Responsables de l’atelier
Jérôme CHEMIN (Université Bourgogne Europe)
John-Erik HANSSON (Université Paris Cité)
Pauline HORTOLLAND (Université Marie & Louis Pasteur)
Sophie MUSITELLI (Université de Lille)
ADNOT, Camille, ENS PSL camille.adnot@ens.psl.eu
Political and Affective Emancipation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence
This paper examines the forms of emancipation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Composed in the wake of the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Letters register the upheavals of the decade even as Wollstonecraft travels northwards. Questions of national and individual liberty keep surfacing as she compares political structures across Europe. Her observations on Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish society prompt reflections on inherited freedoms, gender inequality, the decline of vassalage, and the contradictions of absolutist rule, while England – “that boasted land of freedom” – is criticised for the emerging “tyranny of wealth.” Political liberty thus forms a leitmotiv as Wollstonecraft stages her encounters with local communities, and assesses the conditions that enable free civic development.
Yet the Letters also develop a parallel and more intimate narrative of emancipation, grounded not in national institutions, but in individual aesthetic and affective experience. Freedom becomes linked to the exercise of intellectual faculties such as taste and aesthetic judgment. Wollstonecraft describes her own liberation not through social exchange (with which she is often frustrated), but through encounters with the environment. Moments of release occur as she steps off a boat onto land, welcomes a cloud as a “liberator,” or finds in the act of walking a form of physical and mental freedom. The famous passage in which she models the movement of her thoughts on the current of a cataract exemplifies her belief in the natural world’s power to expand, elevate, and emancipate the mind.
By tracing these intertwined registers of political and aesthetic emancipation, this paper argues that Wollstonecraft articulates a junction between Enlightenment conceptions of taste as mental elevation and Romantic notions of the sublime as a radical freeing of the self.
Camille Adnot is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. She defended her doctoral dissertation on William Blake’s illuminated books at Université Paris Cité in 2023. Her research focuses on 18th– and 19th-century British literature and visual arts, with a particular interest in Romanticism approached from material and environmental perspectives. Her recent publications include chapters in Water and Sea in Word and Image (Brill, 2023), Milton Across Borders and Media (OUP, 2023), and Global Bunyan and Visual Art (2025). She coorganises the “Romanticism across Borders” seminar, which explores cross-disciplinary approaches to the Romantic period.
Baudry, Samuel Université Lumières Lyon 2 samuel.baudry@univ-lyon2.fr
La poésie romantique encourage-t-elle l’émancipation de ses lecteurs ?
La poésie romantique encourage-t-elle l’émancipation de ses lecteurs ? Que nous disent les commentaires de lectrices et lecteurs actuels sur la puissance ou l’impuissance de la poésie à produire des effets sociaux, psychologiques ou moraux ?
Depuis la Déclaration d’indépendance des Etats-Unis en 1776, jusqu’à l’indépendance de la Grèce en 1821, en passant par la révolution de 1789 et l’abolition du Slave Trade Act en 1807, la poésie romantique a donné voix à toutes sortes de plaidoyers pour la liberté, d’apologie de l’autonomie, de critiques des servitudes – appels à l’émancipation qui prenaient à partie les sphères sociale, politique, religieuse ainsi qu’esthétiques. Les effets sur les débats publiques, dans les biographies individuelles et les mouvements collectifs de l’époque sont indubitables. Mais que reste-t-il aujourd’hui de cette force persuasive ?
L’analyse des plusieurs centaines de commentaires laissés sur des réseaux sociaux à propos des poèmes de Blake (America: A Prophecy ; « A Little Girl Lost » et « The Little Girl Lost »), d’Anna Laetitia Barbauld (« The Rights of Woman »), d’Hannah More (« Slavery, A Poem »), de Byron (« The Prisoner of Chillon ») ou de Shelley (The Revolt of Islam), permet de reconstruire les attentes, les préjugés des lecteurs contemporains et de discerner leurs éblouissements ou leurs dégouts – permet de mesurer ce qui subsiste des effets émancipateurs de cette poésie.
Samuel Baudry est Maître de Conférences à l’Université Lumières Lyon 2, membre du laboratoire IHRIM (UMR 5317) et Co-directeur de la collection Esthétique et Représentation : Monde Anglophone (1750-1900) aux Presses de l’Université Grenoble-Alpes.
Après avoir travaillé sur la réception de la poésie romantique dans les journaux au 19ème siècle et s’être intéressé au courrier des lecteurs dans la presse périodique du 18ème siècle, il est maintenant engagé dans un projet autour des commentaires de lecteurs publiés en ligne.
En 2023 il a publié D’où vient la critique littéraire ? aux presses universitaires de Lyon, et en 2025 il a créé avec Denis Reynaud le site du « Universal Gazetteer » (site de référencement et de maillage des journaux britannique du 18ème siècle accessibles en ligne)
Julien Beckaert – Université de Lille, julien.beckaert@univ-lille.fr
Entre esquive et réinvention : les miscellanées politiques comme outil d’émancipation radicale dans la Grande-Bretagne des années 1790
Avec la Proclamation royale du 21 mai 1792 contre les écrits séditieux, la Grande-Bretagne bascule dans une ère de répression accrue. Ce texte ne se contente pas de s’ajouter aux outils existants (espionnage, intimidations loyalistes, amendes) ; il en décuple la portée, offrant un cadre légal propice à la multiplication des procédures abusives et des privations de liberté. C’est dans ce contexte hostile que les éditorialistes radicaux Thomas Spence, Daniel Eaton et Sampson Perry s’engagent dans un processus de lutte éditoriale novateur. Cette communication se propose d’analyser comment leurs miscellanées politiques (Pig’s Meat, Politics for the People et The Argus) ont contourné l’interdit afin d’offrir à la « multitude » une voie pour sortir de l’ignorance. Ces recueils hybrides mêlant chansons, essais, fables, parodies et réappropriations de textes canoniques fonctionnaient comme des espaces de résistance espérant transformer une plèbe assujettie en un public politique souverain.
Julien Beckaert est doctorant en civilisation britannique au Laboratoire CECILLE (ULR 4074) de l’Université de Lille. Sa thèse examine les stratégies éditoriales de trois périodiques radicaux – Pig’s Meat, Politics for the People et The Argus – publiés en Angleterre dans la dernière décennie du 18ème siècle. L’analyse littéraire et politique de ces publications mettra en évidence les modalités par lesquelles les éditorialistes londoniens Thomas Spence, Daniel Eaton et Sampson Perry ont utilisé une vaste littérature datant du XVIIe au XVIIIe siècle afin de promouvoir leurs convictions politiques radicales. Il est également membre fondateur du Laboratoire Junior CÉDILLE, et rédacteur en chef du carnet de recherche du séminaire « Histoire globale, politiques et sociétés » de l’Axe 3 du Laboratoire CECILLE.
Chemin, Jérôme, Université de Bourgogne Jerome.Chemin@u-bourgogne.fr
Humphry Davy: the paradox of emancipation and conformity
This talk examines the contradiction at the heart of Humphry Davy’s career: his simultaneous pursuit of intellectual emancipation and his participation in systems that disciplined and constrained the body. As a chemist, philosopher, and public lecturer, Davy championed the liberation of the mind through imaginative science, insisting that discovery required emotional, intuitive, and poetic capacities. His experiments with nitrous oxide, his romantic scientific writings, and his correspondence with Samuel Taylor Coleridge reveal a deliberate effort to free thought from the confines of mechanistic reasoning. However, as he climbed the social ladder, from provincial outsider to President of the Royal Society, he leaned into ancient philosophies to discipline his body. Davy’s social ascent coincided with increasing alignment to institutional authority, class hierarchy, and the regulation of body. This talk explores the tension between the monitoring of the body and the liberation of the mind.
