The call to empathize has become truly inescapable over the last decade.  Feeling with others, so the claim goes, is an ever more necessary counterbalance to economic and political systems that appear to no longer attempt to obscure their inexorable cruelty. According to philosopher Jesse Prinz, more books have been published with the word “empathy” in their titles since 2010 than in all of the 20th century. Prinz’s metric reveals a cultural fascination with empathy in educational, therapeutic, media, and scholarly circles—a trend that we might call the “empathetic imperative.” Indeed, empathy is often presented as a panacea for the world’s woes, offered as both diagnostic tool and subsequent cure.

Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith note that the Female Gothic has been an ever-shifting category since its introduction into literary vocabulary by Ellen Moers in 1976, asserting that the Female Gothic “is shaped by...national identity, sexuality, language, race, and history” (The Female Gothic, 10). Gothic scholarship has long demonstrated that the mode varies across national and continental borders particularly drawing out distinctions between the American and the British. However, less attention has been paid to the concept of age. Keeping in mind the conference theme, how does the space of girlhood and/or adolescence complicate or further our understanding of the Female Gothic?

When the United States launched the War on Terror in September 2001, President George W. Bush announced that the nation was facing a “new kind of evil.” This evil, he declared, would be met by an American “crusade” that was “going to take a while.”  Bush suggested that he was declaring a new kind of war—one that would be waged on nefarious activities rooted in destructive beliefs rather than other nation-states. This pointed but ambiguous designation cast an entire region and religion, the Middle East and Islam, as perpetual enemies in a conflict with no foreseeable end. Since that point, the U.S.

Call for papers: BROLLY. Journal of Social Sciences (London, UK)

London Academic Publishing, UK

Vol. 2, No. 2, August 2019 - General Topics

Submission Deadline: July 25, 2019

Vol. 2, No. 3, December 2019 - Special Issue: "30 Years After the Berlin Wall"

Submission Deadline: November 25, 2019

No publication fee will be charged.

Open Access

ISSN 2516-869X (Print)

ISSN 2516-8703 (Online)

Web:

www.journals.lapub.co.uk/index.php/Brolly

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