Poétique de la 'catastrophe' / A Poetic of 'Catastrophe' : Visual and Literary Representations of the English Regicide in Early Modern Europe.

[this via the LRS list]

Institut du Monde Anglophone
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle- Paris III, Séminaire Epistémè (Responsable : Line Cottegnies) (EA 4398 : PRISMES / PEARL)

* CALL FOR PAPERS*
*CONFERENCE *
*Friday 11 June 2010*
*Maison de la Recherche (Sorbonne Nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris)*

In 1649 the beheading of a Christian monarch by his own people stupified all of Europe. It was an event that was to haunt several generations, like Mary Stuart’s execution in 1587. It inspired the French moralist Blaise Pascal to write a maxim on the instability of all things : « Could the man who cherished the friendships of the King of England, the King of Poland and the Queen of Sweden have thought he would one day be without a haven ? »

These two regicides gave rise to an abundant literature and a host of visual representations all over Europe. In addition to a number of polemic essays, these regicides spawned a whole literature of its own including narrative pamphlets, both fictional and dramatized, novels, plays, ballads and numerous elegies and funeral orisons, many of which remained anonymous. Rather than reconsider the polemical arguments for and against the execution of royals, this conference will be interested in papers dedicated to the literary and visual representations of the two regicides in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England and in continental Europe. Special attention will be paid to the discursive strategies in these works to thematize or sublimate the feeling of 'catastrophe', disaster or cataclysm that is often used to describe the monarch’s death.

This first conference will lead to a second day conference in 2010-2011.

100-word abstracts should be sent to Line Cottegnies (line.cottegnies@univ-paris3.fr ) and Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille (claire.gheeraert@univ-rouen.fr ) before 31 January 2010, with a short biography.

For more information: http://www.etudes-episteme.org