Winner of the CECS Bigger 6 article prize announced

Posted on 12 April 2022

Dr Omar F. Miranda is this year's winner with the article 'The Global Romantic Lyric'.

CECS is delighted to congratulate Dr Omar F. Miranda, this year's winner of the Bigger 6 / CECS article prize for 'The Global Romantic Lyric'. This prize-winning research appeared in The Wordsworth Circle 52.2 (March 2021). Bigger 6 described the essay as drawing together two oft cited, but rarely compared, canonical poems (Kubla Khan and Tintern Abbey) to posit 'neither a greater nor a lesser but a global Romantic lyric of multidirectional pathways and diverse cultural and temporal orientations'.

This intervention expands MH Abrams's foundational discrimination within Romantic forms to consider explicitly geospatial implications of 'cross-racial, cross-cultural, and transnational forms of encounter across time inherent to global poetics and aesthetics'. To ground this rereading, Miranda puts Wordsworth and especially Coleridge in conversation with William Jones’s work on Hindu and Sanskrit linguistic and literary traditions.

What emerges is a view of Romantic period verse with many provocative invitations to think through the dynamics between English literary tradition and the contrapuntal scenes where it was arguably conceived and is continually renewed.

Bigger 6 and CECS also recognized Dr Yi-cheng Weng, with an honourable mention for her article, 'Fashioning the Self-Portrait: Mary Robinson's Personas in Pictures and Words', published in The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (June 2021).