GER 2025: “Negotiations of Value in the Romantic Age”
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
25-28 September 2025
Organisers: Gerold Sedlmayr, Kathrin Bethke, Mona Kammer
Conference Programme
Conference Venue: Orangerie, Schlossgarten 1, 91054 Erlangen
Thursday, 25 September 2025
From 1:00 pm Registration
2:15 pm – 3:00 pm Welcome Addresses and Introduction
Welcome Addresses:
Lutz Edzard (Vice Dean for International Affairs at the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Ralf Haekel (University of Leipzig, Germany), President of the German Society for English Romanticism
- Gerold Sedlmayr (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany): “Negotiations of Value in the Romantic Age: An Outline”
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
PANEL 1: Literary Value: The Economy of Letters, Canon Formation, and the Question of Disinterestedness
Chair: Michael Meyer (University of Koblenz, Germany)
- Sebastian Domsch (University of Greifswald, Germany): “The Economy of Letters – Concepts of Literary Value in Romanticism”
- Natalie Roxburgh (University of Hamburg, Germany): “Disinterestedness as Discourse and the Problem of Literary Value”
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm Coffee Break
5:00 pm – 6:45 pm
Keynote 1: Michelle Faubert (University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada): “Human Rights, Human Value in the Age of Transatlantic Slavery: Assessing the Subject in British Romanticism”
Chair: Mona Kammer (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
7:30 pm: Conference Warming at Restaurant “Alter Simpl”, Bohlenplatz 2, 91054 Erlangen
Friday, 26 September 2025
9:00 am – 10:30 am
PANEL 2: Reassessments of Aesthetic Value and the Value of Knowledge
Chair: Christoph Bode (LMU Munich, Germany)
- Tilottama Rajan (University of Western Ontario, Canada): “Rethinking Aesthetic Value Through Hegel and Schelling: Between Aesthetics and Naturphilosophie”
- Jorunn Joiner (Lund University, Sweden): “Valuable Paper and Priceless Information: The Society of Antiquaries of London and Anglo-Nordic Exchanges”
- Prachi Sharma (India): “Myth, Nature, and the Sacred: Reimagining Cultural Value in German and Indian Romanticism”
10:30 am – 11:00 am Coffee Break
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
PANEL 3: Reclaiming Value – Women Writers’ Subversion of Normative Literary, Economic and Moral Values
Chair: Simone Broders (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
- Mari Komnæs (Lund University, Sweden): “Reclaiming Value after the Fall: Mary Hays’s Renegotiation of Sexual and Economic Value in The Victim of Prejudice”
- Irene Valenti (University of Augsburg, Germany): “Counter-Daemonic: Subversion of Values in L.E.L.’s Literary Annual Fairies”
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Lunch Break
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm
PANEL 4: The Value of Time / The Timing of Value: Aesthetic Value, Time, and Media
Chair: Frank Erik Pointner (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
- Marvin Reimann (University of Bonn, Germany): “Reconceiving the Value of Time: Its Commodification and Recovery as Individual Time in the Romantic Period”
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm Coffee Break
3:30 am – 4:30 am
PANEL 5: The Literary and Political Value of Genre (1)
Chair: Cian Duffy (Lund University, Sweden)
- Ian Duncan (University of California, Berkeley, USA): “Settler Pastoral: Scotland in South Africa”
- Robert W. Jones (University of Leeds, UK): “Sheridan the Tax Man”
4:45 pm – 6:00 pm
Keynote 2: David Duff (Queen Mary University, London, UK): “Negative Aesthetics: Coleridge’s Philosophical History of Bad Poetry”
Chair: Gerold Sedlmayr (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
7:00 pm: Conference Dinner at Restaurant Thalermühle, Thalermühle 1, 91054 Erlangen
Saturday, 27 September 2025
9:30 am – 10:30 am
PANEL 6: The Literary and Political Value of Genre (2)
Chair: Marleen Waffler (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
- Kathrin Bethke (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany): “Measures of Value: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and the Axiology of Poetic Genre”
- Wolfgang Funk (Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany): “The Lie of the Village: Economies of the Pastoral in and before the Romantic Era”
10:30 am – 11:00 am Coffee Break
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
PANEL 7: The Value of (Historical) Truth in Fiction, Textual Criticism and Religion
Chair: Katrin Röder (TU Dortmund University, Germany)
