cfp.english.upenn.edu

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the eruption of violent conflict in the French and American revolutions, an industrial revolution sweep Britain, the prolonged hostilities of the Napoleonic wars, as well as the economic catastrophe of the South Sea Bubble. The period was also a time of upheaval in literature: philosophically, stylistically, generically and in the changing nature of the literary marketplace. Recent scholarship has continued to highlight the importance of political and intellectual debate to British literary output, as well as the battles taking place within literary circles and texts themselves. For the XXth annual graduate conference in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature at Cambridge, proposals for papers of 20 minutes are invited on these and related topics:

- political conflict
- narratives of conflict and catastrophe
- conflict within the text
- economics and literary production
- friends and enemies
- war and the justification for war
- antagonism between writers and reviewers
- literary / cultural criticism as conflict
- interdisciplinary / transdisciplinary interpretations of conflict
- theorising conflict and catastrophe
- ongoing disputes on reading the period
- radical aesthetics
- ecological conflict
- imperialism
- utopia
- religious differences
- class conflict / revolution
- gender conflict (‘battle of the sexes’)
- ‘the ancients’ and ‘the moderns’
- conflicts between modes of discourse
- iconoclasm, vandalism, and the destruction of art
- microhistory
- disciplinary conflict

This conference will take place on 21st-22nd April at the faculty of English. Attendance is five pounds and will include a free lunch on both days. The conference will open with a keynote paper from Dr Nicholas Halmi (The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, Norton Critical Editions of Wordsworth and Coleridge). Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a 1-line biography to conflictandcatastrophe2012@gmail.com by 1st April. Website: conflictandcatastrophe.wordpress.com