The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2003
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"Origins and Ends of Empire"
Session Leader: Ian Balfour, York University ibalfour@yorku.ca
This panel will address narratives of empire in the Romantic period, broadly understood, with special attention to matters of origins and teleology, as well as to how history is thought to move through space, whether natural or politically constructed or both. The organizer plans a paper on Volney. Contributions might engage authors such as Rousseau, Mary Shelley, De Quincey, Gibbon, Hegel, etc.
"Romanticism and the Culture of Natural History"
Session Leader: Alan Bewell, University of Toronto, a.bewell@utoronto.ca
Papers are invited on the impact of natural history upon literature and culture during the Romantic period.
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"The Drama and Theatre of Joanna Baillie"
Session Leader: Catherine Burroughs, Wells College, cb64@cornell.edu
This session will explore recent developments in the scholarship on Joanna Baillie and present new research and approaches to her work, emphasizing Baillie's theatre career and dramatic canon. Topics could include: Baillie as both "closet dramatist" and "closeted playwright"; her dramaturgical innovations and theatrical experiments with bodies, space, and speech; Baillie as theorist and practitioner; her extensive prefaces; the performance history of individual Baillie plays (in Scotland, Great Britain, and America); Baillie's "missionary"/"religious" dramas (The Bride and The Martyr and connections to Ceylon); Baillie's representation of women, Africans, sexuality, class, and/or "the nation" etc.
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"Sites of Recreation"
Session Leader: Julie Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara jcarlson@english.ucsb.edu
This panel invites papers that consider notions, places, and practices of recreation in the Romantic period. It is especially interested in exploring the tensions between "leisure" and "work" that these sites embody and legislate: on the one hand, valued for their opposition to work and its ethics of utility and, on the other, requiring enormous work (physical, intellectual, ethical) both to produce and receive. Through what means and to what ends do theatres, music halls, pleasure gardens, sports, or shopping relax and thereby re-create the human? What do these forms of recreation tell us about the relation between creativity and repetition, novelty and routine, killing time and prolonging life?
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"On the Verge: Bordering Philosophy"
Session Leader: David L. Clark, McMaster Univeristy dclark@mcmaster.ca
In what ways is Romanticism the site of a complex philosophical reflection upon the motivations and implications of borders and borderings? What productive and/or carceral roles do limits, margins, and verges play in "Romantic" philosophy (including German Idealism, Kantian, and post-Kantian thought)? In what ways is the philosophy of the period "beside itself," i.e., in a more or less problematic rapport with zones of thought deemed to be "outside"? Possible topics include: philosophy of the border or philosophy at the border; producing and policing the netherlands, hinterlands, homelands, and heartlands of philosophy; philosophy at the limits of philosophical conceptions of philosophy; philosophy's close encounters with the putatively non-philosophical (empiricism, faith, mysticism, irrationality, animality, corporeality, contingency, etc.); Romantic philosophy within, without, and athwart Romantic ideology; philosophy and abjection; the place of philosophy in Romantic modernity, theory, and criticalpractice; the place of individual philosophers in (Romantic) philosophy; the use and abuse of philosophical nationality and nationalism; disciplinary governance and the organization of knowledge; hybridizations and graftings of disciplines in service of the (re)formation of philosophical borders; philosophical concepts of space and place, including philosophical expressions of cultural, national, linguistic borders and borderings; the places of philosophy in the university; putting the "philosophical" university in its place. "Philosophy" is here broadly conceived, ranging from canonical philosophical work of the period to non-philosophical texts that are characterized by lineages, inflections, questions, and moves that are deemed to be "philosophical." Proposals from a wide range of methodologies, disciplines, and languages are warmly welcomed.
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"Communal Romanticism"
Session Leader: Jeffrey Cox, University of Colorado, jeffrey.cox@colorado
This panel will explore both the sense in which romanticism can be placed as a communal creation and the ways in which we might alter our practice to explore romanticism in a communal fashion. While we think of the romantic era as marked on the one hand by the Individual and on the other by the Nation, one might also argue that it was the era of the group, the club, the cenacle, the association. What happens to our understanding of romantic culture when we look at it not from the perspective of the individual genius or of the controlling aggregation but from that of the dynamic community? While communal creativity is perhaps clearest in the theater, where a production is the work of many hands, we can explore the forging of a collective culture in, for example, acts of collaboration, in the exchanges that occur within groups, and in the creation of formal cultural alliances. If we discover that romantic culture is created communally, how might we discover a commensurate communal scholarly style?
