2007 BARS/NASSR Conference
Hosted by the Centre for Romantic Studies, University of Bristol
List of Proposed Special Sessions
Details of proposed special sessions are listed below. Scholars interested
in submitting abstracts for consideration should send proposals of no more
than 300 words to the special session convenors by November 17, 2006.
Session convenors will then submit their special session proposal for
vetting by the conference committee.
Abstracts submitted to the convenors of special sessions which are not
accepted will be resubmitted as single abstracts to the conference
committee.
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Bristol's Robert Southey
Our conference's meeting in Robert Southey's native Bristol provides a
perfect opportunity to introduce fresh perspectives on his work and its
increasing importance to Romantic studies. Papers are invited on any aspect
of Southey's prodigious output during the Romantic era--as poet, prototype
anthropologist, historian, and political thinker. Papers addressing
Bristol's significance to Southey are especially welcome.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Elisa Beshero-Bondar (University
of Pittsburgh at Greensburg) at: [log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
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Liberating Joanna Baillie
This session will reflect on Baillie both as a liberator whose works
encourage resistance to stifling roles and systems and as a beneficiary of
liberation by scholarship that has freed her from a subordinate position
among Romantic-era writers. Papers considering any aspect of the processes,
effects, and implications of liberation connected with Baillie are invited.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Regina Hewitt (University of
South Florida) at: [log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
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Romanticism and the Child as Liberator
This session invites a study of the child in Romantic literature as a
liberator or symbol of liberty. How has the child been represented as one to
liberate adults, the oppressed, the Other? How has the child been symbolized
in this way differently by male and female writers?
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Lisbeth Chapin (Gwynedd-Mercy
College) at: [log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
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Transatlantic Agitation
Thomas Paine was born in England but started his career as propagandist for
the "rights of man" in America with the publication of Common Sense and the
Crisis pamphlets before moving back to England to write his Rights of Men.
But Paine is only the most concrete and famous example of the movement back
and forth across the Atlantic agitating for rights. William Godwin, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Charles Brockden Brown, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Joel
Barlow, Percy Shelley, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and many others agitating for human rights felt and disseminated influence
across the Atlantic. This panel invites abstracts for papers treating the
transatlantic crossing of texts, writers, ideas and agitation for the rights
of women, men, slaves and laborers from scholars of both American and
British Romanticism.
Please send 300 word abstracts to Rob Anderson (Oakland University) at
[log in to unmask] or Jeff Insko (Oakland University) at [log in to unmask]
by November 17, 2006.
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Inventing the Wheels that Enslave
Discoveries, inventions, theories about the origin, age, and size of the
universe, the forces that shaped and animated it during the Romantic period
were liberating to some, oppressive to others. For example, photosynthesis,
which identified the source of life in nature and connected human beings to
the green and growing universe, which some poets celebrated, also placed
human beings metabolically on the same level as their house-pets and
domestic animals. The liberating discovery of
infinity, of a timeless and boundless universe occurred at the same time as
the invention of personal time, of watches and public clocks, which in turn
confined people to schedules, deadlines, and belatedness. The amazing and
liberating vision of a universe endlessly circulating immortal particles
turned individuals into a "sad jar of atoms," poised always on the edge of
dissolution, random survivors in an alien universe. Science and natural
history, like all forms of knowledge in the period,
reflect these fundamental dualities between freedom and imprisonment,
between autonomy and dependence.
Please send proposals exploring these dualities in particular sciences,
natural history, or inventions, their expression in literature, music, art
in Europe, America, and Great Britain. Because the same ideas were received
and assimilated differently in different cultures, geology, for example, in
America and in Europe, comparative inquiries would be most welcome.
Please send 300 word abstracts (as attachments) to Marilyn Gaull (New York
University) at [log in to unmask] by November 17 2006.
