Early Modern English Culture in European Perspective:
Relationships Across the Channel
Valencia (3-5 May 2023)
Facultat de Filologia, Traducció i Comunicació (Universitat de València)
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Call for Papers
Deadline extension for proposals: 6 February 2023
We are pleased to announce the 33rd SEDERI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE (SEDERI XXXIII), which will be held as an in-person event from 3 to 5 May 2023. The theme is EARLY MODERN ENGLISH CULTURE IN EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE: RELATIONSHIPS ACROSS THE CHANNEL.
The map of Europe in the 1595 Spanish edition of Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum shows colorful borders demarcating geographical, national and state identities while projecting Europe as a mythical and geographic symbol of a heritage shared by those identities. From this perspective, early modern English culture cannot be understood as developed in isolation from the European arts, politics, economy, religion, technology, commerce and education. A set of European communicative networks conformed a space of cultural encounter and exchange where ideas circulated, and that culturally, linguistically and institutionally made the emerging modern states rich and complex. An extended “in-betweenness” resulted from interactions of forms of artistic and cultural activities which took place via translation, trade, commerce, conquest, exploration, diplomacy, printing, religion, etc. and their resulting textual mobilities manifest in genres such as theatre, poetry, fiction as well as non-fiction narratives (e.g. travel literature, diaries, etc.), correspondence, etc. not only indebted to their own respective legacies but to those of neighbouring countries or to those of more distant lands. Oftentimes, such neighbouring or distant lands worked as mirrors to nations that appropriated their distinctive cultural features or re-fashioned visually, poetically and cartographically their experiences abroad according to their views and interests. While the New World provided obvious scenarios for exchange and competition across European states, channels of interconnection between modern states and regions of Europe took place in innumerable manners at global and local scales, numerous and intense enough to regard early modern Europe as a webwork in whose many images and likenesses the English nation was forged and whose borders were porous enough to be permeated by early modern English culture.
We invite contributions focusing on, yet not limited to, the following issues and questions:
Identities: To what extent the early modern literatures of England, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and other European countries, and their interrelations, contribute to the configuration of a European cultural identity, then and now? Is there any “Europeanness” in early modern English culture?
Imagined communities: How are readers and spectators of early modern English literature summoned to participate in an imagined community called Europe, then and now? How is early modern England perceived by its European neighbors?
Xenophobia, anti-foreign feeling, and nationalism in early modern Europe: How do national feelings clash and negotiate with the ‘non-European’? How is the ‘non-European’ other integrated in England and Europe? How does such integration of the non-European problematize European identity itself?
Cultural reception: How are early modern cultural works, English and non-English, received and consumed when they cross the English channel? What characterizes European representations and appropriations of early modern English culture?
Translation and adaptation: How are English texts translated and adapted across the channel? What is the impact of European works translated and adapted into English upon early modern English culture?
Fiction: To what extent are translations and adaptations of European novels agents in the development of early modern English fiction?
Drama: How did the emerging professional theatre base its conventions and stage practices on connections across the channel?
Poetry: How do poets participate in the textual mobility in Europe, both then and now?
Non-fictional prose (correspondence, diaries, sermons, biography, hagiography, etc.): Which part is played by non-fiction texts in the making-up of European identities?
Contemporary media and arts: How 20th- and 21st-century representations of early modern English culture participate in a European conversation about culture?
Women, gender, Europe and writing across European borders: How the development of distinctively feminine literary voices, English and non-English, alter the production, articulation and distribution of texts at national and transnational levels? How do the treatment of gender in anglophone culture mirror European gender politics and vice versa?
Religion: Ortelius equated Europe to Christendom: To what extent did the Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements problematize a sense of commonality for Europeans?
Early modern European utopias: How does the imagining of ‘new societies’ and ‘new worlds’ contribute to conceive views on Europe and Europeanness?
Ecocritical approaches to early modern English culture and Europe: How do natural resources and their exploitation matter with regards to the social, political and cultural connections between England and nations on the other side of the Channel? How are concerns with such exploitation of natural resources reflected, depicted and treated in anglophone and European drama, fiction, poetry and culture?
Myths: Do European myths in early modern English culture contribute to a sense of “Europeanness”?
Pedagogy: How can the teaching of early modern English culture foster a sense of European citizenship?
Digital humanities: How do digital technologies applied to the study of early modern English culture help create transnational perspectives?
Economy and trade: How does the 'new economy' (nascent capitalism) influence the production of literary, and cultural artifacts at large, in terms of content and style?
Submissions should consist of:
Name and surname
The full title of your paper
An abstract (200-300 words)
Any technical requirements for the presentation
Your institutional affiliation
Status: Prof. / Dr. / Ph. D. candidate / M. A. candidate / Other
Your SEDERI membership status (member, non-member, application submitted)
It should be sent to . The deadline for submitting proposals is 06/02/2023.
Any queries? Contact us at .
