Keynote lecture to be delivered by Professor Deirdre Coleman

Keynote lecture on 'Romanticism’s Oceania: Cook, Coleridge, and the Pelew Islands' to be delivered by Professor Deirdre Coleman at the 2019 Wordsworth Summer Conference

Romanticism's Oceania: Cook, Coleridge, and the Pelew Islands

Professor Coleman's lecture will revisit the various controversies surrounding John Hawkesworth’s compilation of the Pacific voyages, An Account of the Voyages ... for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773). It will then move to George Keate's An Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), often seen as a happy corrective - a type of Pantisocracy - to Hawkesworth's troubling Tahiti. Her lecture will conclude with the popular story of Lee Boo as seen in poetry by William Lisle Bowles, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Cottle and Jane West.

The Wordsworth Summer Conference was created in 1970 by Richard Wordsworth, the great-great grandson of the poet, in collaboration with Marilyn Gaull of The Wordsworth Circle, to celebrate Wordsworth's work and influence on the bicententary of his birth. This year's conference will take place at Rydal Hall, Cumbria from 5-15 August 2019.

Image: 'The Oroolong on the Morning of Departure' taken from the fifth edition of George Keate's An Account of the Pelew Islands (1803)

Image taken from George Keate's 'An Account of the Pelew Islands

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