21-23 November 2019, UNSW Canberra
Although the body has preoccupied literary scholarship for some time, there has been a renewed attention in Romantic studies to the complex ways in which literature encodes and reproduces our awareness of embodied experience. Challenging views of Romanticism as bounded by visionary and idealist expression, such work reflects a reorientation of criticism around the materiality of Romantic culture, whether configured as part of the age of sensibility or in relation to the era’s natural and social sciences. The Romantic period was, moreover, a time when control of the body emerged as a key political issue in workshops, homes, battlefields and colonies, when bodies were subject to rapidly evolving ideas of gender, class and race, while new bodies of knowledge and corporate political bodies emerged to regulate the affairs of nations and empires. This conference invites papers that broadly consider how embodiment was evoked, challenged and understood in Romantic cultural life. Convenors invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspects of Romanticism and embodiment. Proposals may be for individual papers or for panels of 3-4 papers.
Abstracts due 30 June 2019