This panel will examine eighteenth-century British fiction and the relationship between violence, obscenity and humor. Novelists' use of the obscene joke is a tempered way to suppress the blurring lines of distinction between classes and to maintain hierarchy, a direct response to the changes in society and to the increasing sensitivity to vulgar subjects in polite society. This panel is interested in discovering how authors mobilize social anxiety through violence, obscenity and humor.

While the Abbey Theatre is perhaps the most familiar public context through which the nationalistic and aesthetic struggle to shape an identity for a (post)colonial Ireland was formed, expatriate Irish used the bourgeoning film industry to represent Ireland from an international perspective. Recent commercial successes have ranged from the international co-production of The Wind That Shakes the Barley, winning British director Ken Loach a Palme d'Or, to the Dublin grassroots construction of John Carney's Oscar-winning Once, but awards aside, a tension still exists between the Ireland of filming destination and the Ireland of film origination.

For years, scholars have demonstrated the debt that Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and other playwrights owe to Seneca's work. Such foundational criticism has often pointed to Seneca's plot devices, characterization, language, and form that inspired later Renaissance dramatists. However, recent scholarship demonstrates Seneca's effect on early modern subject construction and performance conditions. This panel aims to continue and extend current reconsiderations of Seneca's influence on early modern drama by gathering papers that "rethink" Seneca's works and influence in light of feminist, queer, post-colonial, and materialist theoretical perspectives.

Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies
www.jlts.stir.ac.uk

'Horror is beyond the reach of psychology' Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 164

This proposed RSA 2012 (Washington, DC) panel is interested in examining how and why early modern English individuals experienced repulsion, and how and why they expressed this repulsion in poetry, plays, and prose. The study of disgust in early modern literature is essential and overdue. As other disciplines (e.g. anthropology, psychology, history) have discovered, to be disgusted is to be human, and to be disgusted in certain ways, by certain things, is to identify with a particular culture. By studying the ways in which disgust manifests itself in early modern literature, we will better understand early modern culture.

Where and how is emotion theorized in the medieval (and/or modern) period? This session will consider the discourses within which the "emotions" or "passions" are overtly analyzed, described, and prescribed. Papers might consider confessional literature, treatises on the vices and virtues, rhetorical treatises, moral philosophy, sermons, devotional literature, conduct manuals, medical treatises, or other places where emotions come under definitional pressure. Are the emotions theorized in genre-specific ways? Differently in Latin versus the vernacular? What kinds of emotional theories does Chaucer's poetry engage with? How do certain frames such as "vice and virtue" or the medicalizing of emotions shift understandings?

This one-day academic conference aims to bring together scholars working on all aspects of performance in the early modern period (taken broadly to include the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries). We intend to interrogate what performance and its related terminologies and practices might have meant to early modern readers, playgoers, and congregations; how performance shaped and/or undermined distinctions between private/public bodies and selves. Although drama is an essential point of reference for this discussion, we encourage that "historicizing performance" be taken as broadly as possible. Topics might include (but are not limited to):
- Plays and play-going
- Music and singing