Department of English Language and Literature Seminar

The Author in Nineteenth – Century Literary Culture : Romanticism to Formalism

Speaker : Andrea Selleri

Date: January 16, 2020

Time: 14.40 – 16.00

Location: G 160

The Author in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture: Romanticism to Formalism
The significance of the relationship between the author and the work
is among the most contentious issues in the theory of criticism. In an
anglophone context, much of this contentiousness can be traced back to
the interplay between critical theory, critical practice and literary
practice in the Victorian period. This talk will outline the
modifications of Romantic poetics that defined the dominant Victorian
critical protocol, provide examples of the tensions between mainstream
critics’ concern with ‘finding the author’ and Aestheticism’s
de-centring formal practices, and finally connect the aesthetic needs
that became apparent in Victorian debates about interpretation to the
self-conscious formalism of later Modernist critics.

Andrea Selleri has a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Trieste,
and a PhD from the University of Warwick (2014). From 2014 to 2018 he
held the post of tutor and associate fellow at the University of
Warwick. Selleri is the co-editor of a collection of essays published
by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016, the editor of a collection of essays
under contract to Routledge (scheduled to be delivered in March 2020
and published in 2021), and Edinburgh University Press have requested
a full script of his monograph, The Author in Victorian Literary
Culture: Romanticism to Formalism, to be delivered in February 2020.
He is also the author of eight articles in AHCI-listed journals, as
well as other essays and book chapters.

Click here for the event poster.