CFP:  Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Literature

Eds. Ronda Arab (Simon Fraser University) and Laurie Ellinghausen (University of Missouri – Kansas City)

The editors invite essays for an edited volume on intersectionalities of class in early modern English literature. 

Defining class broadly as identity categorization based on wealth, family, bloodlines, and occupation, we seek to explore class as a complicated, contingent phenomenon modified by a wider range of social categories apart from those defining terms, including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and geography.  We seek to explore a broad range of questions about the intersectional factors influencing class status in early modern England:

• How did non-class social categories influence one’s class position and status within one’s community?
• In what ways was class mobility influenced by factors other than occupation, marriage, and wealth?
• How could cultural behaviors and emerging modes of masculine, feminine, or queer conduct influence one’s class position or one’s relationships with those of a different class?
• Could class ever be made irrelevant by the dominance of other social categories?
• What were the dynamics of power and hierarchy within marriages that crossed class lines?
• How might fault lines in patriarchal dominance be created or widened by differentials in power between elite women and non-elite men? 
• How did social categories of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and geography intersect in instances of class conflict or in social manifestations of class resentment?
• How were religion, language, dialect, or proto-nationalist sentiment exploited to defuse or exacerbate class tension?
• How were intersections of criminality and class understood?
• How could affect be a class-tinged phenomenon? Could affect influence one's class or cultural status? 

By engaging these and other questions, this collection aims to explore class as a fully intersectional phenomenon in the literary texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  Papers treating both dramatic and non-dramatic genres are welcome, as are papers that focus on early modern or contemporary performance.

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a two-page CV to the editors (use both email addresses:  ronda_arab@sfu.ca and ellinghausenl@umkc.edu) by December 1, 2020.  Completed essays of 6000-7000 words will be due by August 1, 2021.