Enfilade

Between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’: Furnishing the Elite Interior 1740-1940
European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC), Glasgow, 11-14 April 2012

Proposals due by 1 May 2011

This ESSHC session examines European and North American market practice in order to address class difference and identification in the lust for the ‘new’ of the eighteenth-century elites and the desire for the ‘old’ amongst the aspirant middle classes thereafter. As Thomas Chippendale asserted in 1762, ‘The Title-Page has already called the following Work, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, as being calculated to assist the one in the Choice, and the other in the Execution of the Designs; which are so contrived, that if no one Drawing should singly answer the Gentleman’s Taste, there will yet be found a Variety of Hints, sufficient to construct a new one’. This suggests that furnishing the elite interior could be a collaborative process between patron and cabinetmaker/upholder, as witnessed in the demand for increasingly novel styles of furniture capable of integration into the new architect-designed interiors of the later eighteenth century.

For the nouveaux riches, or those like the Wynns of Nostell Priory and the Lascelles family of Harewood House whose wealth increased dramatically as the century progressed, taste (and thus class identity) was best expressed through the acquisition of fine art, furniture and other items to fill their new town and country houses. Once such families became part of the Establishment, with associated titles and influence, their original consumption practices became the model for the next generation of arrivisti and their ‘new’ objects became the desirable ‘antiques’ of the nineteenth century. (more…)

English Catholic Women Writers, 1660-1829
Special Issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, edited by Anna Battigelli and Laura M. Stevens

Abstracts due by 1 June 2011

This special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature will focus on English Catholic women’s imaginative work as it was inflected by Catholicism or through self-identification with a Catholic minority culture during the long eighteenth century. Articles on eighteenth-century Catholic women from the British Isles, including exiled English women working abroad or in the colonies, are sought exploring topics including, though not limited to, the following:

1. the strategies English Catholic women used to express, promote, or protect their faith
2. the intersections of gender and faith, particularly in the face of anti-Catholic polemic equating all Catholics with women or with the feminine
3. women’s education
4. the role of religious houses or religious orders within literary texts or as sites of literary or artistic production
5. the reciprocal influence of Anglo-Catholic culture and Gothic literature
6. Catholic women’s political engagement as Torries or Jacobites
7. their literary, artistic, or political responses to the Catholicism of the Restoration Court, the Stuart kings, the Revolution of 1688, the Whig ascendancy, or Catholic emancipation
8. their representation of English national history or English national identity
9. their participation in the minority press.

Most of the essays will concentrate on women writers, but proposals for essays on other forms of women’s imaginative work, particularly the visual and domestic arts, are welcome. All essays should be informed by the rich repository of recent work in early modern Catholic studies. Articles should not exceed 25 pages (6250 words) and should conform to the 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. All submissions should be in Microsoft Word. Initial queries and abstracts are encouraged, though final acceptance will be determined by the completed essay. Please send abstracts by June 1, 2011 and final submissions via e-mail by September 1, 2011 to both: Anna Battigelli (SUNY, Plattsburgh), a.battigelli@att.net AND Laura M. Stevens (editor, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, University of Tulsa), laura-stevens@utulsa.edu