MLA 2014, Chicago,
9-12th January 2014
Special Session
Forms of Freedom: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Liberal Thought
This session will explore the ways that poetry responds to the rise of liberalism during the long nineteenth century. The past decade has seen a revival of interest in liberal philosophy and culture as contexts for the nineteenth-century novel. This panel aims to expand this conversation via a consideration of liberalism’s poetics, addressing the influence of European liberal thinkers on the poetry of the nineteenth century.
Papers might address:
- Poets as readers and/or practitioners of liberal philosophy
- The poetics of the liberal subject
- Liberal ‘form’
- Mill’s poetic education
- Liberalism’s discontents: the poetry of radicalism and communitarianism
- Poetry and the state