The editors of Gender and Space in Britain, 1660-1820 seek essays that identify, delineate, and explore new cartographies— geographic and metaphoric—of gender in literature authored by British women between 1660 and 1820.
This collection begins with the historical and theoretical recognition of the ways in which space both constitutes and represents identity. As Henri Lefebvre has pointed out, historically the temporal and spatial have been gendered masculine and feminine. At the same time, however, scholars such as Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have demonstrated that the early modern period, specifically the eighteenth century, was a turning point in the redefinition of the geographical landscape and the social terrain of Western Europe. Transformations in foundational British structures including class, politics, economics, and print culture during the long eighteenth century reconfigured and created new concepts of both space and gender. What did these reconfigurations demand and what opportunities did they provide for men and for women? In particular, how do women (re)define, occupy, negotiate, inscribe and create new spaces, cross borders and construct both concrete and abstract new cartographies during this period in Britain?
Possible topics of exploration include but are not limited to:
*The City and/or the Countryside
*The Space(s) of the Nation or Beyond
*Space and Revolution
*Border Crossings, Exile and Migrations
*Professional Spaces
*Domestic Space(s)
*Sacred/Profane Places and Spaces
*Body Spaces
*Space and Genre (ex. satire, poetry, the novel, the Gothic, non-fictional prose)
Please send a 1-page abstract and a 2-page CV as a .doc or .docx attached to an email to mnarain@tcu.edu and to gevirtka@shu.edu by September 1, 2010.
