Call for papers

Literary Crisis: Romanticism Before and After

Facing this unprecedented Covid-19 situation, we see how 2020 has been a year of crisis from pandemic to economic collapse to military escalation to political division to protest.

Yet these crises also suggest a transformative moment for us to rethink their perceptions of this globe, and to reshape the ways of living than what we were used to. Indeed, these conditions of crisis are also narratives that invariably echo a Romantic anxiety with our modern world. Romanticism, as a global concept, though some two hundred years ago, speaks to people’s longings to react against their predecessors, while producing significant impacts on the writings written in its wake. The Romantics writing expressed and formalized many of the avenues of our present discontentment whether William Blake looking with horror upon the “dark Satanic mills” of modernity, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein struggling with the creature he created through scientific innovation, or Edgar Allan Poe visualizing collapse in the midst of pandemic. Thus, this symposium asks how crises are conceptualized or addressed in Romanticism or literature in general. How do Romantic literature and writings before and/or after that help us cope with crises? The CFP seeks papers that explore writings about crisis, or theorize literary approach towards crisis, artificial or natural, imaginary or real, financially or environmentally, materialistically or metaphysically, privately or publicly, or otherwise. Submissions might consider how recent theories of sociologies, philosophies or ecologies might renew our ways of reading and writing about crises in our time. Presentations might also consider how to read Romanticism, before and after, in relation to contemporary events or other discourses, or how reading Romanticism might assist our understanding of crisis in unexpected ways. We welcome papers that discuss any aspect of Romanticism, thinking about how it rebuilds its past, and how it influences what we call the post-Romantic writing. We call for papers that engage in any aspect, (but are not limited) of this theme of “literary crisis”:

Potential Topics:

Anxiety and Repression (from self to interrelationships)

Chaos/Confusion of group/individual consciousness

Spatial and temporal crisis (including refugee and migration crisis)

Re-envisioning nature 

Civilization and its discontents

Crisis in masculinity or femininity 

Literature/Romanticism as disease

Natural Disaster and Apocalypse in Romanticism/Literature 

Literary representations of disease, illness, and pandemic

Institutes of Humanities in Crisis

Crisis and Change/Transformation

Transatlantic Conflicts 

Crisis in theory, philosophy, and history

Crisis and Asia

*Each presentation should be around 15 minutes (conducted in English), with 5 minutes for the Q & A session. 

In order to create a friendly platform for postgraduate students to share ideas and exchange feedback, we plan to invite each presenter to read one to two abstracts from the other presenters beforehand and provide comments for each assigned piece during the symposium. 

We also plan to organize a postgraduate academic writing/publishing workshop, organized by The Wenshan Review (https://www.wreview.org/index.php). 

We would like to encourage submission of full papers after the symposium. Selected papers will be published on our Romanticism and Its Legacies website: https://romanticlegaciestw.wixsite.com/website

Please contact us and/or submit an English abstract of 250-300 words (with 5 key words and a brief bio) to the following email: literary.crisis@gmail.com by 16 November 2020. We welcome informal enquiries and panel proposals. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by 20 November 2020.