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Abstracts Due Oct. 20, 2008

In chapter 11 of Middlemarch, George Eliot uses the phrase “fresh threads of connection” to refer to the slow and gradual changes that occurred in provincial England, especially in relationships between towns and rural areas. While some connections, like the ones Eliot describes, are forged and acknowledged in the present, other connections, like that depicted in the illustration above, may quietly exist on the outskirts of what appears to be sharply and insistently divided. Picking up these threads, this conference aims to stitch together similarly fresh and unexpected connections in the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers—whether those connections are ones that we generate through our research or discover to have existed in the past. Surprising connections can arise between people (whether individuals or cultures), within and between texts and genres, and in the juxtapositions that scholars construct among texts, theories, and disciplines. In focusing on these fresh connections that we discover or create, this conference hopes to honor rigorous and innovative scholarship, while also creating space for further exciting connections among diverse scholars and ideas. Unexpected connections can include (but are not limited to) any of the following:

Crossing boundaries Transatlanatic alliances Women's travel Meeting places

Correspondence Culture shock Colonial encounters

Anachronism Adaptation and allusion Re-envisioning the canon Rewriting the past, revising the present

Memory and memorials Hauntings Prophesies and predictions

Unlikely friendships and families of choice Surprising political alignments Mixed company Inter-racial relationships

Solidarity across class Communities, congregations, and clubs Patients and practitioners

Phonography to photography Bicycling and omnibus Telegraph and telephones

Printing, publishing, typewriting Domestic and food science Medicine and psychology

Mixed genres Collage and quotation

Periodical juxtapositions Unexpected collections and anthologies

Interdisciplinarity Women authors as critics

Innovative responses to critical impasses Fresh critical perspectives