Senior Lecturer, British Studies.
Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest.
Research expertise
Romanticism; travel writing; eighteenth-century feminism; social history and history of ideas during the age of revolution; sea literature.
Contributions
Individus
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge was writing at a time when the science of man was taken up by a variety of emerging disciplines such as anthropology, chemistry, ethics, psychology, sociology … Coleridge kept pace with the progress of these sciences, and these fuelled his thinking about natural affections and natural sociability.
Boxing
The popularity of boxing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is attested by the great number of publications and debates about the sport. Pugilism, in spite of its violence, was progressively presented as a sociable entertainment, a disciplined pastime, that allowed the cultivation of manly virtues. To legitimize boxing, various discourses shaped it as a science and as an art in the context of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Boxing became increasingly associated to a conservative and nationalist perception of Englishness as conservatives and radicals perceived the potential of the pastime to educate the mob and to cultivate a disciplined violence useful to maintain a pugilistic spirit in times of peace.
Pratiques
Pratiques
Women's travel writing
This entry deals with female travel narratives to the Continent, with a focus on those written during the revolutionary decade (1789-1800). It aims to show how sociability – sociable practices, culture, values – was a key topic for understanding the Continental other (its character, manners and mores) but also a rhetorical mode of writing one’s self in relation to the other.
Notebook writing (and Romanticism)
Many Romantic poets and thinkers kept notebooks to jot down miscellaneous entries ranging from minute observations of natural objects, fragments of lectures or poems to records of dreams and nightmares, or metaphysical reflections.
Objets
Pratiques