Jérôme Chemin is Senior Lecturer at the University of Dijon. After defending a dissertation on Coleridge and philosophy, he focused on the notebooks of Humphry Davy and especially on the link between poetry and science in this protean medium.
Clanet, Marion, Université de Lille, marion.clanet@univ-lille.fr
Romantic Women poets and the eulogy of science
William Wordsworth claimed in 1802 that scientific knowledge was yet too unfamiliar to provoke the sympathetic feelings necessary to Romantic poetry; however, an interest in science had already crept in some of his predecessors’ poems. Indeed, in the late 18th century, women Romantic poets actually incorporated some of the findings of modern science within their poetry. Although Wordsworth’s preface to The Lyrical Ballads is still predominantly considered as a manifesto for English Romantic poetry, some of his claims had already been refuted by those earlier poems when he wrote it. As Melissa Bailes has shown (2017; 2023), the academic prevalence of Wordsworth’s definition of Romantic poetry means that we have overlooked other aspects of poetical works written in that same period. To break free of this canonical understanding of Romanticism, we may consider how Anna Seward, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith used the contrivance of personification to eulogize the pursuit of knowledge. The poems I intend to discuss contradict the idea that language cannot convey pleasurable feelings and scientific information at the same time. They also resist Wordsworth’s view that the « Man of Science »‘s work should inherently be isolated and thus excluded from the social binds the Poet strives to weave in his work. Romantic scientific poetry is indeed particularly likely to bridge the gaps between the multiple voices of scientists and poets, through the use of footnotes, quotations and a common language.
Agrégée et docteure d’anglais, j’ai soutenu en décembre 2023 ma thèse de doctorat intitulée « La Copie : La Réplication de l’humain au laboratoire de la fiction dans Frankenstein de Mary Shelley, The Island of Doctor Moreau de H.G. Wells et Never Let Me Go De Kazuo Ishiguro », portant sur les questions du posthumain, du biopouvoir et des échanges entre sciences et littérature dans ces trois romans gothiques, et dirigée par la Professeur Catherine Lanone. Sous contrat post-doctoral à l’Université de Lille depuis septembre 2024, je participe aux côtés de la Professeur Sophie Musitelli à l’élaboration du projet WISE, pour une recension et une étude des poétesses britanniques ayant composé des poèmes d’inspiration scientifique depuis la période romantique jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine.
Emmanuelle de Champs et Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq – CY Cergy Paris Université et Université Paris Nanterre
Frances Wright ou l’émancipation féminine comme moteur de l’histoire
En 1848 paraît à Londres England, the Civilizer. Her history developed in its principles. Signé « A Woman », ce livre méconnu est l’ouvrage d’une femme, Frances Wright (1795-1852) dont les projets, les écrits et les conférences ont pourtant fait sensation aux Etats-Unis et en Europe de 1820 à 1830. England the Civilizer est l’aboutissement d’un cheminement intellectuel et militant qui entrevoit la possibilité d’un progrès politique et social pour l’humanité. A travers le récit de l’histoire britannique, Wright y brosse une fresque de l’essor de la civilisation occidentale qui s’ancre dans la lecture des grandes histoires stadiales et conjecturales des Lumières écossaises (Kames, Smith, Millar…). Mais au fil de ses conférences et de ses écrits, Wright développe une pensée originale en prise directe avec les philosophies nouvelles de son temps - utilitarisme de Jeremy Bentham, associationisme de Robert Owen, saint-simonisme et comtisme – où l’émancipation féminine apparaît comme le véritable ressort de l’histoire.
Dans cette communication, nous nous proposons de revenir sur la carrière transnationale de Frances Wright, entre la Grande-Bretagne, la France et les Etats-Unis, avant d’examiner l’originalité de sa lecture de l’histoire, et notamment son analyse des révolutions au prisme d’autres interprétations contemporaines de l’histoire britannique dans les milieux réformateurs proto-socialistes. Enfin, nous reviendrons sur le tableau esquissé par Wright de la destinée de la civilisation occidentale au sein de laquelle l’émancipation féminine joue un rôle moteur.