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Romanticism and Liberalism
Liberalism is the philosophy of individual freedom and social
responsibility. Although its apogee came later in the 19th century in the
writings of John Stuart Mill and with the formation of the liberal party
under Palmerston and Gladstone, it had many links with British Romanticism
in its formative period. This interdisciplinary panel will ask whether
liberalism either in theory or practice might mediate the dichotomy between
radicalism and conservatism that pervades Romantic literature and
its criticism. Papers might explore the common roots of Romanticism and
liberalism in empirical philosophy or consider the place of political
economy, free trade, liberal educational philosophy, social contract theory,
or liberal imperialism in Romantic literature. Alternately, panelists might
reflect on the "romanticism" of liberalism itself especially with a view to
its success (or failure) as a political movement in Britain, the USA,
Canada, and elsewhere.
Please send abstracts of 300 words to Alex Dick (University of British
Columbia) at [log in to unmask] by November 17 2006.
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Liberating Medicine
What do emancipation, liberation, and freedom mean in the context of
Romantic medical discourse and practice? How does Romantic medicine
underpin, or undermine, Romantic liberty, especially as both are tied to
Enlightenment rationality and improvement, and sensibility's delicate
balance of health, virtue and physical-emotional response? Papers are
invited which treat literature, visual art and medical texts, comparatively
or independently, and which connect medicine to any aspect of the
conference theme. The convenor hopes that papers will be available for a
possible forthcoming volume.
Possible topics:
- changing roles of midwives and medical men; their professional freedom and
limitation; their patients' liberation, or not, from pain and danger
- association of physicians with radical politics, free-thinking, atheism,
libertinism
- medical grounds for liberating or confining gender and sexuality
- medical endorsements of domesticity; medical discourses of childbirth,
nursing and childrearing as they empower or impede women's liberation and
the production of freer, happier citizens
- aesthetic freedoms and constraints of anatomical art; embryology and
organicist metaphors in Romantic aesthetics; poetics of medical writing;
intertwining of medical discourses and literary texts
Please send 300 word abstract to Tristanne Connolly (St. Jerome's,
University of Waterloo) at [log in to unmask] by November 17
2006.
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Free Felicia Hemans
"I dream of all things free," wrote Hemans in National Lyrics and Songs for
Music. Follow her dream. Free this writer of a vast oeuvre from
preconception and constraint. Submit a paper proposal on Hemans and a poem,
volume, edition, topic, writer, genre, era, faith, theory, etc., of your
choosing.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor Nanora Sweet at
[log in to unmask] by November 17, 2006.
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Religion and Censorship
This session will examine the relationship between continuing religious
intolerance in the 1760-1832 period and the language used to characterize it
in literature, together with that literature's linkage of religious to other
forms of repression. A mixed session examining canonical authors and the
discourse of religion in cultural politics is sought.
Please send 300-word abstracts by e-mail to Professor Murray Pittock
(University of Manchester) at [log in to unmask] by November
17, 2006.
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Free Seas or Ruled Waves? Romanticism and Maritime Empire
For all of the fine work done in recent years on Romantic-period
representations of the imperial state at war, much remains to be said about
how the literature of the era represented the Empire's war at sea. How did
Romantic writers portray sea battles, naval affairs, and events in maritime
theatres of war? How did they consider the new geopolitical and legal
questions about sovereignty, piracy, insularity, and imperial administration
that emerged as Britain increasingly styled itself a maritime
power in opposition to Napoleon's domination of the continent? How did the
rhetoric of freedom comport with the project of ruling the waves? Papers
will be welcomed that treat related topics both familiar (Austen's sailor
characters, the cult of Nelson) and less familiar, and that involve other
national literatures or other media.
Please email a 300-word abstract to Samuel Baker (University of Texas at
Austin) at [log in to unmask] by November 17th, 2006.
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How to submit your proposal
For information on how to submit your proposal including access to online
submission please visit the conference website at:
https://www.bris.ac.uk/romanticstudies/events/2007callforpapers.html
All those attending the conference must be members of either BARS (The
British Association of Romantic Studies) or NASSR (North American Society
for the Study of Romanticism).
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John Halliwell
Research Assistant
Centre for Romantic Studies
Department of English
University of Bristol
3-5 Woodland Road
Bristol, BS8 1TB
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[log in to unmask]
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/romanticstudies
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