Melissa J. Ganz

Transatlantic Fictions

This panel seeks to examine Anglo-American literary and cultural relations from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth.  How do British writers use American settings to imagine the relationship between the Old World and the New?  How do early American writers draw upon and/or contest British literary and political traditions?  In what ways do cross-cultural encounters in novels, plays, poems, letters, or autobiographies reflect and/or shape constructions of gender, race, and nation in the Enlightenment?  Panelists might examine scenes of trade or travel or accounts of slavery, captivity, revolution, or war.  Papers that reflect upon the historical, theoretical, or methodological implications of their analyses and/or that situate readings of individual texts in the context of recent debates in transatlantic studies are especially welcome.

Fiction and Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment

From the casuistical dilemmas that permeate Defoe’s fiction to the ethical cases that mark Austen’s prose, eighteenth-century novelists show a keen interest in questions of moral philosophy.  This panel seeks to investigate the overlapping concerns and mutual influences of novelists and ethicists in the Enlightenment.  How do imaginative writers draw upon and/or challenge contemporary theories of justice?  In what ways do novelists respond to or critique ideas about contract, consent, sympathy, marriage, slavery, revolution, or reform?  Papers might pair a novelist with a philosopher, or they might offer a broader assessment of the relationship between fiction and ethics in this period.  Alternatively, they might examine the uses of fiction or narrative in philosophical texts.

Send one-page abstracts for either panel to Melissa Ganz (mganz at fas.harvard.edu) by September 15, 2011.  

For more information about ASECS and the 2012 conference, see http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/.