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CfP: CREA XVIII, ‘Horror, the Real and the Fantastic’

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CREA XVIII

2019 Conference

“Horror, the Real and the Fantastic”

Sorbonne Nouvelle, 7th December, 2019

This conference builds up on CREA XVIII’s 2017 conference on “Fact and Fiction”. It aims to explore the seldom discussed realism of the Gothic and the realism of ostensibly non-mimetic moments in fiction generally and in historical discourse in the long eighteenth century. Papers will consider how the real figures and is figured, explicitly in the treatment of character, cognitive content, and cause and effect, or as underpinning in the form of narrative technique.

Horace Walpole anchored the Gothic novel in the real at its inauguration in 1764. His preface to The Castle of Otranto told readers: “allow for the possibility of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation”. A second preface reinforced his point, declaring that “he wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability, in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions”. Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic depends, in turn, upon the reader’s hesitation between the comprehension of the real as uncanny and a surrender to the supernatural marvellous as such.

Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others, played on those epistemological modes, in particular in their accounts of the French Revolution; so did Catharine Macaulay in her description of the execution of Charles I. 

Papers may explore the issues outlined above in various forms of expository prose as well as in fiction, drama, poetry and art. Please submit proposal for 25-minute papers before 30 September 2019 to isabelle.bour@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

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ASECS Call for Executive Board Nominations

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An announcement from ASECS:

Dear ASECS Members

The ASECS Nominating Committee solicits nominations for the positions of Second Vice-President and Member-at-Large of the ASECS Executive Board. ASECS exists entirely for and through its members, so we call on you to suggest names of ASECS members of diverse career paths who would be good leaders and responsible stewards of the Society. In considering candidates for the Board, the Nominating Committee seeks diversity, gender balance, and the inclusion of constituencies that are currently underrepresented both within and outside ASECS.

The Second Vice President is a member of the Executive Board and the Steering Committee of the Society and may take on other duties for the Executive Board, such as chairing or serving on ad hoc committees. The Second Vice-President will remain on the Board for four years, as Second Vice-President, First Vice-President, President, and Past President successively. As First Vice-President, she or he will serve on the Executive Board, the Steering Committee and the Finance Committee, and may take on other duties such as chairing ad hoc committees. As President, she or he presides at meetings of the Executive Board, convenes the Steering Committee, presides at the Society’s Annual Business Meeting, formulates policies and projects for presentation to the Executive Board, and normally serves as one of the society’s delegates to the ISECS Executive Committee.

Two Members-at-Large are elected each year to serve three-year terms on the Executive Board. They are expected to attend meetings of the Executive Board (held just prior to the annual meeting) and may be asked to serve on the Steering Committee, the Program Committee for the Annual Meeting, the Media and Publications Advisory Committee, the Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility, or an ad hoc committee.

Between scheduled meetings, the business of the Executive Board and the Steering Committee is conducted as necessary via email or conference call. Reasonable travel expenses to the Steering Committee and Executive Board meetings are covered by ASECS.

If you wish to nominate any ASECS members for these important positions, please forward a nominating statement to the committee chair, Sue Lanser (lanser@brandeis.edu). Please include the candidate’s name, institutional affiliation, discipline, previous contributions to the Society, and a brief description of the strengths you believe the nominee could bring to the Executive Board. Self nominations are welcome. All nominations must be received by Tuesday, September 10, 2019. If you have any questions, please be in touch.

Yours,
Sue Lanser, Chair
2019-20 Nominating Committee

CFP: XVII David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies

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Call for Papers

David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies XVII
‘Dark Enlightenments’
2-4 December 2020
Adelaide, Australia

Keynotes:
Associate Professor Kate Fullager (Macquarie)
Professor Sasha Handley (Manchester)
Associate Professor Eugenia Zuroski (McMaster)

The Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ANZSECS), Flinders University, and the University of Adelaide invite you to the 17th David Nichol Smith (DNS) Seminar for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Inaugurated in 1966 by the National Library of Australia, the DNS is the leading forum for eighteenth-century studies in Australasia. It brings together scholars from across the region and internationally who work on the long eighteenth century in a range of disciplines, including history, literature, art and architectural history, philosophy, theology, the history of science, musicology, anthropology, archaeology and studies of material culture.