Emmanuelle de Champs est Professeure d’histoire et civilisation britannique à CY Cergy Paris Université. Ses travaux en histoire intellectuelle portent sur l’utilitarisme de Jeremy Bentham. Elle a notamment publié Enlightenment and Utility, Bentham in France, Bentham in French (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Elle s’intéresse à la production et à la circulation des arguments utilitaristes en faveur de l’égalité des sexes au XIXe siècle ( ‘Des intérêts aux droits politiques des femmes : les théories utilitaristes de Bentham à l’époque de la Révolution française’. Annales Historiques de La Révolution Française 411, no. 1 (2023): 25–45, ‘The Interests of Women in Bentham’s Late Constitutional Thought’. In Bentham on Democracy, Courts, and Codification, edited by Xiaobo Zhai and Philip Schofield. Cambridge University Press, 2022 : 68-87). Elle a également coordonné avec Florence Clavaud le projet de transcription et d’édition collaborative en ligne “Testaments de Poilus”.
Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq est Professeur de civilisation britannique à l’Université de Paris Nanterre et actuellement en délégation auprès du laboratoire Triangle-ENS Lyon (UMR 5206). Ses travaux portent sur l’histoire de la pensée politique et du républicanisme anglais à la période moderne et sur la circulation des idées politiques entre la Grande-Bretagne et la France au dix-huitième siècle, notamment par le biais des traductions. Parmi ses publications les plus récentes : “Portrait of the republican as Translator. Engaging with English Political Texts in the Eighteenth Century”, History of European Ideas, 2025, 1-17; « Faut-il se souvenir du républicanisme anglais ? L’héritage intellectuel du républicanisme anglais dans le temps long », XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 81 | 2024; « Translation before translation: the dissemination of Harrington’s ideas in French in the eighteenth-century », in Ideas Across Borders: Translating Visions of Authority and Civil Society in Europe, dir. Gaby Mahlberg, Thomas Munck (Londres, Routledge, 2024, pp.118-135), et une monographie, La République de Harrington dans la France des Lumières et de la Révolution, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment/Liverpool University Press, 2022.
Duperrier, Félix, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, duperrier.felix@gmail.com
Charlotte Smith and Mary Hays’s female historical imagination
This paper explores the inclusion of female agents in the History of England, from the earliest records to the Peace of Amiens (1806). The project, initially undertaken by Charlotte Smith and completed by Mary Hays, performed a number of epistemological and ideological inroads into a traditionally male preserve. The History is a product of what Lynette Felber describes as ‘women making history, both as agents and as authors representing the past’.1 Expanding the emphasis on great men and war prevalent in conventional historical narratives, Smith and Hays incorporated authoritative female figures into the national past. At the same time as it asserts the public agency of women, their History stresses the limits that patriarchal oppression imposes on such power. In doing so, Greg Kucich explains, it ‘both advances and qualifies its unique value for inciting women’s participation in the national progress of liberty and political improvement’.2 The paper accordingly discusses the reformist politics of the History of England, in which female emancipation serves both as a cause and desired effect. The educational and revisionary purpose of the History, whose subtitle marks it out as a Series of Letters to a Young Lady at School, underlines its ambition to teach young women to view themselves as legitimate participants in the public sphere. Celebrated women – such as Joan of Arc, Lady Jane Grey, Mary Stuart, or Queen Elizabeth – and less prominent women alike are portrayed as having shaped government, the nation, and civil society. In advocating civil liberties, checks on arbitrary power, a more tolerant and pluralistic society, or opposition to all forms of political violence, Smith and Hays ultimately sought to counter the political marginalisation of women.
