UPDATE: [Collections] Novel Geographies, 1660-1900 (1/5/08; collection)

Call for Papers: Novel Geographies: Space and the British Novel, 1660-
1900

Essays of between 9,500 to 7,000 words sought for a new book collection
focusing on the ways in which representations of space change in British
prose fiction from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Interested
authors should discuss how historical forces, such as colonialism,
slavery, industrialization, or urbanization, impact the imaginary "space"
of the novel and nation, as well as how varying constructs of identity
and/or experience (e.g. of race, religion, class, gender, or global
location) influence these newly emerging forms of narrative imagination
or "novel geographies."

How can the physical dimensions of novels, the pages, the covers, and the
bindings, possibly contain and encapsulate the grand, far-flung worlds
that they conjure in our minds? The vast disproportion between the
relatively modest spatial dimensions of novels and the immense
phenomenological worlds that they summon in our minds is not so much a
barrier for readers as it is an invitation to explore (at least
imaginatively) the places situated beyond the confines of the page -
however familiar or strange, intimate or enigmatic those places may be.
Novels can accordingly give readers the profound satisfaction of
journeying to the moon, over the earth, and across the ocean; they can
also make us content to simply find shelter within the pocket of a coat
for a while. Supposing that we prefer thrill to comfort, they can even
take us on a precipitous dive two thousand leagues under the sea. Novels
allow us to crisscross distant nations, to summon extinct epochs from
yesteryear, and to penetrate the secret recesses of the heart. Indeed,
readers may traverse the outmost depths of the universe and recall the
inmost concerns of the self in virtually the same moment: indulging in
the absolutely far and the entirely near with almost equal ease and
abandonment. In thus dallying from realm to realm, world to world, hearth
to hearth, and mind to mind, novel readers seem to defy space and time at
once, even as they recline in their best beloved, albeit completely home-
bound, love seats or armchairs.

Such eclectic and expansive representations of space no doubt reflect the
drives and desires of readers themselves, who look to the novel as both a
means of transport away from and, paradoxically, as a means of nostalgic
return to their current material and social conditions. Hence, from their
earliest incarnation, novels have posited narrative worlds stitched
together from the scraps and patches of everyday life: making visible the
psychological and phenomenological limits of the quotidian, if only to
strategically exceed those limits whenever possible or expedient. Whether
it is Haywood's clandestine gardens, the bustling streets of Defoe's
London, Fielding's byways and inns, Richardson's ultra-virtuous closets,
or Austen's manorial estates and country houses, the spaces of the novel
often envisage a world populated by very real historical agents, while
also distorting, displacing, refracting, and even transforming their
actual socio-political landscape in profound and extremely telling ways.
Indeed, however much these geographies may seem to resemble (and
reassemble) authentic places in Britain or elsewhere, they seldom seek to
mirror these geographies faithfully or transparently. Rather, these novel
geographies, these spaces in, of, and beyond the confines of the
narrative, bear a complex, and occasionally antagonistic, relationship
with one another and with the rapidly changing, increasingly interlocked
worlds in which they are produced. By focusing on the geographies of the
novel, this collection hopes to demonstrate the ways in which lived space
and its representation interact with and inform one another and, as a
result, reshape the pluralistic and interdependent landscape of Britain
itself.

Please email the completed essay by January 5, 2008 to Adam Sills
(engags_at_hofstra.edu) and Abby Coykendall (acoykenda_at_emich.edu).

Email submissions are preferred, but you can also use the following
addresses:

Prof. Adam Sills
Department of English
Hofstra University
204 Mason Hall
Hempstead, NY 11549-1000

Prof. Abby Coykendall
Department of English Language and Literature
Eastern Michigan University
612 Pray-Harrold Hall
Ypsilanti, MI 48197

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Received on Sun Oct 21 2007 - 16:48:02 EDT