Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 21-24, 2013
Boston, Massachusetts
Host Institution: Tufts University
CFP #1: Engendering the Victorian Female Poet
There has been a historic tide of scholarship arguing the merits of Victorian poetry written by women. From Aurora Leigh to “Goblin Market,” nineteenth-century female poets created a canon of verse that questioned gender categories and troubled the status quo. While scholars from Oliphant to W.M. Rossetti added valuable interpretations that legitimized the genre, contemporary critics such as Armstrong, Tucker, and Prins have used modern lenses to probe the subtleties inherent in the work of a “poetess.” This roundtable will discuss the ways gender is mapped onto and inherent in nineteenth-century female poetics. We will probe how the female poet changed/expanded/problematized form, and how poets addressed the sexual, moral and class conventions of their time. What were the cultural responses to these poems, and what were some significant male responses? What was the effect of working-class poems authored by women? How did the concept of boundaries smite or enforce a female poet’s project? We will also discuss the transatlantic implications of publishing and editing, as well as how poets represented the adversity of gender in their verse—what Barrett Browning called a “disheveled strength in agony.”
This roundtable examines the ways gender is mapped onto and inherent in verse of Victorian female poets. Participants should examine through theoretical lenses canonic or non-canonic poems (metapoems, verse-novels, lyric, epic, sonnet, elegy) throughout the long nineteenth-century. 500 word abstract/CV by 9/30 to blavin@optonline.net with subject line “NeMLA VFP”
CFP #2: Nineteenth-century Eco-Poetics
How does nature operate in nineteenth-century poetry? From Arnold’s “Scholar-Gypsy” to Leopardi’s “La Ginestra,” nineteenth-century poets privileged the nature motif in their verse. While literary critics have queried these poetic projects by focusing on Empire, religion, gender, and form, few scholars have explored eco-critical approaches to this global canon. This panel will consider poems where science interrogates landscape, faith interacts with nature, and industrialization pocks the pastoral. We will begin by exploring how the systematic and organized study of nature—and the advent of the natural sciences—impacted verse forms. We will also ask how literary legacies, such as Romanticism, influenced the positioning of nature in the nineteenth-century verse. Panelists will explore through theoretical lenses the evolving notions of nature and how they manifest in the poetry of various nation-states. We will query how the genre responded to the burgeoning sciences and technological innovations, and we will explore the theoretical implications of a nineteenth-century eco-poetics.
This panel queries how nineteenth-century poets privileged the nature motif in their verse. Panelists should examine through theoretical lenses canonic or non-canonic poems (lyric, epic, sonnet, verse-novel, elegy, etc.) that manifest nature in verse. 500 word Abstract/CV by 9/30 to blavin@optonline.net with subject line “NeMLA 19th Eco_Poetics”