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"Romantic Libraries"
Session Leader: Ina Ferris, University of Ottowa, iferris@uottawa.ca
This session invites papers on the implications of the culture of the book in Romantic-era Europe. Possible topics include public and private spaces of literacy; book collectors and bibliomaniacs; antiquarian book clubs; the emergence of book professions (e.g. librarians, bibliographers) and civic/national repositories; obsessive readers; representations of the library (visual as well as linguistic); and literary/publishing genres linked to book collection (e.g. miscellanies, novel "libraries," collected editions, historical series, anthologies, etc.).
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"Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Approaches to British Fiction"
Session Leaders:
Jill Heydt-Stevenson, University of Colorado, Boulder, jill.heydt@colorado.edu Charlotte Sussman, University of Colorado, Boulder, sussman@ucsub.colorado.edu
We welcome papers on the novel of the Romantic Period; topics could include recovering women writers; new perspectives on sexuality during this period; post-colonial theory, particularly as it relates to England's internal colonization of Scotland and Ireland; publishing practices; radical politics; and revaluations, after Lukacs, of the relationship between the history of genres and the history of cultures. Possible authors: Austen, Mary Brunton, Burney, Edgeworth, William Godwin, James Hogg, Mary Shelley, Scott, Wollstonecraft, and others.
Please e-mail proposals to both Jill Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman.
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"American Romanticism"
Session Leader: Virginia Jackson, New York University vwj1@nyu.edu
This panel will address nineteenth-century American poetry in trans-Atlantic context. Not only has there been little critical attention given to poets other than Whitman and Dickinson in the period, but the few studies there are depend on notions of American exceptionalism that cause critics to ignore or diminish the popular Anglo-American traffic in poems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An understanding of that exchange will revise current ideas about nineteenth-century American literature as well as ideas about British romanticism itself.
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"Romanticism and the Language of Terrorism"
The words "terrorism" and "terrorist" were invented during the 1790s and became part of Romantic discourse via British reactions to the political events of the French Revolution. Though these words had a specific, sharply delineated significance initially, from the beginning they were connected with other discourses (especially the Sublime) in ways that gave them a much broader and more ambiguous status. Contributors are invited to address any aspect of the Romantic language of "terror," including its connections to and differences from the functions of such language in U.S. and global culture today.
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"The Place of China in Romantic Period Writing, 1790-1842"
Session Leader: Peter Kitson, University of Dundee p.j.kitson@dundee.ac.uk
Papers are invited on the representation of China in the period from the Macartney Embassy of 1792-94 to the first Opium War of 1839-42. Historians and scholars of relations with China and the West conventionally argue that the image of the Qing Empire (1644-1912) underwent a substantial refashioning in this period, from being a generally idealised polity in both Jesuit Missionary and Enlightenment writing to being viewed as a static, arrogant and degenerate in the early nineteenth century. Papers are invited on a range of subjects, including: literary representations, missionary writing, early sinology, discussions of the languages, culture, agriculture etc of the Qian Empire, chinoiserie, consumption, commodities (tea, silk, earthenware, opium) etc. Papers dealing with Chinese travellers to the west and accounts of their presence are also welcome.
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"Romantic Places"
Freud's famous concept of the "andere Schauplatz" points to the ways that the site of an action can be something other than its material or literal actuality. I solicit proposals for talks that explore the various ways Romantic texts complicate the notion of place, by showing "place" to be interlinked with "elsewhere," whether from personal or cultural memory, repetition, prophecy, hauntings, or connections to agencies beyond the particular site. As this last possibility intimates, the citation of Freud is not meant to limit proposals to the psychoanalytic: explorations of the impact of imperialism or trans-national forces on a particular site will be welcome. This call for papers is intended also to raise questions of form and allusion, not to study the content of texts alone but also to stimulate discussion of a text's place in a textual network.
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"The Intersection of Gender and Race in Romantic-era Writing"
Session Leader: Anne Mellor, University of California, Los Angeles mellor@humnet.ucla.edu
I welcome papers on the ways in which race and gender are configured by Romantic-era writers. I especially welcome papers on women and slavery, the entrance of women and racially marginalised figures into the discursive public sphere, the way their writings responded to and/or informed public opinion concerning the rights of the dispossessed, slavery and abolition, the colonisation of both the West and the East, the development of a global capitalism, etc., as well as considerations of genre and literary form in relation to these issues.
