Negotiating 19th-Century Spaces

Graduate Student Literature Conference

March 11-12, 2005

The idea of one’s space is multidimensional. While some spaces are predetermined, others are negotiated. The thinkers of the 19th century often investigated the dilemma of space, whether it was created or already occupied. How does the 19th-century individual determine his or her space? How is it negotiated? Who defines it? Who rebels against these defined spaces? Because spatial categories are fluid and less defined, it is the premise of our conference that some 19th-century spaces must be negotiated.

Many writers, such as Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Eliot, Douglass, Dickens, Emerson, Hawthorne, and James among others, devoted their lives and their works to negotiating individual spaces. What do they determine and how does space play out in their works? How did the Industrial Revolution modify the spatial question? How did it contribute to the labeling of people’s spaces?

Our third annual graduate conference at the University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC) is looking for papers that highlight how the unique circumstances of the 19th century affected and contributed to the notion of space, spaces, the individual, and his or her space. Along with works written on English texts, this conference welcomes papers on non-English literatures and comparative topics. The keynote speaker is Dr. Roxanne Eberle, author of Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing. Her current project, a five-volume edition of “Women and Romanticism,” is part of the effort to find a space for women in the British Romantic canon.

Possible topics could include but are not limited to:

• Sexual and gendered space (space of women, men, love, sexual ‘others’)
• Class space (group identity, bourgeoisie, working class, upper class)
• Artistic space (tableaux, painting, sculptures, theatre)
• Fiction and fictional spaces (narrative, narration)
• Scientific and technological spaces (Outer Space, invented space, utopias, dystopias)
• Nationalist and Imperialist spaces (royalty, colonies, British empire, warring spaces)
• Racial and Postcolonial spaces (space of race, the colonized, the Other)
• Traveling spaces (traveler, rest-stops, grand tour, undiscovered terrain)
• Publications and their imagined spaces (gift books, periodicals)

Abstracts of 250 words or less are due by December 15, 2004. Please include your name, the name of your institution and program, and any A/V needs you may have. Submit abstracts electronically via e-mail to respective representatives:

Michelle Cooper (American Literature) rogersm21@hotmail.com

Shelley Johnson (British Literature) sajohns7@yahoo.com

Kristi Krumnow (Comparative Literature, or non-English literature) kkrumnow@aol.com