(General proposals for special sessions should be limited to 500 words [or 1000 words if comprising sub-proposals] and emailed to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu no later than March 1, 2009.)

1. Romantic Science and the City
2. Cities and Empires
3. Jews and the City
4. Romantic Interiors
5. Sex and the City
6. Cities and Citizens: Romanticism in the Liberal Metropolis
7. Romanticism and Urban Gothic
8. The Journey to the City: Romanticisms in African American and Caribbean Literatures
9. Urban Planning in the Romantic Era
10. Romantic Excess and the City
11. Knowing Your Place: Urban and Rural Landscape in Romantic Literature


1. Romantic Science and the City

Like the art and literature, Romantic science was divided between the countryside and the city. New descriptive sciences,  astronomy, geology, biology/ photosynthesis, for example, drew scientists  out of the laboratories and into the natural world. The experimental and theoretical sciences, however, such as mathematics, physics, even medicine, depended on urban communities to exchange and  disseminate ideas. In both, art and literature were significant, often defining.   

Please send 250 word proposals for papers that account for and characterize urban science or distinguish between city and country science or that consider the role of art and literature in shaping and disseminating urban as well as country science to mgaull@bu.edu. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session.  The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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2. Cities and Empires  

If you imagine Romanticism as a view of the city from the country, you see one thing.  If you imagine it as a view from the city of the country, though this time of the European periphery and the regions beyond, you see quite another.  To what extent did Europeans presuppose an urban perspective in considering other cultures–cultures that were often geographically remote, technologically less advanced, and demographically less urbanized?  Or is there a Romantic countryside-to-countryside sensibility that crosses, say, the divide between Europe and the rest of the world?  Alternatively, can we read back from the present and find city-to-city transcontinental connections, or even contemplations of the non-European city from the European countryside? 

In other words, the aim of this session is to map the urban-rural divide onto the European-non-European one.  No particular interpretation of this mapping, including its ultimate value, is assumed.  Since a topic of this sort runs the risk of becoming narrowly thematic, papers attentive to possible relationships between outlook and medium of expression or formal considerations are particularly welcome.  

Please send proposals of 500 words or less to Walter Cohen, wic1@cornell.edu. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session.  The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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3. Jews and the City 

Historically, one effect of European Romanticism was the formal reintroduction of Jews into the city. Although from the Renaissance on, some Jews did reside in various cities throughout Europe, there were many restrictions imposed against them, and it wasn’t until the Romantic Period that Europeans began to face the realities of what would eventually be called “the Jewish Question”: how – and whether – to integrate Jews into their communities. Reentry posed problems for the Jews, as well, for the relaxation of external restrictions undermined the traditional religious authorities, resulting in an internal debate that corresponded to that of the dominant community, as Jews questioned the ultimate cost of city life for them.
 
For this special session, Jews and the City, I would like to invite papers dealing with both sides of the question, considering how the dominant community grappled with the problem of integrating the Jewish minority into the city, and how the Jews debated the cultural and religious effects of assimilation. Paper topics can relate to any of the major disciplines embraced by the International Conference on Romanticism: literary studies; history; philosophy; political science. Possible topics might include, though are not limited to: 

 * Christian writers writing about the problem of Jews in the city
 * Jewish writers dealing with the realities of living in the city
 * The historical debate over Jewish emancipation
 * The historical impact of Jewish emancipation
 * Jewish influences on Western intellectualism
 * Christian influences on Jewish intellectualism
 * Expansionism into Middle Eastern cities
 
Please send proposals of 500 words or less to Sheila Spector, sheilaspector@msn.com. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session. The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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4. Romantic Interiors 

In Book I of The Prelude Wordsworth describes himself as being released from the city’s “house of bondage.” For him the experience of leaving the “prison” of the city’s walls serves as a necessary prerequisite to writing the great poem of the mind. If Romanticism is in part characterized by what has been called an inward turn, how does this turn manifest itself in the city’s interior spaces? Must one do as Wordsworth does, and leave the city in order to properly look inwards?

This session invites papers that analyze the emotional experience of being in indoor spaces of all sorts, from what we might call “public” interiors: courtrooms, theaters, and drinking holes, to “private” interiors such as bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens. How does the construction of such interior spaces, and the functions they are designated for, influence the development and/or actions of literary characters or their authors?

