Carl-Ludwig ConningPhD student
About me
My thesis explores the notion of “the imperfect” in British and American Romantic literature. The project takes its outset in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s respective engagements with the discourse on the imperfect, one which can be traced back through the long eighteenth century’s British and German aesthetic and philosophical writings on the place of imperfection in literature, arts, science, and theology. My work seeks to establish the imperfect as a key term which can help us examine disparate shaping strands within Romanticism, particularly with regards to those continuously difficult areas of inquiry as the sublime, the beautiful, the fragment, the ruin, and the gothic. I am interested in thinking through the imperfect both backwards and forwards in history from the first generation of British Romantics, by reading them in relation to their British and Continental predecessors as well as in relation to the Romantic afterlives with the New England transcendentalists. This methodology provides an understanding of Romanticism as a cultural practice more nuanced and prevalent in Western history, yet at once less independent of earlier eighteenth century ideas, than what has usually been attributed to it.
I received my MA degree in English literature from Uppsala University in 2019, with a degree project on weather in the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I began as a PhD student of English literature at Stockholm University in the fall of 2020.
Publications
A selection from Stockholm University publication database
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‘A poet, however, whom we fear that few Swedes know about’: Hellen Lindgren’s 1892 Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley
2022. Carl-Ludwig Conning. Nordic Romanticism, 263-292
ChapterRead more about ‘A poet, however, whom we fear that few Swedes know about’Carl-Ludwig Conning explores a previously undocumented aspect of the Swedish reception of Percy Shelley. In 1892, the literary critic Hellen Lindgren published the first major Swedish analysis of Shelley along with Fröding’s translation of Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. Conning’s chapter investigates the cultural-historical context for Lindgren’s introduction of Shelley to Swedish readers and reads Lindgren’s account of Shelley alongside the literary manifestos of the Swedish writers Fröding and von Heidenstam. Conning shows how Lindgren found in Shelley a particularly compelling integration of idealism and materialism, thereby offering a potential resolution to a dichotomy which was much debated in Swedish literature at the time as part of an ongoing transition from national Romanticism toward Naturalism. Conning also provides a full English translation of Lindgren’s essay.
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Towards an “Aesthetics of Weather”: Gustaf Fröding and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
2023. Carl-Ludwig Conning. European Romantic Review 34 (6), 732-751
ArticleRead more about Towards an “Aesthetics of Weather”In spring 1892 the Stockholm literary magazine Ord och bild commissioned Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding (1860–1911) with a translation of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816). At the time, Fröding was an accomplished poet and an experienced translator of Romantic poetry from English, German, and French. However, Fröding lamented in a letter to his editor that in “Hymn” he had encountered an unexpected problem with rendering Shelley’s poetry of meteorological form into Swedish. This is peculiar as Fröding’s own poetic compositions, original and translations alike, are deeply preoccupied with meteorology. Taking its outset in Fröding’s struggle with the translation, this essay investigates weather in “Hymn,” arguing that what had puzzled Fröding was a mode of meteorological representation idiosyncratic to Shelley. The essay suggests that it is precisely through these idiosyncratic meteorological representations that Shelley develops discourses of French materialist and British skeptical and empirical philosophy. This development culminates in an “aesthetics of weather,” expressive of Shelley’s radical conceptions of the social and physical world. The essay concludes that Fröding’s pronounced struggle and the variation in semantic content of his version of the poem reveal what is really the meteorologically precise poetic form of an aesthetics of weather in “Hymn.”
Show all publications by Carl-Ludwig Conning at Stockholm University