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An international group of Brown scholars will host a conference to explore the frontiers of sensation and topography in the life, writing and culture of Charles Brockden Brown. The conference organizers conceive “frontiers” both broadly and narrowly. Broadly speaking, frontiers are “multiple sites of exchange among different groups, cultures, and nations” (Teute and Cayton, Contact Points); more narrowly, “frontiers” exist at particular geographical sites in Brown’s work, in his early Republican context, and now at the end of the twentieth century.
Brown explored the frontiers of many issues in cultural crisis—gender, psychology, class, not to mention the canon and the literal frontier landscape. The Western frontier of Brown’s native eighteenth-century Pennsylvania has now moved as far westward as the Pacific: two centuries after his life, Las Vegas represents just such a far West site of sensation, sensationalism, and the outer borders of aesthetic and cultural experimentation.
The conference will be held October 27-29, 2000, in Las Vegas. We invite 1-2 pp. abstracts on the following topics under the organizing principle of “frontiers”:
- gender, women, queer theory, domestic ideology
- race and/or ethnicity
- psychology and physiology
- sensation, sentiment, sympathy, the body
- commerce, economics, gambling
- expansionism, colonialism, imperialism, the North Atlantic, European connections
- class, the marketplace, popular culture, the canon
- cultural spaces of the 1790s: gothicicms, romanticisms, revolution, translation
- history of the book/ literary marketplace
- republicanism, liberalism, countersubversion, right-wing paranoia
- history and historiography, historical time, revolutionary time, narratology, epistolarity
- geography, urbanism, space, topography, domesticity, architecture
- Open Topics
Send abstracts by May 15, 2000 to Martin Brueckner at the address below.
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