Romanticism and Property

Canberra, 18-20 November, 2027

Property changed in both idea and practice in the decades around 1800. The French Revolution saw an upheaval of property relations through the confiscation of Church and aristocratic estates. In the same years, settler-colonial societies experimented with new ways of selling, trading and legally codifying the ownership of land. Even as the transatlantic slave trade continued to generate enormous profits from trafficking, selling and exploiting the labour of kidnapped peoples, the Abolition movement challenged the categorization of people as property. And while ownership of land and people was at the forefront of these changes, they also took in new instruments of intellectual property, including of literature.

Romantic literature and other artforms were engaged extensively with their own changing legal status. They also tracked much broader shifts in what property was and how it was conceived—not least property in land, tellingly named “real property” or “real estate”. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, there was “nothing more pernicious than the notion that any one possesses an absolute right to the Soil.” The young Coleridge associated “the right of landed Property” with the origin of the “accumulative system” of capitalism, and planned pantisocracy primarily as a community that abolished property.

The organisers of this conference invite proposals on Romanticism and property in any of its many and varied conceptualisations. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Politics of land ownership; inheritance, the estate and improvement; histories of property law
• Property and imperialism; colonisation and dispossession; Romantic settler-colonialism
• Slavery and abolitionism
• Property, class, and labour; the commons and enclosure; histories of capitalism and colonialism; unequal exchange; class struggles and national liberation struggles
• Romantic-period egalitarianism and communalism; Romantic revolutions and utopias; ownership of protest spaces
• The country and the city; agricultural revolution, urbanisation, industrialization
• Intellectual property; copyright, literary property and authors’ ownership of their work
• Selfhood and property; ownership of self, Romantic individualism; philosophical theorisation of properties, e.g. Kant on properties of human thought and perception
• New markets in the Romantic period; cultures of consumption; gender and property
• Metaphors of possession and ownership

Please submit abstracts of c.250 words, plus a short bio by 30 April 2027 to rsaacommunication@gmail.com with the subject line “RSAA 2027 Proposal”. Notifications of acceptance will be provided by the end of June. If you need earlier confirmation for travel or funding purposes, write to rsaacommunication@gmail.com.

A limited number of modest travel bursaries will be available for HDR/ECR scholars. If you are interested in applying for a bursary, please include a statement of need with your abstract which details your access to travel funding. HDR/ECR presenters will also be eligible for the Will Christie Prize for best conference paper.

Conference organising committee: Amelia Dale, Will Christie, Gillian Russell and Neil Ramsay.

The conference is supported by the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA) and the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS), the Australian National University.

Image caption: Joseph Lycett, Kissing Point, New South Wales, the property of the late Mr James Squires, ca. 1775-1828. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons