CFP: Writing 'Europe' in the Age of Goethe

Durham University, 21-22 April 2020

With the French Revolution, the American Declaration of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars and the attendant changes in Europe’s political system, the turn of the nineteenth century was ushered in by distinct shifts concerning Europe as an idea, a political concept, a place, a community of a shared identity, history and values. 

Driven by major colonial expansion into the ‘New World’ in the fifteenth century and afterwards, but also the lasting threat of the Ottoman Empire until 1683, the inquiry into European identity had been a longstanding one, when – with the emergence of nationalism and the waning of the old Holy Roman Empire – new decisive factors came into play around 1800. The notion of Europe remained multifaceted throughout, but Europhiles of all shades had in common that they sought to overcome the order of nation states with a transnational model. Europe as a cosmopolitan and republican catchword gained traction in the Vormärz, in particular at the Hambach Festival; but it also informed Romantic, conservative or religious takes on the community at stake, as famously in Novalis’ Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799). The controversial discussion was propelled by anti-feudal, in the broadest sense anti-capitalistic, but also anti-bureaucratic agendas. In its diversity, the term is intricately connected to central political, cultural and identity-related concepts in the ‘Sattelzeit’ (including Herder, Kant, Fichte, Görres, Friedrich Schlegel etc.). 

We invite papers which look into this complex idea of ‘Europe’ as presented by writers at the time or analyse how their ideas are received and recontextualised today, as different epistemic frameworks (from global to planetary) figure prominently.

These panels are a part of the annual Modern Languages and Cultures conference at Durham University (https://www.dur.ac.uk/mlac/research/conf2020/) and they are co-hosted by the English Goethe Society. 

The English Goethe Society has kindly sponsored bursaries for doctoral students worth a total of £500 and we welcome proposals/participation by such colleagues in particular.

The papers will be published – subject to peer review – in a special issue of the Proceedings of the English Goethe Society (PEGS) in 2021.

Please send proposals of up to 250 words by 1 October 2019 to [log in to unmask].