Also of particular interest are city spaces on the margin—those that exist between outside and inside, such as the urban street. Can the creation of grand and elegant public streets (such as, for example, John Nash’s 1825 Regent Street in London) help us bridge the urban-rural divide?

Please send proposals of 500 words or less to Charles Carroll, charles@literatureinvreview.com. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session.  The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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5. Sex and the City

In recent years, we have seen the commonly held belief that men and women inhabited ‘separate spheres’ during the Romantic period significantly challenged and revised.  In her influential book The Gentleman’s Daughter, Amanda Vickery suggests instead that the various commercial and industrial revolutions which took place in the late eighteenth century city created an altogether new gender system – “indeed the modern gender system” (3).  This panel seeks to explore how the rise of the city in the Romantic period impacted shifting conceptions of gender, extending also into the category of sexuality.  What role does the city play in altering traditional notions of gender?  How does the city incite new possibilities for sexual expression?  Does the city’s architecture speak to innovative ways of reading the body in the Romantic period?  How do arguments about gender and sexuality change as we move to and between different cities?

From the silencing of Dorothy in William Wordsworth’s rumination on the city in “Tintern Abbey” to Walt Whitman’s invocation of Manhattan as the “City of Orgies,” it is clear that within the context of the urban in the Romantic period, issues of gender and sexuality abound.  Papers exploring these or any other questions related to “sex and the city” are welcome.  Transatlantic, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.  Please send proposals of 500 words or less to Diana Koretsky, dkoretsk@bucknell.edu. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session.  The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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6. Cities and Citizens: Romanticism in the Liberal Metropolis

This panel explores the connection between the rise of political and economic liberalism and the Romantic movement in the arts, specifically by examining the city as a site where a liberal body politic first took root and from which it derived its forms. We begin with the observation that leading Romantics of the 1810s and 1820s explicitly foregrounded their kinship with the doctrines of the nascent liberal party in France, itself inspired by the liberales of Napoleonic Spain. We ask why Byron and Shelley felt the need to found a journal named “The Liberal” in 1823 or what led Victor Hugo to affirm, in his 1830 preface to Hernani, that “romanticism is but liberalism in literature.” To what extent do Romantic aesthetics engage with liberal political principles and economic theories? And how does the notorious capaciousness of Romanticism and liberalism as categories relate to their rapprochement?

 The centrality of urban culture to Romanticism has been demonstrated by recent scholarship on so-called plebian social movements in London, Birmingham and Manchester. Cosmopolitanism, religious and ethnic toleration, the commodity pleasures of the market, the normalization of wage labor, the rise of mass media – all these historical epiphenomena suggest that liberalism, its practices and its values, had become inextricable from the urban experience in the decades following the French revolution. This panel tries to reconcile these emergent socio-political realities with the “infidel poetry,” not to mention the infidel prose, that the Romantics produced. We ask whether the famously anti-modern elements of Romanticism – evidenced in the rural poetics of the Lake School, the archaisms of Keats, Beddoes, and Scott, and the metaphysical mysticism of Shelley and Coleridge – necessarily attest to its antipathy to liberal ideologies both past and present. We suggest, rather, that these aesthetic objects stage a negotiation between particularity and generality that provides insight into liberalism’s commitment to abstraction, especially with regards to discourses of citizenship and civil rights in the context of an urban political modernity.

Consequently, we are interested in the elaboration of civic identities and practices that emerged in response to the historical moment when Romantic aesthetics co-existed with and co-opted liberal politics and in how certain subject-positions suggest collaboration and contention between those two forces. Much has been written, for example, about the political significance of Keats's urban and urbane “Cockneyism,” and its affiliation with an embryonic, anti-aristocratic, middle-class masculinity; likewise, one might consider Hazlitt's Liber Amoris as a text in which a narrative of erotic access and blockage maps out an urban landscape undergoing tremendous socio-economic changes and where sexuality, like class, delimits where one can and cannot go. By situating Romantic identities within the liberal metropolis, we hope to elucidate the meaning of citizenship in this period and show how liberalism’s commitment to “institutions, and forms of things,” in Wordsworth’s words, produced a progressive discourse of social belonging that simultaneously preserved the racial, gender and class inequities that continue to divide even the most “cosmopolitan” of spaces.

