CFP for panel at 2017 ASECS National Conference, March 30-April 2, Minneapolis

The Gothic’s concern with religious ideology, identity, and practice has never gone unnoticed; to the contrary, for much of the twentieth century the Gothic’s anti-Catholicism had seemed so obvious that, a handful of insightful scholars excepted, it went mostly unremarked upon. Happily, recent work by Diane Long Hoeveler, Maria Purves, and other scholars has begun to demonstrate that Gothic writers’ engagement with religion was intentional, complex, and varied, as it could hardly fail to be during such a transformation in Britain’s religious settlement as occurred in the last decades of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth, a period which included the campaign for Catholic emancipation, waves of French and Irish immigration, and the rise of Unitarianism and new forms of Protestant political radicalism. Furthermore, new perspectives on the relationship of secularism and religion advanced by Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Graham Ward (among others) have provided us with new ways of thinking about the transformation Britain underwent in these years. This panel seeks historically and theoretically informed papers that perform new explorations of the religious context and content of early Gothic literature.

Please submit 300-word paper abstracts to GCarnes@lindenwood.edu by September 15.