CFP: Performing Taste: Constructing Middle-Class Subjectivity (4/1/03; MMLA, 11/7/03-11/9/03)

For the 45th Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association,
November 7-9, 2003, in Chicago, Illinois:

English II: English Literature 1800-1900 (permanent section): "Performing
Taste: Constructing Middle-Class Subjectivity."

This panel seeks abstracts for papers that explore the manner in which
performances of taste, gentility, and morality in literature contribute to
constructions of middle-class subjectivity in the nineteenth century. In
*An Open Elite? England 1540-1880*, Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier
Stone explore the middle classes' increased attention to and investment in
the trappings of nobility, the performance of prestige, and the appearances
of wealth: "What makes the rise of this middling sort so crucial is their
attitude towards their social superiors. Instead of resenting them, they
eagerly sought to imitate them, aspiring to gentility by copying the
education, manners, and behaviour of the gentry. . . . Their attitude thus
provided the glue which bound together the top half or more of the nation by
means of an homogenized culture of gentility that left elite hegemony
unaffected" (409). In this panel, we seek to explore the cultural growth
and establishment of the middle classes as expressed through behavioral,
theatrical, economic, and social performances in literature of the period.

Please send abstracts and inquiries to Jennifer Liethen Kunka, Panel Chair,
at jkunka_at_fmarion.edu by 4/1/03.

Jennifer Liethen Kunka, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English &
Writing Center Director
Francis Marion University
Florence, South Carolina
Office phone: (843) 661-1520
Email: jkunka_at_fmarion.edu

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Received on Wed Mar 12 2003 - 16:08:45 EST