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"The Places of Travel in the Romantic Period"
Session Leader: Jeanne Moskal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, jmoskal@email.unc.edu
I seek papers examining Romantic-period travel literature and literature in other genres that relies on, responds to, parodies, or contests travel materials. Papers may address travel and travel literature's roles in constructing and complicating national, political, religious, gender and/or sexual identities. Discussions of generic hybridity are also welcome, in particular intersections of travel and drama (e. g. travelling as performance, theatre-going as tourism, or itinerant actors) in keeping with the conference's emphasis on theater in the period. Preliminary inquiries welcome.
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"Let Them Eat Romanticism: Directions in Diet Studies"
Session Leader: Timothy Morton, University of Colorado at Boulder, mortont@stripe.colorado.edu
Papers are invited that explore any aspect of the relationships between food, eating and the literature and other cultural forms of the Romantic period. In consort with the forthcoming collection Eating Romanticism, this panel will explore the enormously variegated and complex configurations of Romantic-period consumption.
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"The Borders of Poetry: Romantic Poetry and the Matter of Fact"
Romantic poetry has a peculiarly involved relationship with facts and factuality. For example: Coleridge criticised Wordsworth's poetry for its 'matter-of-factness', a 'clinging to the palpable' that he thought weakened its imaginative autonomy; but his own writing is often preoccupied by what Biographia calls 'particular facts', and he cherished Wordsworth's gifts of 'particularized Description'. Romanticism is often credited with inventing the autonomy of the aesthetic; yet no movement has been so drawn by what normally evades or escapes the aesthetic; and modern Romanticist criticism, drawn between formalism and historicism, could be seen as the inheritor of such fruitful equivocations. Proposals are invited for papers discussing Romantic poetry and the place of fact, or Romantic poetry's engagements with the non-literary: theoretical accounts and individual case studies equally welcome.
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"Echoes of Romanticism: Nineteenth-Century Music in Practical Criticism and Aesthetic Theory"
Session Leader: Thomas Pfau, Duke University tpfau@sprintmail.com
Proposals on the following topics are particularly encouraged: 1) Irony and Sonority in the Romantic Lyric: Interpreting the Lied; 2) fragmentary Poetics and Musical Intelligibility in early Romanticism: Robert Schumann and E.T. A. Hoffmann; 3) the status of emotion in Romantic and post-Romantic musical aesthetics; 4) Virtuosity in Romantic Literature and Nineteenth- Century Music; 5) Sonority and Sexuality: Nineteenth-Century Music as Fetish and Nemesis; 6) the Metaphysics of Music and the Crisis of European Culture.
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"Cities of Empire: Beyond the Metropole"
Session Leader: Alan Richardson, Boston College alan.richardson@bc.edu
Recent work in the field of Romantic-era imperial culture has tended to rely on a broad opposition between the imperial metropolis, London, and a colonial periphery often characterized as "tropical" or "torrid." This panel seeks to highlight the political and cultural work of colonization sited in a global array of secondary but critical cities of empire: e.g., Bristol, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Glasgow, Belfast, Halifax, Calcutta, Madras, Kingston, Bridgetown, Cape Town, Freetown, Sydney. Papers dealing with texts published outside of London especially welcome.
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"Touring Romanticism"
The 'tour' is one of the most distinctive genres of Romantic writing, a form that exists about sites (and sights). In 1807, Wordsworth announced the 'tour' as a new arena for poetry (and Scotland as an especially 'poetical country'); Radcliffe and other novelists had already made touring a way of getting their heroines out and about. This panel explores the emergence of the tour as a literary form in poetry and / or fiction: related paper topics might include genre formation and adaptation; national borders and identities; real and imaginary geographies; spatial and temporal representations; cross-overs between poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction.
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"The Drama of Felicia Hemans"
Session Leaders:
Susan Wolfson, Princeton University, wolfson@princeton.edu
Elizabeth Fay, University of Massachusetts, Boston, elizabeth.fay@umb.edu
Broadview Press has recently published the parallel text edition of Felicia Hemans's Siege of Valencia (1823 and the ms). We invite papers engaging this new resource, or framing any other compelling discussion of Hemans's drama. Related approaches might also address issues of women and politics, British framings of the recent or contemporary Spanish political scene, treatments of El Cid, literary treatments of sieges, Hemans's reception, or aspects of Romantic-era drama.
Papers should be sent to both Susan Wolfson and Elizabeth Fay.
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