cfp.english.upenn.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS — THE GOTHIC AND ADDICTION

>From Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1795) and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The
Moor (1806), to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus
(1818), Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821),
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886), and Marie Corelli’s Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890), the Gothic
has been fascinated with the theme of addiction/obsession/monomania as it
is variously manifested. Proposals for individual or collaborative papers
for a special issue of Gothic Studies (the official journal of the
International Gothic Association) are invited on the idea of the Gothic and
addiction/obsession/monomania. Possible topics might include (but are not
limited to):

• strategies and structure in the Gothic "pharmography": i.e. narratives
chronicling the process of drug/alcohol seduction and addiction

• addiction and the Faustian intertext

• obsessive science/scientists; science and drugs/alcohol (i.e. the elixir
vitae)

• the tension between rational will/liberty/control/mastery and irrational
enslavement/excessive passion

• literary and medical conceptions of addiction

• drugs and Orientalism, racial contagion, imperial geography

• drugs/alcohol and individual/national degeneration

• "love is a drug" addiction

• drugs/alcohol as symbolic scapegoat onto which are displaced such "secret
vices" as homosexuality (see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 1985)

• Gothic literature as an "addictive," socially dangerous form

Please send electronic copies of proposals of approximately 500 words and a
100-word bio by Monday, September 4th, 2006, to Carol Margaret Davison
(cdavison_at_uwindsor.ca) or by snail-mail to:

Dr. Carol Margaret Davison
Department of English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing
University of Windsor
401 Sunset Avenue
Windsor, Ontario
N9B 3P4
Canada

Completed essays of approximately 6000 words (including endnotes) are due
by March 31, 2007.

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Received on Mon May 08 2006 - 08:43:55 EDT