Reminder: NCSA 2014 Urbanism and Urbanity "British and Continental European Romantic-era Writers" (9/30/2013;3/20-22/2014)

Urbanism and Urbanity

Chicago, IL
March 20-22, 2014

Deadline: September 30, 2013

Maria K. Bachman and Maria Gindhart, Program Co-Chairs, ncsa2014@gmail.com

http://www.ncsaweb.net/

As part of the 2014 Nineteenth Century Studies Association gathering in Chicago, Arnold Schmidt is seeking papers for panels on British and Continental European Romantic-era writers treating the conference theme of the “Urban and Urbanity.” Related themes might include the following:

• the Romantic city
• the city and fashion
• the city and education
• the city and commerce
• the city as utopia or dystopia
• the city as nation
• the city and the citizen
• the city and the social season
• the city and the demi-monde
• the city and spectacle
• the city and popular entertainment

Papers might consider the “Urban” in writers including, but by no means limited to Coleridge, De Quincey, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles Lucas, Harriet Martineau, Hannah More, Amelia Opie, Sydney Owenson, Frances Trollope, Helen Maria Williams, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth. 

Scholars might also treat the theme of "urbanity" and hence focus on novels of manners and/or Romantic satirists like Austen, Byron, Edgeworth, Peacock, among others. These panels are not limited to British writers and particularly welcome papers about Continental European Romantics. 

Email 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers, as well as one-page vitae, to my attention at aschmidt@csustan.edu by the deadline of September 30, 2013.  Please feel free to contact Arnold Schmidt with questions about the appropriateness of possible paper topics.

Graduate students and international scholars may compete for partial travel funding.  For more information, see the general call for papers below.

CFP: NCSA 2014 “The City and the Country in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination" (8/15/2013; 3/20-22/2014)

Urbanism and Urbanity

Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, 

March 20-22, 2014

Chicago, IL.

For a panel tentatively titled “The City and the Country in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination,” I’m seeking proposals for 20-minute papers addressing urban/rural tensions and contradictions. Broadly interpreted, that could include art, music, and literature invoking nostalgia for the rural, rural dialects, urbanism v. the rural in Englishness, industrialization of the countryside and other land-use issues, the back to the land movement, country weekends, interest in rural folklore, the yokel “Hodge” as seen by city-dwellers, environmental concerns, etc. 

Please email 250-word abstracts (or questions, ideas, etc.) by August 15 to Dr. Deborah Maltby, Associate Teaching Professor of English, University of Missouri-St. Louis: maltbyd@umsl.edu. 

CFP: NCSA 2014 Urbanism and Urbanity "British and Continental European Romantic-era Writers" (9/30/2013;3/20-22/2014)

Urbanism and Urbanity

March 20-22, Chicago IL

Deadline: September 30, 2013

Maria K. Bachman and Maria Gindhart, Program Co-Chairs, ncsa2014@gmail.com

http://www.ncsaweb.net/

As part of the 2014 Nineteenth Century Studies Association gathering in Chicago, Arnold Schmidt is seeking papers for panels on British and Continental European Romantic-era writers treating the conference theme of the “Urban and Urbanity.” Related themes might include the following:

• the Romantic city
• the city and fashion
• the city and education
• the city and commerce
• the city as utopia or dystopia
• the city as nation
• the city and the citizen
• the city and the social season
• the city and the demi-monde
• the city and spectacle
• the city and popular entertainment

Papers might consider the “Urban” in writers including, but by no means limited to Coleridge, De Quincey, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles Lucas, Harriet Martineau, Hannah More, Amelia Opie, Sydney Owenson, Frances Trollope, Helen Maria Williams, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth. 

Scholars might also treat the theme of "urbanity" and hence focus on novels of manners and/or Romantic satirists like Austen, Byron, Edgeworth, Peacock, among others. These panels are not limited to British writers and particularly welcome papers about Continental European Romantics. 

Email 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers, as well as one-page vitae, to my attention at aschmidt@csustan.edu by the deadline of September 30, 2013.  Please feel free to contact Arnold Schmidt with questions about the appropriateness of possible paper topics.

Graduate students and international scholars may compete for partial travel funding.  For more information, see the general call for papers below.

CFP: Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity (7/31/2013; 12/18-19/2013)

A Two-Day International Workshop
Tel Aviv University, December, 18-19, 2013

A vast tradition of literary and theoretical reflections has mapped modernity in the fragmented, synaesthetic experience that characterizes urban life. From the paratactic verses of Wordswoth’s Prelude describing the city of London, to the discussion of the ‘shock’ effect and the hyper-stimultion of the urban sensorium in the works of Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, and, most recently, Ben Singer, the bombardment of ever changing stimuli targeting the perception of the urban flâneur has been set against a tradition of aesthetic and epistemological concern valuing the intuited principle of unity that granted access to truth.

The publishing industry has contributed to this new experience of modernity by transforming the production and dissemination of narrative units through periodical forms that mechanically reproduced the same episodic impressions, often by capitalizing on the shock factor upon which many genres of popular entertainment depended. The sensational potential of the plots of both popular fiction, drama, and early cinema have challenged and transformed the discourses of class, gender and national identity that structured the dominant culture.

