Call for Papers: Cosmopolitan Endeavours

This special issue invites articles on works by women writers of the long eighteenth century that reflect cosmopolitan values, strategies, and futures. In the long eighteenth century, the cosmopolitan ethos is manifold: it informs historiographic and philosophical articulations of an “enlightened moral love of mankind”, as Mary Wollstonecraft puts it in A View of the French Revolution (1795), practices that transcend the boundaries of national literature such as travel writing, translation, and salon culture, depictions of cosmopolitan communities in utopian literature as well as of environment and scientific progress. Such wide-ranging proliferations have rightly been celebrated in recent criticism as evidences for a cosmopolitan counter-narrative to the rise of nationalism. However, this celebration has obfuscated the difficulties a cosmopolitan position faces, perhaps best captured in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804), where the mother of the protagonist, “while professing her unbounded love for the great family of the world, suffered her own family to pine under the consciousness of her neglect”. Rather than couching an un-cosmopolitan impulse, this critique raises the stakes of what cosmopolitan ethos must accomplish. For critics, it imposes the need for further explorations of the cosmopolitan position in the long eighteenth century with a special focus on gender and on the process in which cosmopolitanism becomes its own critique, thus, distinguishing itself from the merely international, transnational and multicultural. This special issue seeks to refine insights put forward by literary critics such as Thomas Schlereth, Karen O’Brien, Galin Tihanov, Esther Wohlgemut and Anne Mellor, reflecting and expanding on the renewed interest in cosmopolitan thought and practices.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, explorations of cosmopolitanism in travel writing; educational, abolitionist and children’s literature; translations and adaptations; salon culture; scientific advancement and eco-systems; utopian literature; the concept of hope; representations of cosmopolitans.

We invite essays of 5000-7000 words (including notes).

Please submit abstracts of 400 words to Dr Enit Steiner (University of Lausanne) [log in to unmask] by 1 December 2017. Completed essays are due 31 August 2018. 

Please prepare your essays according to MLA style and in accordance with the journal’s author guidelines and style sheet (to be accessed on this page: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/style/layout/style_rwow.pdf).

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