Wednesday 3 July 2013

CfP: 'Liberty and Limits 1789-1920', Macquarie Uni, 5-6 Dec 2013


Call for Papers
'Liberty and Limits 1789-1920', Macquarie University, Sydney
 5-6 December 2013
Abstracts due 1 August 2013


Keynote speakers
Professor Nancy Armstrong (Duke), Professor Deirdre Coleman (Melbourne), Professor David Punter (Bristol)
The long nineteenth century was inaugurated by the French Revolution and closed in the aftermath of the First World War. In Britain the intervening period was marked by a dialectic compounded of sub-revolutionary change and processes of containment. In all cultural fields new modes of knowledge, theories, and aesthetic forms emerged. The Romantics and Victorians inherited the discursive energies of the eighteenth century in terms of the ways in which literary and other forms of writing were lauded or vilified as intervention, catalyst, palliative or purge. The energy of this period was enacted as much through writing and reading as through empire building and military/mercantile expansion. We invite papers that engage with all aspects of cultural change – including evolution, excess, experimentation, nostalgia, suppression, dissent.

Themes addressed can include, but are not confined to, the following:

Material print culture and new modes of dissemination of information
Literary revolutions
Life writing and the private as public performance
The modern city
The fin de siècle and the emergence of Modernism
Gender/sexual identity
Class mobility/instability
Industrialisation
Anglophone writing and readership
Self-help and social mobility
Romantic and Victorian poetics
Crime and detection
Policing
Juvenilia
The rise of children’s literature
Education and literacy
Evolutionary theory and social Darwinism
The marketplace and the birth of the consumer
Science and technology
Celebrity authorship as cultural phenomenon
The changing nature of readership
The politics of Empire
Photography/ images
Cultural and literary antecedents
Afterlife: Steampunk and neo-Victorian narratives, the long nineteenth century in film adaptations

Date: 5-6 December 2013
Venue: MGSM, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Please send 300 word abstracts by 1 August to: libertyandlimits@mq.edu.au

No comments:

Post a Comment