Update: deadline extended
Paper proposals are invited for a prospective panel on Lucy Hutchinson's
Order and Disorder at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of
America in NYC in March of 2004. Since the 1806 posthumous publication of
her memoirs of her husband, Lucy Hutchinson has been known as a chronicler
of the English civil wars. The text published during her lifetime,
however, was not this story of wartime England, but the story of Genesis
in the first five cantos of her long poem. David Norbrook's 2001 edition
finally brought the entire twenty cantos of the poem into print. The wife
of a "regicide" who died as a political prisoner in 1664, Hutchinson lived
the precarious existence of a defeated republican until her own death in
1681. Like her contemporary, John Milton, she turned to the Book of
Genesis as a response to political defeat. Unlike Milton, her poem tells
not only the story of the Fall, but also a multitude of others, including
the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Esau, and
Rachel and Leah. This session aims to open up critical discussion of this
exciting new addition to the seventeenth-century canon.
Possible avenues of exploration include the relationship between
Hutchinson's poem and:
--Genesis poetry
--the work of John Milton
--the women of Genesis
--temporality, including poetic, political and religious
--the form of the long poem
--women and republicanism
--republican poetics
--women writers and the "epic"
E-mail proposals to Erin Murphy at Emurphy1000@yahoo.com by May 19th.
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From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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