The organizing committee
María José Coperías Aguilar
Víctor Huertas Martín
Jesús Tronch Pérez
Keynote Speakers
Gerd Bayer
Gerd Bayer is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Erlangen University, Germany. He has published extensively on several areas such as postmodern and contemporary novel, postcolonial studies, Holocaust studies, genre, epistolarity and early modern prose fiction. He has taught in several European and American Universities. He is member of a number of editorial boards and peer reviewer for several journals and grant agencies. In the area of early modern literature he is the author of Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) and the editor of some collective books such as: Bayer, Gerd, and Florian Kläger, eds. Early Modern Constructions of Europe: Literature, Culture, History (New York: Routledge, 2016); Bayer, Gerd, and Ebbe Klitgard, eds. Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe (New York: Routledge, 2011). He has also authored a number of journal articles, among others: “Dragging out the Truth: Restoration Periodicals and the Textual Creation of Gendered Identities.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 79 (2019): 15-31, co-authored with Jaroslaw Jasenowski.; “Romance Self-Fashioning and the Proto-Gothic in Mary Pix’s The Inhumane Cardinal.” English Studies 95.4 (2014): 410–240; “Negotiating Ethnic Difference in Restoration Travel Fiction.” Arcadia 47.1 (2012): 34-53; “Early Modern Prose Fiction and the Place of Poetics.” Anglia 129.3/4 (2011): 362-377. He has also contributed to some collective books. Forthcoming an article in Restoration. Studies in Literature and Culture, Fall 2022.
Line Cottegnies
Line Cottegnies is Professor of early-modern English Literature at Sorbonne Université. She is the author of a monograph on the politics of wonder in Caroline poetry (L’Eclipse du regard, Droz, 1997), and has co-edited several collections, including Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France (Brill, 2016), with Sandrine Parageau. She has published extensively on seventeenth-century literature, in particular on Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn and Mary Astell. She has edited 15 plays for the Gallimard edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (2012-21), 2 Henry IV for The Norton Shakespeare 3 (2016), and co-edited Mary Sidney Herbert's Antonius and Thomas Kyd's Cornelia with Marie-Alice Belle (Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England, MHRA, 2017). She is currently editing three Aphra Behn texts for the forthcoming Cambridge University Press Complete Works.
Mark Thornton Burnett
Mark Thornton Burnett, Fellow of the English Association, Member of the Royal Irish Academy and Director of the Kenneth Branagh Archive, is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Macmillan, 1997), Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Palgrave, 2002), Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007; 2nd ed. 2013), Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and ‘Hamlet’ and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2019), the co-author of Great Shakespeareans: Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), the editor of The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Dent, 1999) and The Complete Poems of Christopher Marlowe (Everyman, 2000), and the co-editor of New Essays on ‘Hamlet’ (AMS Press, 1994), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Macmillan, 1997), Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (Macmillan, 2000), Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press, 2005), Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), Filming and Performing Renaissance History (Palgrave, 2011), The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and Women and Indian Shakespeares (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). He is series editor of the Bloomsbury Academic series, ‘Shakespeare and Adaptation’.
Visit to 'La Nau' building, including the old library (evening 3 May)
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No registrations will be accepted after 23 April 2023.
All delegates attending the conference should pay a registration fee, regardless of the fact they are presenting an individual or co-authored paper.
If you would like to attend the conference dinner, please, choose your favourite option at the end of the attached form. Don’t worry, you will be reminded of your choice at the dinner!
As for the visit to ‘La Nau’ building (the University of Valencia original premises placed in the city centre), including a visit to the old library, on Wednesday, 3 May (evening), please tick or write 0 € in the appropriate box, if you are interested in attending
Mode of Payment
Bank transfer to the following account number (Transfer charges assumed by payer):
IBAN: ES5431590040702898259029
BIC/SWIFT code: BCOEESMM159
NAME OF RECEIVER: Universitat de Valencia
Please, state ‘SEDERI 33 + Your name’ as the concept of your bank transfer.
Please, e-mail this form with transfer copy to sederi2023@uv.es
María José Coperías Aguilar
Víctor Huertas Martín
Jesús Tronch Pérez
Arturo Mora-Rioja
Rafael Negrete Portillo
Scientific Committee
Rui Carvalho Homem (Universidade de Porto)
Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University)
John Jowett (University of Birmingham)
Jesús López-Pelaez Casellas (Universidad de Jaén)
Tomás Monterrey (Universidad de La Laguna)
Juan A. Prieto Pablos (Universidad de Sevilla)
Miguel Ramalhete Gomes (Universidade de Porto)
Francesca Rayner (Universidade do Minho)
Alexander Sampson (University College London)
Sabine Schülting (Freie Universität Berlin)
Rocío G. Sumillera (Universidad de Granada)
Sonia Villegas López (Universidad de Huelva)
Venue
Facultat de Filologia, Traducció i Comunicació (Universitat de València)
Av. de Blasco Ibáñez, 32, 46010 València, Valencia, Spain