Please see below for a Call for Papers for a conference on political economy in the Romantic century – this will take place at Sussex in January next year and has some exciting plenary speakers already attached.
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Writing Political Economy, 1750-1850
School of English, University of Sussex
CALL FOR PAPERS
‘Writing Political Economy, 1750-1850’ will be a two-day conference to be hosted by the School of English at the University of Sussex, UK from 15th-16th January, 2016. The event will feature plenary talks from Professor Mary Poovey (NYU) and Professor Peter de Bolla (Cambridge), and will bring together those currently working on and with political economy in literary studies and the humanities more broadly.
We are now accepting proposals for twenty-minute papers addressing political economy between 1750 and 1850. We invite papers which address the discourse of political economy from one of the perspectives sketched out below. Also welcome are papers which consider how current concerns over financial crises and the social and cultural consequences of capitalism resonate through such work, or which consider what pressure is being put on the study of political economy by current debates surrounding neoliberalism and its alternatives.
Proposals for papers should be sent to writingpoliticaleconomy@gmail.com by Friday 24th April, 2015. More information can be found on the conference website.
CONTEXT
In the years since the financial crisis of 2008, political economy has come centre stage in public consciousness. Its role as a foundational discourse through which modernity understands not just finance, but social structures, class, inequality, wealth, poverty and community is newly recognised, but is also now subject to a thorough re-examination. In such contexts, the historicity of political economy, as a discourse and mode of analysis, is rarely acknowledged. But political economy is a relatively recent discourse, emerging in the late eighteenth century as a defining achievement of Enlightenment philosophy, and bequeathing to modernity some of its fundamental concepts, including capital, credit, the market, the division of labour. The rise of political economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also contributed to a transformation of the disciplinary field and a reconfiguration of knowledge whose implications were felt in realms as diverse as literary culture, social philosophy, aesthetics, and beyond.
Our current understanding of the origins and history of political economy was transformed and deepened by the work, in the 1970s and 1980s, of intellectual historians including Istvan Hont, Michael Ignatieff and Donald Winch. In this work, with which the University of Sussex has been strongly associated, the ideas and patterns of thought to be found in political economy were parsed, sifted and contextualized with rigorous detail and erudition. This scholarship led to a conception of political economy as a discourse in which historical formulations of man’s place in the social and natural worlds also articulated the tensions and anxieties that animated contemporary commercial society.
But another phase in the study of political economy can now be identified, as political economy from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries has become the focus of ground-breaking work within English studies. This phase, which began in the 1990s and is ongoing, considers political economy alongside a plethora of other social, literary and philosophical discourses, and offers a wealth of analyses which transform not only our understanding of political economy, but of philosophy, culture, narrative, literary history and the disciplines. Collectively, such work not only enriches our understanding of the discourse of political economy; it also transforms our understanding of literary history and of literary studies itself. The rich and various work in this area includes:
• studies of political economy as a form of writing, narrative or discourse, which submit its rhetorical and philosophical gestures to intense textual and conceptual analysis
• studies of the genres and textual forms of political economic writing, and of the monetary and credit forms circulating in the economy
• comparative studies of political economic with other forms of writing, including fiction
• work on the archaeology of economic concepts and systems
• analysis of discourses of value, within and beyond economics, and their place in culture
• historical studies of the mobilisation of aesthetic and cultural critiques against the rise of ‘the dismal science’
• post-Foucauldian studies of the construction of bodies and subjects in political economy
• studies of the relations between economics and other disciplines, such as biology, politics, or the social sciences
• studies of the engagement with debates over political economy by particular literary authors, or in particular works.
Proposal for papers are invited from any of the above fields and perspectives.
ORGANIZERS
Dr. Richard Adelman & Dr. Catherine Packham,
School of English, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK