Session Proposal: "Textual Adaptation and the Creation of Culture in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Medievalisms"
59th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University
May 9-11, 2024
Proposals due: September 15, 2023
In her essay “Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: Medieval Modernism” (in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, 2020) Elizabeth Helsinger observes that “Pre-Raphaelite medievalism depended upon a developed sense of the pastness of the past in its relation to the present, a product of the historicism of the earlier nineteenth century. But it required that sense to disrupt it: returning to the past to discover the modern." This session will explore how the Pre-Raphaelites and other medievalist literatures of the 19th and 20th centuries looked to the past in order to create and critique the present while also constructing views of the future.
This session seeks presentations that will discuss adaptation in medievalist literatures of the 19th and 20th centuries and how authors from those periods employ medieval texts in defining and producing contemporary culture and envisioning the future. Presenters might incorporate theories of translation, of adaptation, and of the cultural production.
Papers might address how 19th-and 20th-century writers adapted medieval texts to their own ideologies, or, how medieval texts informed and helped to create those ideologies. Presentations might also discuss how adaptations contributed to contemporary discourse and the spread of cultural ideas and values, how writers dealt with adapting materials from different ages, places, and cultural contexts, and finally how and to what extent 19th- and 20th-century writers thought about faithfulness to the original texts.
Please submit proposals by September 15, 2023, using an online submission process: https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress. Use the “Submission” tab.
Questions: Robert Sirabian (rsirabia@uwsp.edu) and Daniel Najork (Daniel.Najork@asu.edu)