The Wye Valley: Romantic Representations, 1640-1830

6-8 July 2011, Tintern, Monmouthshire, Wales

Organisers

Professor Tim Fulford, Nottingham Trent University
Dr Damian Walford Davies, Aberystwyth University

Keynote Speakers

Professor Suzanne Matheson, University of Windsor, Canada
Professor Fiona Stafford, Somerville College, Oxford

The aim of this international conference – held on the banks of the Wye at Tintern, with views over to the abbey ruins – were to revisit one of Britain’s paradigmatic cultural sites: the Wye Valley. From Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan to William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, from the Early Modern period to Romanticism, this resonant ground has been central to British poetry, art, aesthetic theory, picturesque tourism and political intervention.

The borderspace from Pumlumon to Chepstow became one of the great internalised cartographies of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The conference sought to trace the flow of Wordsworth’s famous ‘wanderer through the woods’ anew in order to reconsider the conditioning influence this frontier-river had on the literary, artistic and cultural imagination of the age.

The Wye Valley: Romantic Representations examined a broad spectrum of negotiations with the Wye Valley during the period 1640–1830, following in the footsteps and waterwakes of the period’s commentators, authors and artists. How might we ‘revisit’ the Wye Valley in order to defamiliarise the myriad responses to this landscape? What is the extent of the Wye Valley’s ‘reach’ into the various cultures of the age? What are the contours of various ‘cross-border’ negotiations with the Wye? The conference will bring international scholars together to examine a crucial section of the Welsh and British map.The conference took place at the heart of Tintern, a few hundred yards from the abbey and the river.