cfp.english.upenn.edu

Special Session for the 2014 MLA Conference

Historians of the family have disagreed about the role that feeling and affection played in the formation and lives of early modern families. Similarly, interpreting family relationships in early modern texts poses a very specific set of intriguing difficulties.
Possible paper topics, addressing specific texts, could be:
- how do feelings respond to ideologies of family?
- how are emotions among family members constructed?
- cultivation of feelings for family
- religious implications of feelings associated with the family / family members
- Lawrence Stone’s “affective individuality”
- emotional expectations related to gender roles
- meanings of emotions
- cultivation of readers’ feelings for family
- shifts in family structure and accompanying shifts in the representation of family emotions
- family emotion in crisis
- are there “family emotions”?
- metaphors or tropes used to express family emotions
- emotions associated with the ‘household’ definition of the family

This panel invites papers that deals with questions of emotion and kinship in literature published between 1450 and 1750. Send abstracts and CVs to Megan Allen (meallen@wustl.edu) or Anna Leeper (galeeper@wustl.edu). 400-500- word abstracts by 27 February 2013.