CFP

Call for papers:

South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Convention
November 9-11, 2007
Renaissance Hotel Downtown, Atlanta
Deadline for proposals: April 10, 2007
Old English Session “Responses to War”


Tacitus, in The Agricola and Germania, identifies a range of factors--
political, social, and economic--that shaped the Germanic/medieval response to
war; according to him, war made its way into religion, feasting, the lives of
children, and even the marriage ceremony. This session welcomes 20-minute
papers that shed insight on the influences and responses to war and related
topics in Old English literature and culture.  The following list of paper
suggestions is not exhaustive.  Please send one page abstracts to
Emily Redman,
Purdue University, via email at dunke@purdue.edu by April 10, 2007.


Aesthetic reactions to war as evidenced in Old English language, literature,
art, and weaponry/artifacts;
Ecclesiastical and secular responses to war, “war” between Church and State,
war between Church and indigenous belief systems, saint’s lives and Holy War,
war between individual and the State/Church;
War out of times of peace, strife born out of feasting in the hall, war and/as
negotiation;
Women and war, shield maidens, wives, mothers, daughters, infants, peace
weavers, the childless woman, the woman lamenting, woman as stabilizer;
Aspects of battle, such as warriors, deities, rituals, ritual behavior and
ritual speech, vows and promises, weapons and armor, individual weapons, maps,
the landscape, armies, war machines, horses and other animals;
War rhetoric, colonialism, war methods, the emotional and the
strategic, battle
descriptions, function of wyrd;
Enemies and war, monsters and the monstrous, the “bad guys and villains,” the
enemy from within your own camp, scapegoating, otherness;
The aftermath of war, the dead, wounds and the wounded, “last words
of a fallen
warrior,” war and peace, wereguild;
Studies of individual war-related Old English words or groups of words and
their contexts;
Reponses to war in history and legend;
Material culture and war