Alexander Regier reading "Blake, Hamann, and the Polyglot Moravians"
Channel: Department of English, Arizona State University
Date: 25/05/2016

Alexander Regier of Rice University delivered the 2015-2016 Ian Fletcher Memorial Lecture at Arizona State University.

In his talk, Regier discussed a number of little-known but critically important historical and theoretical connections between the English poet William Blake, the German thinker Johann Georg Hamann, and the congregation of the nonconformist Moravian church in London. The wider relevance of these connections is that all three form part of an important Anglo-German constellation of thinkers and writers that flourished well before the 1790s, supposedly the decade during which German influence onto eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary life began. The intellectual and textual exchange between Blake, Hamann and the Moravians actively points towards a need to reconfigure this literary history in the light of a multilingual study of the period.

Ian Fletcher was a much-beloved Victorianist, a specialist in the literature of the 1890s, who spent the final six years of his career at Arizona State University during the 1980s. A remarkably productive scholar much appreciated for his edition of Lionel Johnson's poems, his much-quoted guide to Walter Pater, and his late study of Aubrey Beardsley published in 1987, Ian produced a host of books and articles that have been read and re-read many times in the past 40 years. In fact, his Collected Poems were published in 1998: ten years after his unfortunate death. This lectureship honors his memory and his importance in the field of Victorian Studies.