Dear List,
I post the call for papers below for NEASECS, 9-12 December
1999, at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. We invite paper
proposals and are looking for a person who'd be willing to chair the
panel. Contact information below. Proposals must be received by April
10th, since the panel must be completed by April 15th. Thank
you!
Revolutionary Projects: The English Jacobin Invention of Social Order
This panel invites consideration of the lesser-known English
'Jacobins'. While Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, and William Godwin are
well-known for their role in crafting the English response to the French
Revolution, other writers and political actors are less commonly
discussed, from Thomas Holcroft to Eliza Fenwick, from Robert Bage to
Charlotte Smith. How do these writers invoke or fail to invoke a
distinctive late eighteenth-century idea of network between laboring-class
and middling-class dissidence? What role does the self-conscious
self-construction of writers like Holcroft and Hays who recorded their own
lives play in evaluating their literary contribution and historical
significance? Why did so many of these writers begin by translating works
of philosophy, fiction, and drama from other languages and end by
redacting children's literature, and how is this connected with the
possibility for middle-class women and middle and working-class men of
supporting themselves by writing? Does the structure of heterosexual
romance subtend the cross-class novel of reform and if so what does this
signify? Finally, are masculinity and femininity reconceived in these
writers' works, or are these gendered performances congealed by the very
writers who wished to unsettle rigid rules of propriety and class?
This session particularly invites re-examine the role of one of
the least-discussed English "jacobins," Thomas Holcroft, and how this late
eighteenth-century reformer attempted to engage political energy across
class and gender boundaries. A prolific playwright, novelist, translator,
political essayist and victim of the 1794 Treason Trials, Holcroft emerges
as one of England's first working-class authors. Yet, unlike his close
compatriot William Godwin, Holcroft's work is out-of-print and barely
examined in current criticism despite the significant conjunction of labor
and class conflict in his work and life. This panel attempts to rectify
this neglect, considering Holcroft in the context of the periods other
writers, his class origins, his relation to early feminism, and his own
drive to autobiographical self-analysis.
Considerations of novels, plays, political or philosophical
tracts, letters, children's literature, biographies and autobiographies by
late eighteenth-century writers who reinterpreted the principles of the
French Revolution for English social reform are welcomed.
Organizer and Contact:
Miriam L. Wallace
British and American Literature
COH-104
New College of U. So. Fla.
5700 N. Tamiami Tr.
Sarasota, FL 34243
(941) 359-4335
mwallace@virtu.sar.usf.edu
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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