Katherine Singer, former site manager at Romantic Circles, and Nanora Sweet, a former electronic edition editor, have just issued a call for submissions to a special issue of Women's Writing entitled, Beyond Domesticity: Heman's in the Wider World.
Beyond Domesticity: Hemans in the Wider World
A Special Issue of Women’s Writing
Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) was the sole British woman poet to rank alongside male Romantics in publishing and sales before and after her death. She positioned herself as a cosmopolitan writer in major forms on post-Napoleonic topics, later becoming a pioneer in Biedermeier poetics (of privatized, domestic sentiment). This later development has dominated her recovery in contemporary Romanticism, enabling a reconstruction of “domesticity” itself as a discourse. However, domesticity may be as much an artifact of her life and career as a framework for it. In contrast, this special issue of Women’s Writing seeks essays on the alien, the uncanny, and the foreign in Hemans; the readerly, thinkerly, and artistic; the public, topical, and businesslike; the critical and prophetic.
How did Hemans think through the ramifications of the transatlantic and global worlds, in Europe, Canada, the Americas, the Middle East, and beyond? How did she capitalize on settings peripheral to London (Liverpool, Wales, Edinburgh, Dublin) and how develop networks around and beyond them? How did she rethink or refigure history, mediated by her interests in the medieval and the modern, empire and republic, science, travel, and more? Hemans was a skilled and savvy navigator of the literary marketplace, and what more can we understand about her intervention in and reshaping of publication culture, including periodicals and reviews, publishers and editing then and now? How does she establish dialogue with the myriad, uncanny “voices” in her texts, as paratexts and intertexts? Moreover, how does she experiment with poetics, genre, and medium through her play with a slew of forms? Finally, how does Hemans broach the philosophical through her meditations on ethics, protest, and gender? How does she theorize her relationships to male and female poetic influences, associates, and competitors?
Other topics may include but are not limited to the following areas:
· Contention with established institutions such as church, party, university, royalty
· History as drama; motifs of atrocity, exile, captivity, immolation, the scaffold
· Art, ekphrasis, the musical
· Style, lexicon, classical and Romantic poetics, traditional and innovative forms
· Transcendence, the afterlife, skepticism, consciousness, and prophecy
Please submit articles for consideration between 4000-7000 words to Katherine Singer, Assistant Professor of English, Mt. Holyoke College, ksinger [at] mtholyoke [dot] edu or Nanora Sweet, Associate Professor of English Emeritus, University of Missouri-St. Louis, sweet [at] umsl [dot] edu, by 22 April 2013. Initial queries about articles welcomed.
See instructions for authors and attached style sheet on the Women’s Writing website, http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rwow20&pa.... Instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes. For example, place of publication, publisher and date of publication appear in brackets after a book is cited for the first time. Please include an abstract, a brief biographical blurb (approximately 100 words), and six keywords suitable for indexing and abstracting services.
Editors: Angela Rehbein and Andrew Winckles