"Get a Move On!": Nineteenth Century Migration And Mobility

A Graduate English Conference sponsored by the University of South Carolina

March 7-8, 2008

Keynote Speaker: Ian Duncan
Professor of English at University of California, Berkely and author of
Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens

Special Talks by:
Rebecca F. Stern , Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina

Immigrants and expatriates, sailors and soldiers, travelers and wanderers, men and women: people in the nineteenth century were moving. Novels and new inventions such as railroads, steamships, and street cars provided vehicles of transport for individuals and their imaginations, while the transnational movements of ideas and populations gave rise to a newly globalized Anglo-American literature.

 New technologies, abilities, and time to travel led to new representations of movement in literatures of all kinds. From travel journals and brochures to exploration narratives and science fiction tales, writing in nineteenth-century Britain and America reflected the ways in which an increasingly mobile people thought of themselves and the world at large.

This conference aims to explore representations of mobility and migration in nineteenth-century
British and American literature. 

Submit your 300 word abstract by December 15, 2007 to Grace Wetzel, wetzelg@mailbox.sc.edu.