Call for seminar presentation proposals at the 16th ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) conference (Mainz, Germany, 29 August-2 September 2022)

The seminar proposes to explore the ideas of motion and mobility in modernism from the interrelated perspective of literary and cultural studies. Increased and not always voluntary mobility as well as social and political movements, and reconfigured gender and sexual identities contributed both to more fluid life styles and to an aesthetic motion in the sense of new formal departures and a redrawing of the canon. We invite contributions that address the physical, conceptual, and aesthetic mobility of modernist authors and works, and the impact this has had on recent (re-)conceptualisations of modernism.
Aspects to be investigated in the seminar presentations include but are not limited to:
• travel, holidays, a new leisure culture
• technological developments allowing greater physical mobility (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, ocean liners)
• forced displacement and exile
• social mobility, class conflict, social and political movements
• experimental life styles, new forms of communities, new sexualities and genders
• aesthetic experimentation, new languages, challenges to the canon
• and the interrelatedness of the topics above.
Convenors:
Virginia Richter, University of Bern, Switzerland, virginia.richter@unibe.ch
Nóra Séllei, University of Debrecen, Hungary, sellei.nora@arts.unideb.hu

For more information on the conference see: https://esse2022.uni-mainz.de/

250-word abstracts and short CV should be submitted to both seminar co-convenors by the deadline: 28 February 2022