ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion Symposium
In Form of War: Emotions and Warfare in Writing 1300-1820
The focus of this symposium is on the ways in which writings in various forms – including chronicle, autobiography, romance, epic, theatre, treatise, letter and journal – have responded to the emotional experience of war. Bringing together leading scholars in medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic studies,’In Form of War’: Emotions and Warfare in Writing, 1300-1820 will trace continuities and changes in the emotional register of violent conflict as it has been mediated and transmitted to modernity in the written record of the European past.’In Form of War’ covers English and French examples from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, seeking to trace the development of key discourses of emotion in and about war into the present day. The participants will consider how traditional and emergent forms of writing have shaped the emotional significance of war for readers in successive historical periods, and how emotions have been enlisted in the service of particular wartime agendas. Their collective purpose is to analyse the emotions of war from various viewpoints: representations of the emotional experience of combatants, civilians and spectators; textual, literary and theatrical productions which adapt war themes for particular emotional effects, including propaganda; studies of generic, historiographical and performance traditions of the emotions involved in war; and studies that reflect on the historical, philosophical and thematic frameworks in which war writing is constructed emotionally.
Speakers include:
Craig Taylor (York); Catherine Nall (Royal Holloway, London); Tracy Adams (Auckland); Penelope Woods (UWA); Bob White (UWA); Katrina O’Loughlin (UWA); Andrew Lynch (UWA); Stephanie Downes (Melbourne); Neil Ramsey (UNSW); Peter Sherlock (MCD University of Divinity).
The symposium will be preceded by a public lecture in the evening of June 26 by Craig Taylor on ‘The Trials of Joan of Arc’.
For further information contact Pam Bond at:
Tel: +61 8 6488 3858 or pam.bond@uwa.edu.au