News and Events

132 Articles

Jane Eyre’s Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad: Constructions and Deconstructions of National Identity — by Abigail Heininger

by tc_admin 0 Comments

Exploring the literary microcosm inspired by Brontë’s debut novel, Jane Eyre’s Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad focuses on the nationalistic stakes of the mythic and fairytale paradigms that were incorporated into the heroic female bildungsroman tradition. Jane Eyre, Abigail Heiniger argues, is a heroic changeling indebted to the regional, pre-Victorian fairy lore Charlotte Brontë heard and read in Haworth, an influence that Brontë repudiates in her last novel, Villette. While this heroic figure inspired a range of female writers on both sides of the Atlantic, Heiniger suggests that the regional aspects of the changeling were especially attractive to North American writers such as Susan Warner and L.M. Montgomery who responded to Jane Eyre as part of the Cinderella tradition. Heiniger contrasts the reactions of these white women writers with that of Hannah Crafts, whose Jane Eyre-influenced The Bondwoman’s Narrative rejects the Cinderella model. Instead, Heiniger shows, Crafts creates a heroic female bildungsroman that critiques fairytale narratives from the viewpoint of the obscure, oppressed workers who remain forever outside the tales of wonder produced for middle-class consumption. Heiniger concludes by demonstrating how Brontë’s middle-class American readers projected the self-rise ethic onto Jane Eyre, miring the novel in nineteenth-century narratives of American identity formation.

 

Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790-1870: Gender, Race, and Nation by Julia Wright

by tc_admin 0 Comments

Exploring the ways in which transatlantic relationships functioned in the nineteenth century to unsettle hierarchical models of gender, race, and national and cultural differences, this collection demonstrates the generative potential of transatlantic studies to loosen demographic frames and challenge conveniently linear histories. The contributors take up a rich and varied range of topics, including Charlotte Smith’s novelistic treatment of the American Revolution, The Old Manor House; Anna Jameson’s counter-discursive constructions of gender in a travelogue; Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville, and the ‘Queer Atlantic’; representations of indigenous religion and shamanism in British Romantic literary discourse; the mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic abolitionist movement; the transatlantic adventure novel; the exchanges of transatlantic print culture facilitated by the Minerva Press; British and Anglo-American representations of Niagara Falls; and Charles Brockden Brown’s intervention in the literature of exploration. Taken together, the essays underscore the strategic power of the concept of the transatlantic to enable new perspectives on the politics of gender, race, and cultural difference as manifested in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America.

 

Norm and Anomaly in Literature, Culture, and Language 19-20 September 2016

by tc_admin 0 Comments
Franciszek Karpiński Institute for Regional Culture and Literary Research, Siedlce POLAND
contact email:
normanomaly2016@gmail.com

Norm and anomaly have long constituted a binary opposition whose boundaries are becoming increasingly blurry and open to scrutiny. What precisely does the ‘norm’ mean? Which political, economic, and social forces play a decisive role in producing the ‘norm’? How is the ‘norm’ endorsed through the construction of the ‘anomaly’? And how does the ‘anomaly’ contest the ‘norm’? Can the ‘norm’ be anomalous when viewed as a discursive practice and a form of ideological control? And can the ‘anomaly’ be an integral part of the ‘norm’ without losing its subversive and oppositional character?

This conference invites you to explore norm and anomaly from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives in literary and cultural studies, linguistics and teaching methodology.

As a theme in literary and cultural studies, norm and anomaly pertain to representations of transformed and transformative spaces. These include eerie landscapes, geographies of hope and despair, and sites of post-human activity, all of which have featured prominently in such modes of writing as environmental, risk, and speculative fiction. We also invite papers that address forms of expression and repression in modern and contemporary British and US culture. The problem and problematic of order and chaos, autonomy and oppression, harmony and discord open up further avenues for exploring norm and anomaly through reference to theatre, film, visual arts, television, computer and video games.

The linguistic aspect of norm and anomaly relates to the regularities and/or irregularities of linguistic usage, and to the ways in which norms and anomalies affect linguistic form and meaning or limit language use, its study and understanding. We invite proposals from intra- and interdisciplinary perspectives, such as constitute all areas of theoretical and applied linguistics – from semantics and sociolinguistics through morphology and historical linguistics to pragmatics, translation studies, and lexicography.

As a concern in teaching methodology, norm and anomaly are inseparable from the status of English as a global lingua franca. Across the world, English is part of the school curriculum, which results in the need to test the students’ skills formally. However, the focus on fluency and communicativeness frequently weakens accuracy requirements, and the gravity of errors is assessed against non-native speakers’ subjective judgements. The gap between the ultimate yet not fully attainable goal and the reality of the ELT classroom calls for redefining the parameters of teaching English in response to a number of questions: Is there still one set of norms learners should follow? Or, do norms vary depending on the learner’s progress and learning environment? Which language is the ‘norm’ – the English of the social media or the English of the classroom?

Further possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

– Conventionality vs. nonconformity, normativity vs. transgression
– Order vs. chaos and anarchy, hegemony vs. opposition, protest and rebellion
– Evolution and continuity vs. revolution and disruption
– Alienation and appropriation vs. inclusion and communality
– Beauty and body cultivation vs. deformity and mutilation
– Language as a rule-governed system vs. language as a usage-based model
– Morphological, lexical, syntactic, and phonological variation
– Sociocultural norms (formality vs. informality/politeness vs. impoliteness)
– Transparency vs. opacity of meaning
– Equivalence vs. non-equivalence in translation
– Standard vs. non-standard varieties of English
– Idiomaticity vs. non-idiomaticity in the language classroom
– Accuracy vs. fluency
– Testing vs. assessment

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Prof. Dr hab. Helga Schwalm, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Prof. Dr hab. Liudmila Liashchova, Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities
Dr hab. Ireneusz Kida, University of Silesia in Katowice

The conference will take place in Siedlce, Poland, on 19-20 September 2016.

Proposals for individual 20-minute papers should include an abstract of 200-250 words, as well as the name, institutional affiliation, a 100-word biography of the author, and the title of the paper.

Please send proposals by 30 June 2016 to: normanomaly2016@gmail.com. All other enquiries may be addressed to Dr Joanna Stolarek at:stolarekj@uph.edu.pl. We aim to notify all applicants by 31 July 2016.

The conference fee of PLN 350 or € 80 will cover conference materials, coffee breaks, 2 lunches, and a wine reception.

Post-conference articles will be put forward for review. Selected articles will be published in a collective monograph in the ‘Transatlantic Studies in British and American Culture’ series by Peter Lang Verlag, or in Studia Anglica Sedlcensia in 2017.

Conference organizers

Prof. Dr hab. Leszek Kolek
Prof. Dr hab. Liudmila Liashchova
Prof. Dr hab. Roman Mnich
Dr Joanna Stolarek (conference secretary)
Dr Maxim Shadurski
Dr Jarosław Wiliński
Mgr Agnieszka Wróbel
Mgr Jowita Buńko

World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Dialogues and Diasporas

by tc_admin 0 Comments
full name / name of organization:
International Association for the Study of Scottish Literature
contact email:
scotlit@sfu.ca

World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Dialogues and Diasporas

The second World Congress of Scottish Literatures will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from June 21-25, 2017 and will coincide with the annual meeting of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society. The Congress’s subtitle, “Dialogues and Diasporas,” speaks to the range of ways in which Scotland is articulated both at home and within a global context. At the same time, it acknowledges the multiple roles Scotland has played in the production of both globalism and localism.

The geographical location of the conference on the West Coast of Canada draws particular attention to two key themes of the conference:
1. Indigenous/Scottish relations and 2. Transpacific/Scottish connections

The steering committee invites proposals for papers that explore these or any of the following themes:
• Imagining Scotland at home and abroad
• Connections between Scottish/non-Scottish writers, texts, genres
• Diaspora, migration and immigration
• Scotland in/and empire
• Globality, locality, glocalism
• Scottish literature/world literature
• Teaching Scottish literature in the world/teaching world literature in Scotland
• Scotland and the transatlantic
• Internal dialogues in Scottish writing
• Scottish literature and the dialogue across time
• Scotland, race and indigeneity
We also welcome pre-organized panels on any of these topics. In keeping with the conference’s focus on dialogue and in order to maximize discussion and participation, panel organizers are encouraged to explore alternatives to the traditional format of three to four papers: workshops, roundtables, lightning talks, pecha kucha.

Please note that in the interests of involving as many people as possible, participants are asked to present only one paper at the meeting; however, they may also serve on a roundtable/discussion or as a discussant.

Deadline for submissions of papers and panels: Oct. 1, 2016.

Further information about the conference is available athttps://dialoguesanddiasporas.wordpress.com/

Please send submissions to: Leith Davis at scotlit@sfu.ca

The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896

by tc_admin 0 Comments

Following the Second World War, the United States would become the leading ‘neoliberal’ proponent of international trade liberalization. Yet for nearly a century before, American foreign trade policy was dominated by extreme economic nationalism. What brought about this pronounced ideological, political, and economic about face? How did it affect Anglo-American imperialism? What were the repercussions for the global capitalist order? In answering these questions, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade offers the first detailed account of the controversial Anglo-American struggle over empire and economic globalization in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The book reinterprets Anglo-American imperialism through the global interplay between Victorian free-trade cosmopolitanism and economic nationalism, uncovering how imperial expansion and economic integration were mired in political and ideological conflict. Beginning in the 1840s, this conspiratorial struggle over political economy would rip apart the Republican Party, reshape the Democratic Party, and redirect Anglo-American imperial expansion for decades to come.

Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America

by tc_admin 0 Comments

Dead reckoning is the nautical term for calculating a ship’s position using the distance and direction traveled rather than instruments or astronomical observation. For those still recovering from the atrocities of the twentieth century, however, the term has an even grimmer meaning: toting up the butcher’s bill of war and genocide.

As its title suggests, Dead Reckoning is an attempt to find our bearings in a civilization lost at sea. Conducted in the shadow of the centennial of the First World War, this dialogue between Romanian American poet Andrei Guruianu and Italian American essayist Anthony Di Renzo asks whether Western culture will successfully navigate the difficult waters of the new millennium or shipwreck itself on the mistakes of the past two centuries. Using historical and contemporary examples, they explore such topics as the limitations of memory, the transience of existence, the futility of history, and the difficulties of making art and meaning in the twenty-first century.

Andrei Guruianu teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. His previous books include the poetry collections Made in the Image of Stones and Portrait without a Mouth.

Anthony Di Renzo is Associate Professor of Writing at Ithaca College and the author of many books, including Bitter Greens: Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity from the Imperial Kitchen, also published by SUNY Press.

Little Miss Grouch: A Narrative Based Upon the Private Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith’s Maiden Transatlantic Voyage, pp. 1-206

by tc_admin 0 Comments

Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. This means that we have checked every single page in every title, making it highly unlikely that any material imperfections – such as poor picture quality, blurred or missing text – remain. When our staff observed such imperfections in the original work, these have either been repaired, or the title has been excluded from the Leopold Classic Library catalogue. As part of our on-going commitment to delivering value to the reader, within the book we have also provided you with a link to a website, where you may download a digital version of this work for free. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience. If you would like to learn more about the Leopold Classic Library collection please visit our website at www.leopoldclassiclibrary.com

 

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Miss-Grouch-Narrative-Transatlantic/dp/B01BGZBZ7O/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454989522&sr=1-2&keywords=transatlantic&refinements=p_n_publication_date%3A1250226011

The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900)

by tc_admin 0 Comments

Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora.

Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers’ narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure’s manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.