The theme for this conference is ‘Dark Enlightenments.’ We ask delegates to consider the dark, shadowy aspects of enlightenment processes of the eighteenth century. When broadly conceived, the theme is open to numerous up-to-the-minute, interdisciplinary possibilities, including (for example):

  • the dark side of the public sphere, such as expressed in satire and polemic;
  • Empire and enlightenment;
  • critiques of empathy and humanitarianism;
  • negative emotions;
  • crime, conflict and violence;
  • the use and abuse of the past;
  • progress and ethics (political, social, scientific);
  • war;
  • romanticising death;
  • the Gothic;
  • the numinous eighteenth century;
  • the transformation of night-time;
  • developments in notions of privacy, secrecy and the hidden self;
  • the “shady” moralities of libertinism;
  • the aesthetics of darkness and light.

This, we believe, is a particularly timely theme, partly owing to the nationalist turn in global politics, and the recent controversy stirred in Australia by the proposed Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. It offers both sides of the political spectrum the opportunity to interrogate and fully understand the costs, benefits, and legacies of eighteenth-century “progress.” It is also a theme designed to emphasise the Enlightenment in its moral complexity and richness, and the wide range of domains (from the everyday to philosophical thought) that contributed to its production.

We also welcome papers for subjects that fall outside the main conference theme.

Proposals for 20-minute papers should consist of a title, 250-word abstract, and short bio sent via email as a pdf attachment to DNS2020@flinders.edu.au.

We also accept proposal for panels of three papers, which should include all the above for each presenter, a panel title, and if possible, the name and short bio of the panel chair.

Deadlines for submissions:

For early deliberation: 1 November 2019. A first round of acceptances will be made shortly after this date to facilitate international attendance.

Final deadline: 1 March 2020

For further details, please consult the conference website: https://dnsxvii2020.wordpress.com/

Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768). National Gallery, London.

Romantic Studies Association of Australasia 2019 Conference: Embodying Romanticism

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Call for papers

Although the body has preoccupied literary scholarship for some time, there has been a renewed attention in Romantic studies to the complex ways in which literature encodes and reproduces our awareness of embodied experience. Challenging views of Romanticism as bounded by visionary and idealist expression, such work reflects a reorientation of criticism around the materiality of Romantic culture, whether configured as part of the age of sensibility or in relation to the era’s natural and social sciences. The Romantic period was, moreover, a time when control of the body emerged as a key political issue in workshops, homes, battlefields and colonies, when bodies were subject to rapidly evolving ideas of gender, class and race, while new bodies of knowledge and corporate political bodies emerged to regulate the affairs of nations and empires. This was a period when bodies were subject to ever more intensive modes of analysis and management, at the same time that bodies imposed their transgressive physicality through new understandings of environments, vitalism, trauma, slavery, disease and taste. Attentive to such developments, Romantic studies in turn dovetails with a broader materialist emphasis that explores how bodies are shaped in relation to affect, biopolitics, speculative realism, post-humanism and eco-criticism. Alain Badiou has recently proposed that our modern, liberal ideology can today only perceive two objects: bodies and language. Aligning itself at the conjuncture of these two terms, this conference invites papers that broadly consider how embodiment was evoked, challenged and understood in Romantic cultural life.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspects of Romanticism and embodiment. Proposals may be for individual papers or for panels of 3-4 papers.

Proposals
Abstracts of approximately 250 words are due by 30 June 2019.
Please send abstracts to the conference convenor, Neil Ramsey, at n.ramsey@unsw.edu.au.

Postgraduate bursaries are available.

See the conference website for full details: https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/conferences/rsaa

RSAA 2019 Call for Papers (PDF)

Embodying Romanticism – Romantic Studies Association of Australasia 2019 Conference

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21 – 23 November 2019
UNSW Canberra Northcott Drive
Canberra ACT 2600 Australia

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Professor Will Christie, Australian National University
Associate Professor Kevis Goodman, University of California Berkeley
Professor Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne


Call for Papers
Although the body has preoccupied literary scholarship for some time, there has been a renewed attention in Romantic studies to the complex ways in which literature encodes and reproduces our awareness of embodied experience. Challenging views of Romanticism as bounded by visionary and idealist expression, such work reflects a reorientation of criticism around the materiality of Romantic culture, whether configured as part of the age of sensibility or in relation to the era’s natural and social sciences. The Romantic period was, moreover, a time when control of the body emerged as a key political issue in workshops, homes, battlefields and colonies, when bodies were subject to rapidly evolving ideas of gender, class and race, while new bodies of knowledge and corporate political bodies emerged to regulate the affairs of nations and empires. This was a period when bodies were subject to ever more intensive modes of analysis and management, at the same time that bodies imposed their transgressive physicality through new understandings of environments, vitalism, trauma, slavery, disease and taste. Attentive to such developments, Romantic studies in turn dovetails with a broader materialist emphasis that explores how bodies are shaped in relation to affect, biopolitics, speculative realism, post-humanism and eco-criticism. Alain Badiou has recently proposed that our modern, liberal ideology can today only perceive two objects: bodies and language. Aligning itself at the conjuncture of these two terms, this conference invites papers that broadly consider how embodiment was evoked, challenged and understood in Romantic cultural life.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspects of Romanticism and embodiment. Proposals may be for individual papers or for panels of 3-4 papers.

Topics might include:
• Affects and embodied emotions
• Sensibility and materialist epistemologies
• Materials, objects, things
• Life, organicism, vitality
• Theatre, bodies on stage, celebrities
• Labour, work, maternity
• Sexuality and gender
• Corpses, death, graves
• Race, empire, colonialism
• Disabled bodies, monsters, illness
• Spaces, environments, atmospheres
• Planetary bodies, heavenly bodies, cosmology
• Architecture, buildings and the body
• Medicine, surgery
• Slavery and transportation
• Biopolitics/biopower and the body politic
• Texts and paratexts
• Bodies of knowledge
• Animals and humans
• Organisations and institutions

Abstracts of approximately 250 words are due by 30 June 2019. Please send abstracts to the conference convenor, Neil Ramsey, at n.ramsey@unsw.edu.au

Postgraduate bursaries are available. See the conference website for details: https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/conferences/rsaa


Call for Submissions – Eighteenth-Century Fiction

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The Indigenous Eighteenth Century

Maori Chief

The editor of this special issue of ECF invites manuscripts that consider the roles and representations of Indigenous peoples from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand during the long eighteenth century. In what ways did Indigenous peoples shape European literature and knowledge? How can we recover sites of agency and response, and how do we read alternative strategies of representation outside of the written word? How were European writers who encountered “Indians” and “savages” influenced by these exchanges? How was Indigenous material culture collected and understood by Europeans? This special issue seeks to bring the interdisciplinary approaches of Indigenous Studies to bear on the eighteenth century, and to continue the work of decolonizing the period as we know it. Deadline for manuscripts: 15 July 2019 (6,000–8,000 words). Publication of this special issue is proposed for autumn 2020.

The special issue editor is Dr. Robbie Richardson, University of Kent.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction ecf@mcmaster.ca
http://ecf.utpjournalsreview.com/index.php/ecf  “Submissions”

L’Europe des Lumières face aux cultures indigènes

L’éditeur de ce numéro spécial (Dr. Robbie Richardson, University of Kent) recherche des articles concernant le rôle des peuples indigènes ou autochtones des deux Amériques, de l’Australie ou de la Nouvelle-Zélande dans l’évolution de la culture et pensée européennes (1660-1800). Il s’agit surtout d’approfondir les questions suivantes. De quelle(s) façon(s) les peuples indigènes ont-ils influé sur la vie littéraire et/ou scientifique de l’Europe des Lumières? Dans une perspective historique, est-il possible de reconstruire les conditions matérielles qui ont donné lieu aux multiples échanges entre Européens et indigènes? Dans le domaine littéraire, quelle influence a été exercée par les soi-disant “Indiens’” et “sauvages” rencontrés (ou imaginés) par divers auteurs européens de l’époque? Ce numéro spécial se propose deux buts: de (re)penser le Siècle des Lumières par le biais interdisciplinaire des études indigènes (Indigenous Studies); et de contribuer à “décoloniser” les recherches universitaires sur le dix-huitième siècle. La date limite est le 15 juillet 2019 (6 000 – 8 000 mots). La publication est proposée pour l’automne 2020.

Contact: Eighteenth-Century Fiction ecf@mcmaster.ca

Submit: http://ecf.utpjournalsreview.com “Submissions”