- Angela Esterhammer (University of Toronto, Canada): “Credibility and Truth-Value in the Late-Romantic Historical Novel: Scott and Galt”
- Dafydd Moore (University of Plymouth, UK): “‘Vindicating’ Homer: Negotiating Religious, Literary and Historical Value in the Search for the Trojan War”
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Lunch Break
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
PANEL 8: Productive vs. Unproductive Values? Satire, Comedy and the Economic
Chair: Gerd Bayer (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
- Robert Clark (University of East Anglia, UK): “Money, Markets and Values in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion”
- Chi-Fang Chen (National Chiayi University, Taiwan): “The Political Economy of Comedy: On Disinterested Value in Romantic Criticism”
3:00 pm – 3:30 pm Coffee Break
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
PANEL 9: The (Economic) Value of Nature and the Environment / The Formative Impact of the Economic on Human and Non-Human Nature
Chair: Laura Zick (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
- Carolin Böttcher (Trier University, Germany): “The Value of Botany in The Wild Irish Girl”
- Isabel Fernandez Mayor (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland): “The Affectivity of the Natural World and the Romantic Child: Christian-Romantic Values in Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children”
4:45 pm – 6:00 pm
Keynote 3: Joanna Rostek (Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen, Germany): “The Value of Economic Criticism for Romantic Studies”
Chair: Kathrin Bethke (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Dinner, self-organised
9:00 pm Guided City Tour through Erlangen with the Nightwatchman
Sunday 28 September 2025
09:30 am – 11:00 am
PANEL 10: Media Materialism, Aesthetic Reevaluations of Environmental Worlds, and the Material-Discursive Dimensions of Romantic Language
Chair: Ralf Haekel (University of Leipzig, Germany)
- Andrew Burkett (Union College, New York, USA): “The Value of Mediation and Time in the Environmental Art of John Constable”
- Alexander Scherr (Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen, Germany): “Listening to the Breeze: The Value of Romantic Poetry in the Anthropocene”
- Martin Fog Arndal (University of Copenhagen, Denmark): “The Economic is Ecological: Mary Wollstonecraft on Nature, the Body, and Capital”
11:00 am – 11:30 am Coffee Break
11:30 am – 12:30 pm
PANEL 11: Authorial Value / The Value of the Author
Chair: Ute Berns (University of Hamburg, Germany)
- Andrin Albrecht (University of Jena, Germany): “Ishmael, Oil Baron”
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm: Lunch Break
2:00 – 3:00 pm: GER General Meeting
Prof. Dr. Roland Weidle: A Comprehensive Guide to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Arden, 2025)
Tuesday, 22 July 2025 at 4 p.m., Room C603, Bismarkstr. 1
As part of this semester’s class on the transformations of the sonnet from the Shakespearean Renaissance to transcultural and queer appropriations the form, Roland Weidle from Ruhr-Universität Bochum is going to join us to talk about his recent book, A Comprehensive Guide to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which came out with Bloomsbury Publishing in 2025. This book provides students with the tools to unravel the complexities of one of the most difficult sonnet sequences, introducing them to the literary tradition, themes, stylistic features and cultural contexts of the genre. It thus enables readers not only to disentangle the complex relationships of the poems’ characters but also to appreciate their philosophical, sensual, topical and subversive qualities.
Prof. Dr. Anette Pankratz: „Fun, Fantasy and Caricature: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando“
Wednesday, 25 June 2025, 10:15-11:45 a.m., Room C301, Bismarckstr. 1
(As part of the „Textanalyseseminar“, Group 3, taught by Gerold Sedlmayr)
On 7 November 1928, Virginia Woolf remarked about her latest novel Orlando: “I want fun. I want fantasy. I want (& this was serious) to give things their caricature value” (7 November 1928). Mission accomplished: the noveltells the fantastical story of someone who lives from Elizabethan to modern times and changes sex in between; it gallops through history, caricaturing learned biographers and eminent geniuses. The guest lecture will contextualise Orlando as an example of (high) modernist writing – and hopefully demonstrate that both modernism and Virginia Woolf are nothing to be afraid of.