CFP: Panel on ‘Rights, Revolution, Romanticism and Suicide’, NASSR conference, 13-15th August, 2015.
I am looking to put together a panel on the subject of suicide in the Romantic period for the 23rd North American Society for the Study of Romanticism which will take place in Winnipeg, Manitoba from August 13 to 16, 2015. The theme of the conference is "Romanticism and Rights,” inspired by Canadian Museum for Human Rights which recently opened in Winnipeg in September 2014. While the conference theme is "Rights," the topic is broadly construed to include a range of subjects that includes the right to die.
The symbolic import of suicide was hotly contested in various texts of the Romantic era. For instance, in the Neoclassical mode
and in some radical literature, suicide was lauded as heroic. It was also a popular element in the sometimes vapid, tear-jerking literature of sensibility and tales of celebrity suicides, such as that of the young poet, Thomas Chatterton. In Gothic novels, such as Hogg’s Justified Sinner, self-killers represent horror and utter sinfulness, and yet many other writers, following Burton’s influential Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, attributed suicidality to extreme religious devotion. Most powerfully, though, in the period’s major ideological battles, suicide strongly conveyed revolution, the defiance of tyranny, and a defence of one’s existential and bodily autonomy – all key characteristics of Romanticism as it has traditionally been defined. Nevertheless, by the end of the period, the legal understanding of suicide was linked almost invariably to victimhood, rather than to resistance. Chatterton’s 1770 suicide marks the development of a new conception of suicide that was caused by the emergence of a rational, critical spirit of enquiry that weakened the earlier spiritual prohibitions against self-murder and also the widespread association between suicide and mental dis-ease. However the intellectual support that allowed suicide to be conceived as a free choice of refusing life also took the connotations of suicide into the realms of Romantic enthusiasm. Following the death of Chatterton, and hot on the heels of Goethe’s Werther, Romantic-era writers felt compelled to examine and reflect upon the relationship between life and death, and between the individual and an unjust, unforgiving or unrewarding society. The panel welcomes papers that examine these themes or any other aspect of suicide in relation to Human Rights, Romanticism and/or Revolution.
1. Please send 350-word abstracts for 20 minute papers that consider any aspect of suicide in relation to Romanticism, Revolution and Human Rights to Dr Leigh Wetherall Dickson ([log in to unmask] by Monday 15th January 2015.
The website for the conference can be found at http://nassr2015.wordpress.com.
Dr. Leigh Wetherall Dickson
Senior Lecturer in 18th- and 19th-Century Literature
Department of Humanities, School of Arts and Social Sciences
Northumbria University
Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 8ST
Tel: 0191 227 3277
Fax: 0191 227 4630
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