Architecture & the Literary Imagination solicits conference papers that will broaden the repertoire of literary sources for understanding European architecture (c. 1350 – c. 1750) and foster dialogue across disciplines.

Architectural historians typically rely on histories for facts, and treatises for theories. A much wider range of texts records the reception of real buildings, the capacity to imagine fantastic ones, and the reciprocity between architecture and literature: poetry, dramaturgy, the picaresque novel, inauguration or consecration speeches, travelogues, epigraphy, and so on.

‘Architecture’ includes cities, civic buildings, palaces, villas, housing, individual rooms, gardens, grottoes, the constructions of nature itself, fountains, monuments, engineering, and decorations from vault painting to topiary. Our focus is largely Europe, but encompasses the Ottoman Empire, all territories ringing the Mediterranean basin, and descriptions of architecture transmitted by the global missions of the Church or travellers.

The source language may be in any vernacular, and we are also interested in Neo-Latin, Neo-Greek, and Classical Arabic as legacy languages of cultural transmission across history and borders.

A particular theoretical concern is the intermedial relationship between immaterial words and solid buildings – however that may be defined.

A collection of essays from the conference will be published, subject to peer review, in an edited volume of the new book series, Architecture & the Literary Imagination (Harvey Miller Publishers, series editors, Fabio Barry & Paul Gwynne).

Papers will be 30 minutes in length and preferably in either English or Italian. Please send an abstract of 200 words by 1 October:
Fabio Barry: rabiriuscantab.net
Paul Gwynne: p.gwynneaur.edu