CALL FOR PAPERS AT THE 1996 MLA
"FAMILIAR STATES: THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DIVIDE IN THE BRITISH NOVEL"
This MLA Special Session will look at the political implications of the domestic sphere: what is the relationship between Family and State in the British Novel of the 18th and 19th centuries? The Family/State analogy has been carefully documented in the Renaissance and early modern period, but less attention has been paid to the State in/of the Family as political and industrial revolutions, labor unrest, and imperial conquests redefined and complicated the boundaries between private and public. In what ways did the Family/State analogy and the Public/Private divide develop, change, evolve? To what extent did household relationships--wife, husband, children, servants, companions, dependent relations--enact structures of political authority and vulnerability to reflect national, political, imperial concerns? Consider spatial relationships: fluid borders between private and public, architecture as domestic geography, the "public" position of servants, troubled boundaries in the Victorian ghost story. From an age of revolutions, is the haunted space revolting?
2-page abstracts or papers by March 10, 1996, to Eve M. Lynch, English Department, University of California, Davis, CA 95616; emlynch@ucdavis.edu
Eve M. Lynch
emlynch@ucdavis.edu
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