The International Hoccleve Society is pleased to invite abstracts for a sponsored session at the 55th International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 7-10, 2020) at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI:
Rediscovering Hoccleve
This session proposes to explore Hocclevean discovery, broadly construed: what it means to discover and re-discover Thomas Hoccleve and his works—in all their anxieties, politics, ethics, and self-representations. Recent scholarship has seen a fruitful upsurge in approaches to Hoccleve’s work, from such theoretical lenses as disability studies and affect theory to book-length studies from David Watt and Sebastian Langdell interrogating, respectively, the poetic processes and ecclesiological investments that shape Hoccleve’s writing. New discoveries about Hoccleve’s life and literary output continue to emerge from archival research, allowing us to revisit how we read Hoccleve’s work through an autobiographical lens, specifically the intersection of the historical scribe and bureaucrat with the narrating persona that we meet in his poetry.
We therefore invite papers that take up new directions for Hoccleve studies, re-visit Hoccleve’s poetics in light of new discoveries about the poet and his fifteenth-century environment, or witness Hoccleve articulating discoveries of his own. What can emergent ideas from theoretical sites such as new and feminist materialisms or surface reading allow us to discover in Hoccleve? How might theories not often applied to Hoccleve, such as ecocriticism or postcolonial theory, engender new readings of this poetry? How does Hoccleve’s poetry itself engage with discovery and newness; how does Hoccleve make and manage his own discoveries in the literary and historical archive that situates him? And finally, how do readers and critics discover Hoccleve? How has he been read by succeeding generations leading up the present and rediscovered by scholars who have worked to rehabilitate him; how do we, in our own fraught political and ideological context, discover Hoccleve anew?
Paper proposals or questions about the session may be directed to Arwen Taylor at hocclevesociety@gmail.com. Proposals are due by September 15, 2019; please send a completed Participant Information Form along with your submission.
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