Liberty and Limits 1789-1920
MGSM, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
December 5-6, 2013
Deadline: August 1, 2013
Deadline: August 1, 2013
Keynote Speakers: Professor Nancy Armstrong (Duke University), Professor David Punter (Bristol University), Professor Deirdre Colman (University of Melbourne).
The long nineteenth century was inaugurated by the French Revolution and closed in the aftermath of the First World War. In Britain the intervening period was marked by a dialectic compounded of sub-revolutionary change and processes of containment. In all cultural fields new modes of knowledge, theories, and aesthetic forms emerged. The Romantics and Victorians inherited the discursive energies of the eighteenth century in terms of the ways in which literary and other forms of writing were lauded or vilified as intervention, catalyst, palliative or purge. The energy of this period was enacted as much through writing and reading as through empire building and military/mercantile expansion. We invite papers that engage with all aspects of cultural change – including evolution, excess, experimentation, nostalgia, suppression, dissent. Themes addressed can include, but are not confined to, the following:
- Material print culture and new modes of dissemination of information
- Literary revolutions
- Life writing and the private as public performance
- The modern city
- The fin de siècle and the emergence of Modernism
- Gender/sexual identity
- Class mobility/instability
- Industrialisation
- Anglophone writing and readership
- Self-help and social mobility
- Romantic and Victorian poetics
- Crime and detection
- Policing
- Juvenilia
- The rise of children’s literature
- Education and literacy
- Evolutionary theory and social Darwinism
- The marketplace and the birth of the consumer
- Science and technology
- Celebrity authorship as cultural phenomenon
- The changing nature of readership
- The politics of Empire
- Photography/ images
- Afterlife: Steampunk and neo-Victorian narratives, the long nineteenth century in
- film adaptations
Please send 300 word abstracts and proposals for themed panels as word documents or PDF with subject heading “Liberty and Limits Conference Abstract” to: libertyandlimits@mq.edu.au The deadline for receipt of proposals is August 1, 2013.
Organisers:
Dr Lee O’Brien
Dr Geoff Payne
Dr Ryan Twomey
For full information here is the link to our conference: