Ann Radcliffe - Bologna Symposium

Presentation:

The two-day seminar aims to investigate Ann Radcliffe’s work legacy, its reception, circulation, translation and remediation, especially in Italy and Europe. The seminar is organized by Serena Baiesi (Bologna), Michael Gamer (Pennsylvania), Diego Saglia (Parma) and Angela Wright (Sheffield), and is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom.

260 years on from her birth, Ann Radcliffe, the English novelist whose writing firmly established the Gothic genre and inspired the fiction of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and the Brontë sisters, could be making a return to people’s bookshelves as part of the Cambridge edition of the complete works of Ann Radcliffe (2026 >) and Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now, a project funded by the AHRC.

Born in Holborn, London on 9 July 1764, Radcliffe published five novels in her lifetime; however, it was the success of The Mysteries of Udolpho that caused her popularity to skyrocket in the 1790s. Contemporary reviewers compared Radcliffe to Shakespeare, with some hinting at the idea that she might be better than the bard at creating a sense of terror and suspense.

Despite achieving notable success in her lifetime, Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) is little known today outside of university classrooms and academic circles. Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now thus seeks to amplify the brilliance of Radcliffe’s work and her centrality within the culture of the Romantic period. At the same time, through seminars such as this one, it seeks to generate fresh enthusiasm for her work among modern readers. In connection with the forthcoming 8-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe (2026-29), Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now is part of an ongoing effort to reassess her place in literary culture and aesthetics from the late-eighteenth century to the present.

Participants:

Serena Baiesi (Università di Bologna); Elizabeth Bobbitt (University of York); Jeff Cox (University of Colorado, Boulder); Caterina Daolio (University of Bologna); Tom Duggett (Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University); Michael Gamer (University of Pennsylvania); Robert Miles (University of Victoria, Canada); Katrina O’Loughlin (Brunel University); Deborah Russell (University of York); Diego Saglia (Università di Parma); Dale Townshend (Manchester Metropolitan University); Rosie Whitcombe (University of Sheffield); Angela Wright (University of Sheffield, and Project Lead for the AHRC-sponsored project ‘Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now’).