Please send proposals of 500 words or to Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, gerard@uchicago.edu, and Anahid Nersessian, anahid@uchicago.edu. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session.  The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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7. Romanticism and Urban Gothic

Studies of 19^th century literature have chronicled the transformation of gothic from a genre associated with the distant to one keenly representative of the “terror next door,”  a switch noted by Henry James as “fatal to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe . . .  What are the Appenines to us or us to the Appenines?”  Just as Victorian art has been aligned with an “urban gothic” (especially in Dickens and Stoker’s Dracula), this panel explores urban sites/narratives/characters/tropes in terms of Romantic texts’ manipulation of gothic elements.  Also welcome are studies that 1) apply various theories of gothic to the specifics of this topic, including theories that define gothic in terms of the uncanny, of narrative disruption, of gender anxiety, of selfhood and agency; 2) consider historical changes in urban life in terms of the trajectory of gothic literature; or 3) analyze visual culture.

 Papers might consider but are not limited to:

• Gothic representation of historical cities, for example, Blake’s London, Wordworth’s London (including the spectacle of Bartholomew Fair) Wordsworth’s Revolutionary Paris, Austen’s Bath, Portsmouth, or London
• The trope of “the city” as nightmare, depravity, blight, Sodom, etc.
• The trope of “the city” as illegible, undefinable, Wordsworth’s “blank confusion”
• Female or queer/paranoid gothic:  sexuality and the city
• Urban gothic victims/villains (for example, chimney sweeps/priests, maids/landlords, mobs/lawyers, prostitutes/magistrates or judges);
• Urban spaces: while spaces associated with Gothic—the castle, monastery, prison, or laboratory—are often seen as isolated sites, how might we consider Gothic spaces in urban streets/urban enclosures (madhouses, prisons, clubs, cathedrals, Parliament, royal palaces, courtrooms, factories, Blake’s “dark Satanic mills,” Wordsworth’s “private courts, gloomy as coffins”)
• Urban entertainment:  panoramas, phantasmagorias

Please send proposals of 500 words or less to Lisa Plummer Crafton at lcrafton@westga.edu. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session.  The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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8. The Journey to the City: Romanticisms in African American and Caribbean Literatures 

One of the defining tropes of Romantic literature is “the journey,” variously characterized by Wordsworth’s “travel among unknown men,” Blake’s “mental traveller,” and Shelley’s “traveller(s) from antique lands.”  It has been argued that the journey to the metropolis most clearly demonstrates the way the city is shaped by Romanticism, and Romanticism shaped by the emergence of the modern city. However, from the 18^th century to this present moment, another “journey” has altered the metropolis; and, in kind, has transformed literary models of travel that often stage a potential transcendence of consciousness, free from a relation to the outside world. Be the city Paris, New York, Marseilles, London, Port-au-Prince, Istanbul, or Harlem, how does the African American or Caribbean journey to the metropole chronicle and critique, in one Romantic example, the “blank confusion” Wordsworth encountered when arriving at London, in The Prelude? Almost universally considered the object as opposed to the subject of such “blank confusion,” how do African American and Caribbean writers, to paraphrase Robert Hayden, “voyage through [the] death” of political and literary exclusion, to find “new life upon these shores” in their critical transformation of the varied expectations of Romantic travel?

 This panel invites papers that focus on African American and Caribbean migrations to the city that both participate in and critique a Romantic notion of “the journey.” How is the experience and narration of history, collective and individual, staged through an encounter with the metropole for African American and Caribbean subjects; how is the city in turn shaped by such an encounter? In what way are these interventions Romantic and post-Romantic in scope? What happens to the African American and Caribbean subject’s interiority when the imagination goes to work on it in an urban, as opposed to a country landscape? How is a resignification of gender, sexual, and racial differences produced or repressed by an encounter with the city? In the shift from the pre-industrial countryside to the modern city, as Alain Locke states “hurdl(ing) several generations of experience at a leap” how is the African American and Caribbean writer’s peculiar sense of time altered by a journey to what Locke calls the “prophetic” metropole? Comparative, transnational, and transatlantic approaches are encouraged.

 Please send proposals of 500 words or less to Victoria.Chevalier@Furman.edu. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session. The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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9. Urban Planning in the Romantic Era

Urban planning would not constitute itself as a distinct profession until the twentieth century, and in many ways the emergence of that profession reflects the felt need to redress the conditions of nineteenth-century cities. Manchester—the representative instance of urban life in an industrial age—almost completely lacked civic government during its explosive growth from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. In addition to Manchester’s squalor and crowds, Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England famously remarks upon the city’s paradoxical lack of planning and the nonetheless observable seclusion of the working classes to slums out of sight of the middle class.  Meanwhile, the romantic era also witnessed astonishingly diverse attempts to plan, organize, and regulate urban spaces. Architects, bureaucrats, social and moral reformers, utopian dreamers, and hucksters imagined myriad plans to create and improve urban spaces. Their plans included projected ideal towns and communities at home and abroad, as well as ambitious civic improvement projects for residential expansions, parks, cultural institutions, and monuments.

