UPDATE: Women's Everyday Rebellions in 18th-Century Culture (12/15/04; collection)

full name / name of organization: 
DBOYD
contact email: 

UPDATE: Working Up the Political (12/15/04; collection)

Working Up the Political: Women's Everyday Rebellions in Eighteenth-Century
Culture

Update: deadline extended

What were the ways in which eighteenth-century women's everyday lives
challenged cultural expectations about the restrictions on the female
role-expectations held both by their eighteenth-century contemporaries and
scholars today? What were the ways in which women's everyday participation
in activities like work and politics rebelled against notions about women's
domesticity and privacy? How did these women's everyday lives resist the
emerging concept of public vs. private? How does the current vogue for
dismantling the real or imagined barrier between public and private inflect
current studies of eighteenth-century women's lives?

While recent studies have linked women to the work of politics by looking at
revolutionary moments, such work often implies that those moments were just
that: isolated moments within a framework of repression and silencing. But
as scholars like Margaret Ezell and others have reminded us, the idea of
women's historical and literary silencing is a paradigm that emerged from
the nineteenth century. This collection seeks essays that go beyond that
paradigm to look at the ways in which eighteenth-century women challenged
not only the restrictions their own culture sought to enforce, but also the
restrictions our historical and literary understandings have set up; we are
interested in seeing how women's daily lives and work show that they were
not simply repressed and silenced, but were active, engaged participants in
all spheres of their culture. Eighteenth-century scholars are beginning to
show how women of the period were not circumscribed to precious
revolutionary moments but rather were participants in a web of acts, ranging
in scale, that contributed to the emergence of a rich cultural dialogue
still vibrant today.

We welcome a wide range of topics and approaches. Some possible topics
include, but are not limited to:

studies of women's political involvement and activity
studies of women's work and employment
literary representations of women's political involvement
literary representations of women's work
cultural significance of fashion, clothing, consumerism as public-sphere
engagement
21st-century approaches to theorizing women's history

Please send complete submissions, in Chicago style, by 15 December 2004 to:

Diane E. Boyd
Department of English
Lousiana State University Shreveport
One University Place
Shreveport, LA 71115-2399
dboyd_at_pilot.lsus.edu

or

Marta Kvande
Department of English
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698
mkvande_at_valdosta.edu

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Received on Fri Jul 02 2004 - 01:23:38 EDT

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