Please send abstracts to Dorothy Kim at dorothyk@humnet.ucla.edu by September 15, 2007.
Early Middle English Society I: Speaking Across Boundaries in Early Middle English Texts ca. 1100-1300
We invite abstracts that consider the ways in which early Middle English texts negotiate boundaries, as well as the implications of those negotiations, from the early twelfth century through the early fourteenth century. Broadly conceived, the term “boundaries” includes lines of demarcation perceived, inferred, or actualized contemporaneously with early Middle English texts, as well as those boundaries that scholarship has subsequently superimposed on individual texts, or on the larger early Middle English field. Areas of investigation might include texts that defy, cross, neglect, or abide by boundaries; texts that inscribe or prescribe boundaries; as well as the relationship between text and boundary with regard to the political, linguistic, geographic, temporal, or codicological, including manuscript mise-en-page.
Early Middle English Society II: Canon-Formation and the Early Middle English Period
We invite abstracts that consider the problem of early Middle English texts as “extra-canonical”: falling outside the standard canon of medieval English literature because of a history of English nationalism that binds English identity as inseparable from English language. We are interested in what a “canon” of early Middle English, materials between the Conquest and Chaucer, would include and why. How might a canon be formed from this period without merely “back”-forming it from its period-based and linguistic neighbors? Was there a way to make texts “look” worthy of canonization? Or reproduction? Is reproduction a form of what we would call canonization? Do texts do particular things to keep themselves in circulation?