This panel invites proposals for papers that consider urban planning as practiced, represented, and inflected by romantic-era texts and images. What role does planning play in romantic aesthetics, or conversely how do romantic texts influence subsequent urban planning? Might planning offer a site for rethinking the relation between the abstractions of theory and the specificity of historicism? How did planners imagine alternatives to the conditions of contemporary urban spaces? What relations might be traced between the visual arts and the attempt to envision urban growth in maps, diagrams, and models? How do romantic texts represent, meditate, or comment upon the range of options for managing urban growth, varying from complex designs like James Craig’s 1767 plans for Edinburgh’s New Town to instances of largely self-organizing urban spaces like Manchester? How did plans for suburban development, including towns and villages, re-imagine the countryside and wilderness? What are the legacies of failed plans such as Coleridge and Southey’s Pantisocracy? To what extent do literary texts represent planning as a sister art? 

This panel welcomes interdisciplinary and Trans-Atlantic proposals. Please send proposals of 500 words or less to Sean Barry, sean.barry@rutgers.edu, and John Savarese, john.savarese@rutgers.edu. Be sure to also e-mail a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session. The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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10. Romantic Excess and the City

The rise of Romanticism coincides with the continuing advance of mechanized production and the mass availability of redundant consumer goods.  The exponential growth of industrial cities such as London were seen as massive uncontrolled accumulations of men, machines, currency, buildings, and especially things. This growth could be figured as mirroring the organic forms of the natural world as seen in Wordsworth’s invocation to London: "Rise up, thou monstrous anthill on the plain/Of the too busy world! Before me flow,/ Thou endless stream of men and moving things!"  At least part of "Book Seven" of The Prelude is given over to describing the parade of nationalities, trades, and goods that make up this flow. The city as accumulation invited humanity to examine itself as a collective phenomenon, a force of nature larger than the individual wills of its citizens, an organism in which could be seen the dynamic of chaos. Despite what might seem a dogmatic adversity to industrial culture, Romanticism had an eye for this curious unbound growth and accumulation, which shows up in their oft-times awe-filled regard of their urban subject matter.  One might make the case that Romantic authors unwittingly mirrored this dynamic both in their epic pretensions and in their often unfinished results.

This section invites papers that examine Romanticism as a "growth" industry with an underlying "aesthetic of accumulation," finding its fit expression in the urban milieu, from the private interior to the public space. Of special interest are the processes and forms of mental and material excess, repetition and redundancy, and the porous border between dynamic and mathematical sublimity. The following is a list of possible avenues into the discourse.

1) Romantic Listers, Hoarders. Collectors: the aesthetic of accumulation
2) The Artist as Generative Entity: production unto the edge of chaos
3) Turbulence in the City: nature’s massing in the habitats of men
4) Romanticism and Number: subjectivity and the mathematics of increase
5) Technological Sublimity: the romanticism of industry

Please send proposals of 500 words or less to cw.viator@verizon.net. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session.  The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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11. Knowing Your Place: Urban and Rural Landscapes in Romantic Literature

 From Wordsworth’s revolutionary Paris to Blake’s “chartered streets” of London, Romantic literature abounds with works centrally focused on place. In the work of Romantic writers, city landscapes can be presented as wild and rural landscapes as cultural icons, and the two are often juxtaposed. This session seeks to explore the interaction of urban and rural landscapes and the significance of that interaction to Romantic poetry and prose. How do city and country landscapes meet and operate within the work’s characters, form, theme, or subject? How are these landscapes polarized or not within the work? How does the author engage aspects of the urban landscape: ships, towers, domes, theatres, temples? Are these landscapes privileged over the rural or not, and to what end? Ecocritical as well as other critical perspectives are welcome. 

Send 250-word proposals to Lisbeth Chapin, chapin.L@gmc.edu; please include your name and all contact information in the abstract. Be sure to email a copy to icrnyc@ccny.cuny.edu as well, indicating that you have submitted your proposal to this session.  The deadline for submission is May 1, 2009.

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