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Book Talk at the Boston Athenæum: Michael Ferber
November 4, 2015 | 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelley–to name a few–are all authors considered to have worked in the Romantic style. However, some literary scholars have connected Jane Austen, the Brontës, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allen Poe to this artistic, spiritual, and intellectual movement. Not surprisingly, all of these authors are well represented within the Athenæum’s collection. This event is an opportunity to learn about the movement that influenced so many of our most beloved writers.
Though many of us admire the great works of Romantic poetry, music, and painting, the ideas of the Romantics may seem juvenile, sloppy, escapist, or even dangerous, and the very word “romantic” is often an insult. Michael Ferber will offer a brief defense of Romantic ideas and intuitions about nature, religion, politics, and the self. Romanticism is here to stay, and it’s not all bad.
Michael Ferber earned a BA in Greek literature from Swarthmore College and a PhD in English literature from Harvard. He taught English at Yale, then worked as a lobbyist and writer about nuclear disarmament in Washington. Ferber has written five books about Romanticism and edited two, as well as A Dictionary of Literary Symbols and about fifty article and reviews. He has also translated some sixty Romantic-era poems from French, German, and Italian. His own works have been, or will be, translated into five languages. He has recently finished a book called Poetic Fame, which surveys the history of the fame of poets from Homer to rappers.
Did You Know?
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.