UPDATE: George Eliot and "Provincial Life" (grad) (4/10/04; 5/14/04)

From: Elizabeth Goodhue (middlemarchmarathon@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Apr 02 2004 - 11:23:12 EST


 Update: UCLA Middlemarch call extended

CFP Extended: New Deadline April 10 2004

George Eliot and “Provincial Life”

14 May 2004, UCLA Graduate Conference

Abstract Deadline: April 10

First serialized in 1871-72, _Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life_ looks back over the horizon of England’s commercial and industrial revolutions to consider the people of a provincial community caught between the claims of the past and the pressures of their own prospects and ambitions. Far from the story of one person or the plot of one romance, Eliot’s novel offers an entire represented community, what Henry James famously called “a treasure-house of detail.”

The UCLA English Department’s ninth annual 24-hour Marathon Reading features _Middlemarch_. Our graduate conference on George Eliot and “Provincial Life,” convened alongside the reading, takes the novel’s subtitle as a starting point for considering how ideas of the “provincial” inform constructions of physical and social space in Eliot’s novel and in the period more broadly.

Possible topics for consideration include but are not limited to:

Serialization and the novel

Industrialization and the novel

Town/Country/City/Locality – liminal spaces

Speed/Space/Mobility/Displacement

Temporality/History/Memory

Public/Private/Domestic, Interior/Exterior

Property, community

Landscape, nature, the environment

Production/Consumption – market economies

Identity/Subjectivity

Realism and the novel

Genre and gender

Epic and the novel

Narrative Strategies

We welcome graduate works directly addressing Middlemarch and/or George Eliot's life and works, as well as papers on related historical and cultural contexts. We particularly encourage submissions attending to race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, technology, and material culture.

Please submit 100-250 word abstract by April 10 2004. With your submission, include your name, email address, mailing address, institutional affiliation, technology requests, and paper title.

**Direct all queries and abstracts to: middlemarchmarathon@yahoo.com**

Elizabeth Goodhue and Christopher Sanchez

2004 Marathon Reading Conference Co-Chairs

UCLA Department of English
2225 Rolfe Hall
Box 951530
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1530
(310) 825-4173

For further information on UCLA's marathon reading (May 13-14, 2004), please see our website.

http://www.english.ucla.edu/marathonreading/mr2004/eventinfo.html

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