May, 2002

Atlantic Crossings, Visionary Schemes, and Postnational Contexts: Charles Brockden Brown and his Contemporaries

Deadline: May 31, 2002

With the recent flourishing of late eighteenth-century scholarship, a range of new approaches has begun to highlight the North Atlantic cultural and intellectual contexts of the 1790s.  These readings often challenge the way texts have been situated within national discourses and instead examine how cultural matters exist in the interstices between regions.  Others, informed by debates about postcolonialism and globalization, see the production and reception of all cultural artifacts as contingent on the appropriation, exchange, negotiation, and alliances of and between different ethno-status groups in their act of mutual encounter.

In important ways, Charles Brockden Brown stands as a vital touchstone for the traffic of cultures across and around the Atlantic, recording and responding to ideas, images, and news as they came to attention from sources in North America, Anglophone and continental Europe, and regions of the world colonized by European countries.  This conference seeks to re-assess Brown as an intellectual within the larger cultural milieu in which he wrote, recognizing him as a versatile encyclopedist who was well-read in English, German, and French, and who engaged in some of the major controversies that moved intellectuals on different sides of the Atlantic.

For this conference, we seek discussions of Brown and his contemporaries who participated in the fertile moment of late eighteenth- early nineteenth-century culture, in all of its manifestations as a product of Atlantic cross-fertilization.

We particularly encourage contributions from colleagues in English, French, German, and Afro-Caribbean studies, who might not typically participate in Early American Studies conferences.  Papers that deal with writers, events, and contexts that illuminate comparative aspects of Brown are especially welcomed.

The conference will take place at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands   23, 24 & 25 October 2002

Possible topics include:

Nationalism
Trade
Travel
Gender/Feminism/Masculinity
Interiority
Class (U.S./Britain/Continental Europe)
Cultural and/or Historiographic Cartography
Sensationalism/Spectacle
Epistolarity/Clubs/Conversation
Imperialism and Postcoloniality
Genre Formation
Theories of Historiography
Sociability and Print Culture
Cultures of Radicalism/Radical Culture
Atlantic Utopistics
The Invention of Race
Globalization in the 18/19C Transition
Liberalism and its Discontents
Modes of Bourgeois Dissent (Puritanism through Romanticism)
Editing and the Critique of Taste
Demographic History
Citizens, Denizens, and Aliens
Subversion and Countersubversion
Society as Collective Psychosis

Please send proposals or abstracts to:

Wil Verhoeven
American Studies Program
Faculty of Arts
P.O. box 716
9700 AS Groningen
The Netherlands

Fax: +31.50.363.5821

or by e-mail at: w.m.verhoeven@let.rug.nl
E-mail submissions are preferred.

Submit a Call for Papers