 

The Female Fantastic, 1860-1930: On the Gendered Supernatural in Texts by Women

by tc_admin 0 Comments
FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com

Where realism was the signature feature of earlier Victorian fiction, mid-to-late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers increasingly embraced fantastic modes. Rosemary Jackson, in her 1981 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, inaugurated the now-ubiquitous truism of literary studies that late Victorian fantastic narratives frequently hold strong – and often covertly revolutionary – metaphorical relations to social concerns. Supernatural and symbolic texts are ideal sites for encryption of radical queries and pervasive anxieties related to gender, sexuality, religion, medicine, science, ethnicity, substance abuse and colonialism (to name a few).

This is an especially persistent trait – one manifested and developed in many directions in the Edwardian and early Modernist fantastic. In supernatural thrillers, ghost stories, science fictions, and amorphous fantasias, counter-cultural angsts find substitutive satisfactions and conflated expression. The uncanny effects of fantastic literature enable this; indirection, obscuration and innuendo are ideal mediums for saying-not-saying things. Indeed, whatever energies crescendo in fantastic literature are exactly those that realism – by default – tends to eclipse, reduce, or normalize. Experiments in form and language, from aestheticism to Modernism, only add to the covert power of fantasy.

Given the substantial scholarship dedicated to non-realist representations written by male writers, this book project will specifically explore women-identified writers’ uses of the fantastic from 1860-1930. Writers like Ouida, Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Mary Butts, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sylvia Townsend Warner used narratively polymorphous fantastic sub-genres to dramatize their particularly activist arguments and ideas. This provided the flexibility to explore not only the darkest corners of the external world, but also the deepest subterranean secrets of the mind. For not only did women-identified writers wield these forms’ easy strategic cover to subvert the status quo, but they also used them to explore the gendered psyche’s links to imagination, pathology and creative, personal and erotic agency. In addition to providing dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, these texts also illuminate intriguing and complex relationships to key moments in gender(ed) history.

This collection will be submitted to an already-enthusiastic selective academic press.

We invite submissions that engage in any related issues, including the following:

•Fantastic figures (ghosts, mummies, werewolves, vampires)
•The evolving genre and forms of the fantastic/supernatural
•Occult communication networks: Annie Besant, Emma Hardinge Britten, Helena Blavasky, and the women of the Golden Dawn
•The shifting meaning/purpose of the female fantastic from mid-century (Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marrayat, Charlotte Riddell) to the fin de siècle to the 20th-century
•The transatlantic, global, or colonial supernatural
•The role of the fantastic or otherworldly in conceptualizations of gender and sexuality
•Nationhood, the “fantastic” other, race, and empire
•Nationalism, Fascism, Socialism and other political movements
•Pacificism, war, and trauma
•The fantastic in periodical and print culture
•Visualizing or depicting the fantastic through illustrations, art, performance, photography and film
•Science, pseudo-science, psychoanalysis, medicine, and the supernatural
•Mental illness, Addiction, and Social Deviance
•Relations of Fantastic to Aestheticism, Decadence, Symbolist, Surrealist, Modernist or other movements
•Female-authored sources for and/or reactions to more “canonical” fantastic literature
•Female academic influences on the Classical and/or “Oriental” imagination (Jane Harrison and Margaret Murray, for example)

Abstracts should be 500 words, exclusive of a selected bibliography and brief author’s bio. Final papers should run between 4,000 – 6,000 words (inclusive of endnotes and works cited) and be formatted in current MLA style. Revisions may be requested as a condition of acceptance. Please send all queries to the editors (Dr. Elizabeth McCormick, Dr. Jennifer Mitchell, and Dr. Rebecca Soares) at FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com.

Submissions Guidelines and Timeframe

By February 15, 2016:
Send one electronic copy of your 500-word abstract toFemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com. Include a selected bibliography of 10 sources and a brief bio of less than 250 words.

By March 15, 2016:
We will notify applicants of our decisions.

By July 15, 2016
Full papers are due.

