Place, espaces et écritures féminines

Transforming Places and Transcending Spaces in English Women’s Writing 1640-1740

Call for papers

45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

April 3-6, 2014

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Host: Susquehanna University

Spaces, whether domestic, social, or political, often carry symbolic or metonymic meaning. As Nicole Pohl points out in Women, Space and Utopia 1600-1800, there is a “complex linkage between space, knowledge and power, identity and the body” (1). However, the occupants of a space can transform, alter, or redefine its significance. In early modern England, women employed a number of strategies to question, defy, and change the traditional authoritative and often oppressive spaces in their world/lives. For example, by forming bonds with other inhabitants of the prison, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria undermines the punishing isolation of the jail cell and converts it into a communal space defined by equality. By placing her body on display in a sustained trance Anna Trapnel transforms an inn into a sight of political protest calling into question Cromwell’s authority in England. This panel seeks to examine the multitude of strategies early modern women used to redefine spaces associated with or symbolic of, power and oppression. Spectacle, physical suffering, literacy, travel, and community are some of the tactics women used to accomplish the transformations that this panel aims to explore. By investigating the ways in which women represent their alterations of these spaces we will also address the essential question, once ruptured, what emerges? How do women modify, resist, usurp and/or escape the spaces that bind them? What do these women accomplish? 

Please send 300 word abstracts and a brief curriculum vita to Andrea Fabrizio or Ruth Garcia: at FabrizioGarciaabstracts@gmail.com

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)


Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable. http://www.nemla.org/convention/2014/cfp.html