cfp.english.upenn.edu

I'm soliciting proposals for this panel, which will run next March at the 2011 ASECS in Vancouver.

The period 1680 – 1730 saw transformations in the political, religious, legal and literary structures of Britain. These transformations have been variously characterized as the rise of the Habermasian public sphere, the Republic of Letters, the development of the two-party system, of professional authorship, elective monarchy, and as the advent of a system of mercantile credit foundational to that which we employ today.

I welcome papers that interrogate the gap between “Restoration” and “Eighteenth-Century” literature in any of a variety of ways, including, but not necessarily limited to:

- The posts of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal
- High culture and low culture
- Lasting culture and disposable culture
- Classical and English myths and epic typologies
- Whig and Tory aesthetics
- Copyright, subscription, piracy, plagiarism and translation
- Credit, reputation, markets and the Exchange
- The stakes – and the nomenclature – of periodisation
- Scientific methods and editing practices
- Profitable enmities and inconvenient friendships
- Epics post-Milton and novels pre-Defoe
- &c

Papers treating the interconnections between these topics and art and music are also welcome; for example the influx of Italian history painters to Britain in the 1680s, or of Italian and German musicians, particularly following the accession of George I.

Please send proposals to cwillan@stanford.edu by the 15th of September 2010.