Bio: Felix Duperrier recently defended his thesis at Université Paris Cité. He is particularly interested in William Wordsworth’s poetry and prose of the 1810s and 1820s. He is one of the co-organisers of the online seminar ‘Romanticism across Borders’.
Leuner, Sara– Université Paris Cité sara.leuner@gmail.com
Radical Emancipation? Samuel Richardson, Mary Hays, and the raped woman in the 18th-century didactic novel
In the September 1797 issue of the Monthly Magazine, Mary Hays offered a contribution ‘On Novel Writing’. In it, she discusses what she views as the didactic imperative placed on the novel, through the creation and display of characters functioning as moral exemplars. She proposes as illustration Samuel Richardson’s 1748 Clarissa, a work she deems ‘exquisite’ while nonetheless abounding with ‘false and pernicious principles, […] violations of truth and nature’. Hays’ wariness towards Richardson’s endeavour is not motivated by its moralistic intent so much as the perceived implausibility of its heroine. She thus writes that ‘the character of Clarissa, a beautiful superstructure upon a false and airy foundation, can never be regarded as a model for imitation’. If Hays expresses, nearly fifty years after its publication, a rejection of Clarissa the character as a believable pattern of feminine virtue, she does not reject outright the didactic project of Clarissa the novel. Crucially, she does not reject the didactic value of sexual violence. As such, two years after her reflection ‘On Novel Writing’, Hays would produce her own examination of the raped woman as an aesthetic and ideological motif in The Victim of Prejudice (1799). This paper proposes to look into this thematic recycling, exploring the meeting points and discontinuities between the two novels. Both depict heroines placed in circumstances that gradually render their sexual violation unavoidable, and to an extent necessary to their respective educational missions. Hays’ late 18th-century narrative can thus be apprehended as both a prolongation of and an emancipation from the central tenets of Richardsonian fiction. Borrowing from a tradition structuring the 18th-century English novel, Hays repurposes it in the service of a reforming didactic project, one that denounces the gendered and moral expectations enabling feminine vulnerability to sexual violence.
Sara Leuner is a PhD student at Université Paris Cité and the University of Liverpool, working on a dissertation entitled “The Rake’s Progress: contribution to an archaeology of predation” under the supervision of Emeriti Professors Frédéric Ogée (UPC) and Paul Baines (UoL) This doctoral project proposes an inquiry into the aesthetic and ideological uses of sexual predation as an artistic motif in the British long eighteenth century (1660-1820), through the rake archetype, understood as both a literary creation and the potential mirror of real-life practices. Sara Leuner has written an entry on the rake for the Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century and an article on xenophobic rhetorical strategies in English rape trials in the Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.
Lochot, Céline, Université de Lille, celine.lochot@univ-lille.fr
Rebellious Youth and Subversive Heir
Emancipation is at the heart of the Confessions of an Opium Eater. De Quincey rebelled against adults’ authority (his mother and guardians, university teachers, bishops and pedantic scholars) to assert himself as mature enough to make his own choices; and lived for a short while the life of the underdog as a vagrant borrowing from Jewish money-lenders and friend with prostitutes. Though he did receive a classic education, he claimed to be self-taught where he most claimed recognition: as an expert on German philosophy and political economy.
The Confessions allowed De Quincey to assert himself as an author and to exorcise the shadow of the major Romantics: in several ways, they can be read as a parody of The Prelude; while the “Postscript on Murder as a Fine Art” rewrites Romantic aesthetics in a subversive way. Finally, De Quincey embraced the essay’s fluidity as a space for experimentation (fragment, generic hybridity).
However, his youthful ideals somewhat collide with his proclaimed Toryism; his consistently apologetic stance on his writing suggests that De Quincey was as “reluctant” a rebel as he was (in John Whale’s own words) a reluctant autobiographer.
Céline Lochot teaches literary methodology at the university of Lille. She published a book based on her doctoral thesis on Irony in the Works of Thomas De Quincey in 2021.