CFP: “Interiority in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Beyond Subjectivity”
Rutgers British Studies Center, April 12, 2013
The potential for discovery of what is or was “interior” fires the curiosity of scholars of British history and culture, whether the subject of investigation is the parlor of a middle-class Victorian family or the emotional life of an eighteenth-century Methodist. The Rutgers British Studies Center will hold a one-day interdisciplinary conference on April 12, 2013 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey on interiority in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Broadly understood, “interiority” might include any topic that concerns mental or material phenomena that are conceived to be interior, internal, inner, or inward, often but by no means always in explicit distinction from what is exterior, external, outer, or outward. We encourage topics that in some fashion reflect on historical changes in the concept of interiority.
Below we suggest five broad topics that should provide a general sense of the range of papers that are relevant to the theme of the conference. In two or three weeks we’ll issue a second call for papers with an extended list of suggested sub-topics that fall under these broad ones. Alternatively, this can be accessed by visiting http://britishstudies.rutgers.edu/events/2012-2013/details/96-interiority-in-eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century-britain-beyond-subjectivity[britishstudies.rutgers.edu].
Why “beyond subjectivity”? A great deal of excellent work has been done in these period fields on the idea of interiority as psychological subjectivity. We value this work. At the same time—and with no intention of proscribing papers that thoughtfully extend it —we’re especially interested in papers that go beyond this focus and that allow relations and correlations to be drawn between different senses of interiority. In this spirit we also aim to bring together a range of interdisciplinary scholarship.
We invite those interested to submit proposals of about 250 words by December 15, 2012 to Kathryn Yeniyurt at kathryn.yeniyurt@rutgers.edu.
Interiority: