosity. Each of the works examined revolves in some manner around the breakdown of an idealized body in order to illuminate the transition from organic to fragmented form. This approach involves reorienting conventional accounts of Romanticism around the emergence of a visual paradigm. Engaging with cultures of print, aesthetic discourse, anatomical art, as well as natural historical knowledge circulating in England at the turn of the century, Dark Romanticism cultivates visual literacy and argues that literary and pictorial elements are inseparable when imagination is at work.
Silvia Riccardi holds a Ph.D in English Literature from the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg.
She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Umeå University, Sweden, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and visual culture. She has previously held positions at the University of Freiburg and Uppsala University.
*External participants may write to Bengt Novén to receive the Zoom link (department members may find it in Romklass calendar)
Transcultural Literary Studies is a vibrant field that brings together several researchers in the Department of Romance Studies and Classics. Our research group focuses on a broad range of issues related to the translation, circulation and reception of literature, and also examines literary multilingualism in all its forms.
