CALL FOR PAPERS
   
  Revisiting the Nineteenth Century: The World, the Body, the Text
  The 14th Annual Conference
  of the R.O.C. English & American Literature Association
   
  National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, TAIWAN, The Republic of China
  November 24~25, 2006
   
  How much do we really know about nineteenth-century Britain and America? Do the cultures of the age still conjure up the same old vague impressions about gentlemanly conservatism, moral hypocrisy, oppressive domesticity, sexual repression, oversea expansion, literary routinism, fin-de-siécle ennui? Our studies of the cultures in the century are still largely confined to context-free reading of writers who usually derived from unmistakably white, masculine, bourgeois (i.e., ¡§respectable¡¨) backgrounds. However, such reading inevitably excludes considerations of those socio-cultural factors like gender, class, race, whose significance in the formation of the English and American cultures is yet to be adequately explored. Indeed, studies of the cultures should go beyond a small cluster of ¡§key texts¡¨ and reach out for a wider range of cultural discourses; even the ¡§key texts¡¨ may have to be read against the cultural backdrops to which these texts originally
 responded. The nineteenth-century England and America witnessed one of the greatest upheavals, expansions, and oppressions in culture and economy of the West. Local or national subjects ventured away into various parts of the wider world and into contacts with racial, cultural, or class ¡§others.¡¨ Consciousness of the body was heightened when it was constantly brought into new stimulating environments and put under scrutiny from various perspectives. Texts were produced not just to record the experiences but to participate in these changes of perceptions. People, capital, ideas once flowed across the world and intertwined into a network of power/knowledge/desire that influenced not just the cores but the peripheries of the empires. So much more of the nineteenth-century world requires new and different scholarly efforts to bring it into consideration in our reconstruction of the historical period that still determined the ways of our world. We may find the nineteenth
 century more than a time of starched-collared gentlemen and crinoline-bound ladies always leading their materially comfortable lives in a rule-stifling, self-congratulatory way.
   
   
   
  Possible Topics for papers (but not confined to):
  ¡° Literary Periodization and Formation Reconsidered:
  Literary Gothicism and Romanticism, Romanticism and Victorianism, Edwardianism(?), canon formation, novel as a genre
  ¡° Colonial Imagination:
  Building Empire, Racial imagination and differentiation, frontier exploration, formation of Englishness or Americanism(?)
  ¡° Transatlantic Interactions:
  Parallel development of literary trends, exchanges of literary inspiration, cultural rivalry and emulation
  ¡° Revolution(s) and Its Impacts:
  Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, cultural radicalism, religious doubts and fanaticism, technological progress, social reforms
  ¡° Women, Men, and Family:
  domesticity, Separate spheres, Female education and occupation, formation of
  gender identities and traits, feminism
  ¡° Body and Sex:
  homosexuality, sexual imagination, sexual regulation, prostitution, medicine, pornography
   
  Papers should be 10-15 pages, in English or Chinese. Please send paper title, keywords, and abstract (maximum 500 words) to Cheng Kung University by May 10, 2006. Also include, on a separate paper, the proposer¡¦s name, address, phone number, fax number, email address, affiliation, and rank. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 20. Full papers are due November 1. Papers written in Chinese may be submitted to the R.O.C. English and American Literature Association¡¦s English and American Literature Review for possible publication. Inquiries may be addressed to Leslie Wu (phone and email below).
   
  The Organizing Committee
  The 14th Annual Conference of the R.O.C. English & American Literature Association
  Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University
  No. 1, Ta-Hsueh Road, Tainan, Taiwan 70101
  Phone: 06-2757575 ext. 52249 (from outside of Taiwan: 886-6-2757575 ext. 52249)
  Email: english_ncku_at_yahoo.com.tw
  Department website (with link to conference website): http://www.ncku.edu.tw/%7Eforeign/chinese/

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Received on Mon May 01 2006 - 08:47:40 EDT