Call for Papers
Imagining Readers, Imagining Nations, 1750-1850

This one-day conference to be held on Saturday May 5, 2007 at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada is the second in a series of focused conferences arising from the Research Cluster, "Imagining Communities, Imagining the State, 1750-1850."

Papers are invited from all disciplines on the interface between imagined readers and the "imagined communities" of nations, states, and other social formations between 1750 and 1850. "Imagined readers" can be interpreted as any form of projected or "inscribed" reader, readership (of, say, periodical reviews and magazines), "reading audience" (in the sense Jon Klancher has given to this phrase), or indeed any actual historical readers as meditated through extant reviews, letters, journals, notebooks, etc. "Nations" may be interpreted as any of those imaginary socio-political entities that coalesced during this period, or any subset or metonym of the ideas of "nation," state," "country," "dominion," "patria," "people," "custom," "tradition," "volk," or, in more recent terms, "culture," "race," "dialect" or "ethnic identity." The "interface" between these idea-clusters can take the form of a promotion of, or a resistance to, the hegemonic ideas of "nation" that have come to define post-1850 modernity, or any combination of these two extremes.

Since this conference is oriented towards the active and practical creation of a research network, we welcome presentations of work in progress, projects seeking collaborators, or papers constructed and presented in such a way as to be open to exchange and input.

Please send a one-page proposal indicating the nature of your project and your method of presentation by March 30th, 2007 to:

Robert Lapp
Department of English Literatures
Mount Allison University
Sackville, NB, E4L 1G9
rlapp@mta.ca