Our Sea of Islands 2: Insular Spaces: Deadline June 1, 2011 (NCS, Portland, Oregon, Portland, July 23-26, 2012)

full name / name of organization: 
New Chaucer Society

The second of these related sessions focuses on ideas about insularity in late-medieval texts and artworks, including Chaucerian ones. What were the correspondences between ideas of religious isolation and geographical insularity? How were islands imagined in relation to each other within archipelagos? What were the distinctions between islands and continents? How was the shoreline an interactive space? Proposals are invited for 15 or 20 minutes papers that examine how people thought about insularity in geographical, political, religious, and artistic discourses.