New Conference: Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World December 2016

by tc_admin 0 Comments
University of Montpellier, France
contact email:
lawrence.aje@univ-montp3.fr

Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World
University of Montpellier, France
1-2 December, 2016

Keynote Speakers

Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University)
Christine Chivallon (Research Director, CNRS)

In Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (2001),[1] Ron Eyerman explores the formation of African American identity through the cultural trauma of slavery. While trauma directly affected individuals who experienced slavery, Eyerman argues that, as a cultural process, trauma is “mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory”. This international conference seeks to examine the foundation, the mechanisms and the scope of these memorial processes. It endeavors to explore a reality of slavery that rests on human memory, on a (re)constructed memory of individual, collective or family trajectories and migrations transmitted from generation to generation.

The Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World conference sets out to interrogate how descendants reconstruct the history of their ancestors when transatlantic slavery is one of the variables of the memorial process. The conference also aims at examining the extent to which, by a process of collectivization of personal or family memories and (hi)stories, social actors of the present not only partake in generating and consolidating group identities but also how they foster “the emergence of the memory of slavery in public space.”[2] In addition to assessing the cultural and symbolic redistribution which are enabled by the commemoration, the museification and the patrimonialization of the memory of slavery, this conference aims at probing the constraints which determine the inscription of this memory in the public sphere and the extent to which social demand, especially in the context of the obligation of remembrance, influences the production of historical knowledge and sometimes leads to conflicts of memory.

As Ira Berlin has argued, can it be contended that although “[h]istory and memory both speak to the subject of slavery […] they speak in different tongues” ?[3] In the traumatic and post-traumatic context of slavery, conflicting memories of interracial relationships, for instance, call for a specific attention: can the mechanisms of memorial (re)construction, whether it be from a psychological or historical point of view, claim or aim to be neutral? It will prove interesting to study the historical and strategic importance of places like Gorée – their symbolic and affective charge, as well as their memorial function. In the same vein, instances of what Ana Lucia Araujo refers to as “memory replacement”, whereby “a local population appropriates an existing building or site and assigns to it stories of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as if it was an actual heritage site” will also be worth considering.[4]

The organizing committee of this international and interdisciplinary conference welcomes papers in the form of case studies, analyses aimed at identifying general trends or comparative approaches. The geographic scope of the conference – the Atlantic space – is purposefully broad, as the issue of memorial modernity transcends individuals, race, nations, space and time. As memory of facts dating back to several generations can only be transmitted, reconstructed and inevitably fragmentary in nature, the palimpsestic dimension of the memorial process will be given particular attention.

Papers may build on recent theoretical works on memory, such as those of Michael Rothberg (2009) [5] for whom memory is constructed on the basis of multidirectional focalizations and synergies between events that are seemingly disconnected in time and space (Multidirectional Memory), or of Max Silverman (2013) [6] who has described the relationship between past and present in the form of a “superposition and interaction of different temporal traces [that] constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by another” (Palimpsestic Memory). It might prove interesting to unravel the threads of family memory construction by studying the trajectory of founding individuals. The archival traces of key moments will thus be identified in order to interrogate and retrace the historical context of these trajectories and/or shed light on parallel trajectories, such as those of better-known historical figures. Genealogical research offers a propitious ground to retrace memories as genealogy reveals the memorial mechanisms which allow to recreate, from the interstices left by factual elements, decipherable paths which are historically credible and psychologically acceptable. Finally, it will be interesting to assess whether the memorial prism is necessarily ethnocentric.

The themes this conference endeavors to explore include, but are not limited to:

– the history and memory of slavery;

– the memorialization of slavery;

– the canonization of the memory of slavery;

– representation(s) of slavery;

– the commemoration, the museification and the patrimonialization of the memory of slavery;

– places and conditions of the production of knowledge on slavery and its circulation;

– the legacy/cies of slavery and the (re)construction of (collective) identity;

– slavery and genealogy;

– sources and archives on slavery.

Submission guidelines

The languages of the conference are English and French. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words in English or French (for papers or panels) and a brief CV mentioning your institutional affiliation totraces2016@gmail.com by February 29, 2016. Notification of acceptance will be sent by March 31, 2016. We welcome papers that cover any region of the Atlantic World as well as proposals for round table discussions.