1381 After January 6th

Thirty years after Steven Justice’s Writing and Rebellion and Susan Crane’s “The Writing Lesson of 1381,” the time has come to reconsider what approaches, other than New Historicist, we might apply to the texts and events of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. This edited forum for Exemplaria seeks short (3-4k words) essays that consider the texts, events, and people associated with 1381 through novel theoretical approaches. These include but are not limited to: lyric theory; activist/new formalism; gender studies; race and ethnicity studies; regionalism; performance studies; affect theory and the history of emotions; sound studies; and manuscript studies. We ask: how might the new empirical findings of the “People of 1381” project impact or change our literary understanding? How do ongoing reassessments of protest politics in the wake of the “movement of the squares” and Black Lives Matter, as well as Jan. 6 (cf. Clover, Bevins, Jäger and Borriello), influence our understanding of 1381? How do current interventions into voice, vocality, and the role of the speaker in poetic utterance impact our interpretation of pseudonymous texts like “The Addresses of the Commons”?” Abstracts may be sent to Katharine Jager (jagerk@uhd.edu) and Spencer Strub (spencer.strub@princeton.edu) by 1 July 2024.