romantic

NeMLA 50th Annual Convention
March 21-24, 2019
Washington, DC

This panel will explore the changing sense of British identity for writers of the Romantic period. Papers are invited that consider the ways in which such writers as Lord Byron in Italy and Greece, Mary Shelley in Italy, William Wordsworth in France, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Germany may have developed new conceptions of themselves beyond their status as British subjects and revealed those conceptions in their writings of the period. Discussion of lesser known writers of the period is certainly encouraged.

This panel proposes to bring together scholars whose work combines ecocriticism and cognitivist approaches to literature for the purpose of considering the potential of the ongoing dialogue between these two fields. Ecocriticism typically looks at how environment is represented and how humans can create an optimal relationship with the non-human world. Cognitive science is generally interested in how humans represent concepts to ourselves and how we make meaning out of those concepts. An understanding of the mind is essential to an understanding of humankind’s relationship to and perception of the non-human environment.

Call for Papers​The Critical Editor™ is currently accepting submissions for its critical edition of Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer.

1818-2018 – the silent revolution: of fears, folly & the female

Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon

5-6 November 2018

In 2018 we celebrate events which took place two hundred years ago: the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the birth of Emily Brontë. While the two events are markedly different, as the former is a tangible work of art and the latter more of a promise of what was to come, both have contributed to challenge and change the conceptions and perceptions of the time, thus performing a silent, subtle revolution in the world of letters.

Writing in 1800, the Marquis de Sade claimed that the Gothic was the inevitable product of the revolutionary tremors felt throughout Europe. In revealing the proximity between poetic and political terror, the Gothic became the inescapable condition and symptom of modernity itself. The rise of the Gothic in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe is closely bound up with the discovery of Shakespeare as a "modern dramatist" by Hegel and, later, Marx. Like the Gothic, Shakespeare's plays had a propensity for exploring the "dark underbelly" of the new modern world. This seminar explores the mutually constitutive relationship between "Shakespeare" and "the Gothic," viewed as cultural catalysts for modernity and modern creativity.