Posts
45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language
Association
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
April 3-6, 2014
Deadline: September 30, 2013
Co-chairs: Carolin Lange (German literature, University of
Washington) and Marie Léger-St-Jean (English literature, University of
Cambridge)
This panel will seek to contrast and compare the attitudes
towards and economics of popular culture in different countries from the 18th
century onwards. The panel chairs invite papers of all kinds: e.g. on the
dangers of reading from medical history or media history perspectives; cheap
literature and its distribution, perception, or poetics.
British radical MP William Cobbett wrote in his Spelling-Book (1831)
for the working classes that novels “are the gin and whiskey of literature:
they besot, without enlivening, the mind”. Yet, radical publishers soon started
publishing fiction in penny numbers because it sold tremendously. Ever since
novels became increasingly accessible from the 18th century onwards, they have
been mostly thought of as suspect, both feared and ridiculed. Only rarely were
they hailed as commodities leading nations towards progress. The cheaper they
were sold, the more awe they inspired. Today, Harlequin novels are still
the object of ridicule.
The panel chairs would like to bring together scholars of
cheap literature across periods and national borders to better understand how,
both generally and specifically, it was distributed, feared, and censored.
Starting around 1750, identificatory reading was believed to ruin (sexual)
morals, middle-class core values, aesthetic standards, health, and intellect.
By the mid-19th century, when novels were sold in weekly penny numbers, the
British middle classes lived in — rather hysterical — fear of being poisoned by
their novel-devouring servants and maids. Later, in the 1920s, the German
parliament passed the so-called "Trash- and Dirt-Literature-Law." Interestingly,
the rationale always calls upon dietary and medical imagery, regardless of time
and place.
Please submit 250-500 word abstracts to Carolin Lange at clange@u.washington.edu.
If the panel receives too large a quantity of high-quality
submissions to accommodate in a single panel, the chairs will consider turning
it into a round table.
For more information see: http://nemla.org/convention/2014/cfp_comparativelanguages.html#cfp14172
