Extended Deadline: The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000 (4/11/2014; 7/1-4/2014)

The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000

University of Sydney

July 1-4 2014

FINAL Deadline: April 11, 2014

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: 

Professor Maud Ellmann, Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English, Chicago

Assist. Professor Julie Park, Vassar

Professor John Plotz, Brandeis

The conference will open up the nuances of the term ‘prosaic’ by exploring the privileged relationship between the novel genre and multiple and complex categories of the ‘everyday’. Building on John Plotz’s notion of the novel as exemplary ‘portable property’, the conference will address the relationship between novel-reading as everyday activity and the novel’s prosaic subject matter, whether this is conceived as material object, cultural practice, or speech act.

Suggested topics:  

• The novel and things
• The novel and film/and TV
• Readerships of the novel
• The novel and gender
• The novel and childhood
• Queer novels
• Psychologies of the novel
• Novel genres
• The odd or uncategorisable
• The secular imagination
• Book history and the novel
• The novel and the digital everyday
• Characters as quasi-persons
• Novel worlds
• The novel and the institutionalisation of affect
• The novel as political action
• Temporalities of the novel
• The novel and the forms of property
• The scale of the novel

Proposals for 20 minute papers or for 3 paper panel sessions should be sent to Vanessa Smith (Vanessa.smith@sydney.edu.au) by April 11, 2014. Postgraduate submissions welcomed.

For more information visit: http://novelnetwork.org/

CFP: The Prosaic Imaginary (3/31/2014; 7/1-4/2014)

The Prosaic Imaginary: novels and the everyday, 1750-2000

University of Sydney

July 1-4, 2014

Deadline: March 31, 2014

http://novelnetwork.org/

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: 

Professor Maud Ellmann, Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English, Chicago Associate Professor Julie Park, Vassar Professor John Plotz, Brandeis

The conference will open up the nuances of the term ‘prosaic’ by exploring the privileged relationship between the novel genre and multiple and complex categories of the ‘everyday’. Building on John Plotz’s notion of the novel as exemplary ‘portable property’, the conference will address the relationship between novel-reading as everyday activity and the novel’s prosaic subject matter, whether this is conceived as material object, cultural practice, or speech act.

Suggested topics:  

• The novel and things
• The novel and film/and TV
• Readerships of the novel
• The novel and gender
• The novel and childhood
• Queer novels
• Psychologies of the novel
• Novel genres
• The odd or uncategorisable
• The secular imagination
• Book history and the novel
• The novel and the digital everyday
• Characters as quasi-persons
• Novel worlds
• The novel and the institutionalisation of affect
• The novel as political action
• Temporalities of the novel
• The novel and the forms of property
• The scale of the novel

Proposals for 20 minute papers or for 3 paper panel sessions should be sent to Vanessa Smith (Vanessa.smith@sydney.edu.au) by March 31 2014. Postgraduate submissions welcomed. 

CFP: Self-Adornment in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (9/30/2012; 3/21-24/2013)

Panel: “Self-Adornment in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel”

44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 21-24, 2013

Boston, Massachusetts

Host Institution:  Tufts University

From the Eustace family diamonds, to Dorothea’s emeralds, accessories and objects of personal adornment litter the pages of the nineteenth-century British novel. This session investigates objects and practices of self-adornment, including jewelry, cosmetics, accessories, and clothes to contribute to our understanding of both canonical and less well-known works of fiction. This panel might include papers which situate objects and practices of self-adornment in relation to realist description, material culture, or feminist criticism; it also invites papers which consider the special role of self-adornment within specific genres such as the sensation novel, or silver fork fiction.   Abstracts of 500 words or less should be submitted to Danielle Barkley, danielle.barkley@mail.mcgill.ca.

Deadline:  September 30, 2012

Please include with your abstract:

Name and Affiliation

Email address

Postal address

Telephone number

A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

The 2013 NeMLA convention continues the Association's tradition of sharing innovative scholarship in an engaging and generative location. The 44th annual event will be held in historic Boston, Massachusetts, a city known for its national and maritime history, academic facilities and collections, vibrant art, theatre, and food scenes, and blend of architecture. The Convention, located centrally near Boston Commons and the Theatre District at the Hyatt Regency, will include keynote and guest speakers, literary readings, film screenings, tours and workshops.

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.  http://www.nemla.org/convention/2013/cfp.html

CFP: Commitment in British Women Writers' Novels

Commitment in British Women Writers' Novelists of the 18th & 19th Centuries

Contributions are invited for a conference which will take place at the University of Caen in France on 17th and 18th June 2010.

As soon as novels developed, women played an important role both as readers and as authors, since among the 2,000 works which were published in the 18th century, 600 were written by women. One can then wonder about the way they used that means of expression and ask whether Mary Wollstonecraft opened the path for a British female literature characterized by commitment through her desire for political and social equality with men. Let us specify that during that seminar the term “commitment” will be used in the sense it had in the 18th and 19th centuries rather than in the sense it took in the 20th century.

Some could focus on the different aspects of commitment whether it is political, social, religious, moral, intellectual, artistic… It would also be quite interesting to consider the sources of inspiration for that commitment in novels by Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, or the Brontës (this is not an exhaustive list). Besides one could deal with the role played by some major figures such as Harriet Martineau or Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill’s wife, but also by some ideals and among them that of the “New Woman”.

Other proposals could be centred on the form that commitment takes on. Does it influence women writers’ strategies for articulating their experience? How does commitment characterize the very text? Does it make itself known always strikingly? And more generally are women writers’ means of expression the same as those adopted in the society of the time?

Please send your proposals (one A4 page maximum) before 1st December 2009 to Elise Ouvrard (ouvrard_elise@hotmail.com).