A significant role in the transformation of aesthetic perception, artistic representation  and the production of the print industry has been played by the research on vision and the analysis of movement in the course of the ‘long nineteenth century,’ as Max Milner, Jonathan Crary and Marta Braun, among others, have argued.  Nineteenth century research on vision has significantly altered not only theoretical discussions but very the modalities of vision that countless ‘philosophical toys’ and popular forms of entertainment disseminated at the level of the everyday.

This conference seeks to map a genealogy of modernity through the ‘sensational’ by taking a comparatist, transnational, interdisciplinary and intermediatic approach to the study of perception and the ways of constructing knowledge in the period going from the emergence of the discourse of aesthetics to the experimentations associated to the early twentieth century avant-garde.

Among the topics considered (but not limited to these):

• the emergence of aesthetics in the eighteenth century 
• the research on optics and motion and its impact on literary and artistic mimesis
• sensationalism in the eighteenth century
• the many forms of literary sensationalism in theatrical production and periodical fiction (melodrama, sensation novels, crime fiction, roman judiciaire, etc.)
• adaptations, translations and fortune of specific genres, works and authors of sensational literature in foreign markets
• violence and the project of modernity
• serialization and the status of the reader
• the montage effect in print culture
• political meanings of sensationalism
• the responses to new media and the reverberations of optical toys in theoretical,  artistic and literary texts
• points of rupture/continuity in the historical narratives of modernism
• transmediation of the sensational in advertising, precinema and silent film
• the periodical press and the emergence of new journalism
• archeological approaches to the avant-garde
• urban modernism and subjectivity in the long nineteenth century
• the challenges to traditional notions of the sister arts
• comparative models of sensationalism and the genealogies of modernity
• commodity culture and the hybrid text of modernity

Please send a 3-400 word abstract and a short bio by July 31 to Alberto Gabriele (alberto.gabriele.tau@gmail.com).

CFP: Uneasy Neighbours?: Rural-Urban Relationships in the Nineteenth Century (4/2/2013; 9/20/2013)

University of Southampton

Centre for 19th-Century Research

Uneasy Neighbours?: Rural-Urban Relationships in the Nineteenth Century

An International Interdisciplinary Conference
20 September 2013

Keynote Speaker: Keith D.M. Snell,

Professor of Rural and Cultural History, University of Leicester

The relationship between urban and rural communities in the nineteenth century was increasingly strained by the unprecedented rate and scale of social, industrial, technological and economic change worldwide. Cities demanded ever more from agriculture, while rural populations decreased; country life and work were changed by mechanisation and industrialisation, while newcomers to the cities had to adjust to alien ways of living and conditions of employment; poverty was commonplace in both the countryside and the cities, while the newly wealthy became landowners and urban leaders. This 1-day interdisciplinary conference aims to consider evidence of the tensions, anxieties and experiences resulting from the changing dynamic between rural and urban life, to examine how this shaped the perceptions of the country and the city, and
to explore how these are articulated in different global contexts.

Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to): The rival attractions of rural and urban living; the rise of the suburb; changing ideals of national identity; representations of rural/urban
life and work in art, literature and science; women’s lives and work in the country and city; rural and urban health/wealth/poverty; utopianism; urban/rural perspectives in the contemporary press; the role and influence of religion; landowners, businessmen and entrepreneurs; the lives of children; philanthropy; the greening of the city (garden cities); industrialisation of the countryside. Abstracts (200 words) for proposed 20 minute papers to be submitted by e-mail to W.B.Sloan@soton.ac.uk and E.M.Hammond@soton.ac.uk by 2 April 2013.

CFP: Uneasy Neighbors? (2/28/2013; 9/20/2013)

Uneasy Neighbours?: Rural-Urban Relationships in the Nineteenth Century

An International Interdisciplinary Conference

University of Southampton

Centre for 19th-Century Research

20 September 2013

Keynote Speaker: Keith D.M. Snell, Professor of Rural and Cultural History, University of Leicester

The relationship between urban and rural communities in the nineteenth century was increasingly strained by the unprecedented rate and scale of social, industrial, technological and economic change worldwide. Cities demanded ever more from agriculture, while rural populations decreased; country life and work were changed by mechanisation and industrialisation, while newcomers to the cities had to adjust to alien ways of living and conditions of employment; poverty was commonplace in both the countryside and the cities, while the newly wealthy became landowners and urban leaders. This 1-day interdisciplinary conference aims to consider evidence of the tensions, anxieties and experiences resulting from the changing dynamic between rural and urban life, to examine how this shaped the perceptions of the country and the city, and to explore how these are articulated in different contexts.

Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to):

The rival attractions of rural and urban living; the rise of the suburb; changing ideals of national identity; representations of rural and urban life and work in art and science; women’s lives and work in the country and city; rural and urban health/wealth/poverty; utopianism; urban/rural perspectives in the contemporary press; the role and influence of religion; landowners as businessmen and entrepreneurs; the lives of children; philanthropy; the greening of the city (garden cities); industrialisation of the countryside.

Abstracts (200 words) for proposed 20 minute papers to be submitted by e-mail to W.B.Sloan@soton.ac.uk and E.M.Hammond@soton.ac.uk by 28 February 2013.

Registration: £30 (£20 students and unwaged)

Reminder - edited collection: Urban Monstrosities (10/1/2011; 4/1/2012)

Call for Articles: Edited Collection "Urban Monstrosities"
Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee, University of Rochester

The contemporary city bears the trace of at least two seismic developments: the Enlightenment rationalization of urban space, marked by the twinned banishment of death to the urban periphery and the creation of a regime of spatial surveillance; and the emergence of the modern city as simulacrum, its widened boulevards and glossy surfaces allowing for the continual flow of commodities and capital. How do contemporary authors of speculative fiction figure and respond to these and other major urban transformations in their own work? We are seeking articles that explore the city as a space of monstrous potential, and which examine how the uncanny cityscape has (d)evolved since the Industrial Revolution. SF and weird fiction, for example, often depict the city as a living organism that is alternately transformative and malicious. How do these and other literary and artistic modes figure urban space as a site of bizarre experiences and subjectivities? What entity can be read in, and attempts to speak through, the oneiric facades of the architectural fantasia? What are the ramifications of a sentient city? How useful are Blake's “dark Satanic Mills," Dickens's "Animate London," and Eliot's "unreal" cities as models for reading contemporary instances of urban monstrosity?

This collection attempts to posit the neglected but important link between the nineteenth and early twentieth century city as an unreal spectacle of overwhelming crowds, urban wilderness, and new social formations, and contemporary representations of the city as an incipient organism or fantastic bestiary, its space a site of chthonic splendor and ruinous allure. What new readings become possible when sophisticated modern fantasists like China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer are placed in a tradition of urban representation stretching back to Wordsworth and Blake, Baudelaire and Poe? How can Mayhew's explorations or Benjamin's body of work on the flâneur and the urban phantasmagoria offer new ways of theorizing the global renaissance of street art, or the burgeoning documentation and aestheticization of derelict architectural structures known as "ruin porn"? Are areas of potential insurrection within the city—Bhabha’s “third space,” the urban carnivalesque—inimical to, or in league with urban monstrosity?

Please send a 500-word abstract, tentative title and brief (1-2 pp) CV to Joseph Lamperez  atjosephlamperez@gmail.com and J. Alexandra McGhee at alimcghee@gmail.com by October 1, 2011. Completed articles will be due April 1, 2012, and should be between 3500-5000 words. For queries please contact Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee at the email addresses above.

CFP: Urban Monstrosities (10/1/2011; 4/1/2012)

Call for Articles: Edited Collection Urban Monstrosities
Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee, University of Rochester

The contemporary city bears the trace of at least two seismic developments: the Enlightenment rationalization of urban space, marked by the twinned banishment of death to the urban periphery and the creation of a regime of spatial surveillance; and the emergence of the modern city as simulacrum, its widened boulevards and glossy surfaces allowing for the continual flow of commodities and capital. How do contemporary authors of speculative fiction figure and respond to these and other major urban transformations in their own work? We are seeking articles that explore the city as a space of monstrous potential, and which examine how the uncanny cityscape has (d)evolved since the Industrial Revolution. SF and weird fiction, for example, often depict the city as a living organism that is alternately transformative and malicious. How do these and other literary and artistic modes figure urban space as a site of bizarre experiences and subjectivities? What entity can be read in, and attempts to speak through, the oneiric facades of the architectural fantasia?  What are the ramifications of a sentient city? How useful are Blake's “dark Satanic Mills," Dickens's "Animate London," and Eliot's "unreal" cities as models for reading contemporary instances of urban monstrosity?

This collection attempts to posit the neglected but important link between the nineteenth and early twentieth century city as an unreal spectacle of overwhelming crowds, urban wilderness, and new social formations, and contemporary representations of the city as an incipient organism or fantastic bestiary, its space a site of chthonic splendor and ruinous allure. What new readings become possible when sophisticated modern fantasists like China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer are placed in a tradition of urban representation stretching back to Wordsworth and Blake, Baudelaire and Poe? How can Mayhew's explorations or Benjamin's body of work on the flâneur and the urban phantasmagoria offer new ways of theorizing the global renaissance of street art, or the burgeoning documentation and aestheticization of derelict architectural structures known as "ruin porn"? Are areas of potential insurrection within the city—Bhabha’s “third space,” the urban carnivalesque—inimical to, or in league with urban monstrosity?

Please send a 500-word abstract, tentative title and brief (1-2 pp) CV to Joseph Lamperez at josephlamperez@gmail.com and J. Alexandra McGhee at alimcghee@gmail.com by October 1, 2011. Completed articles will be due April 1, 2012, and should be between 3500-5000 words.  For queries please contact Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee at the email addresses above.