Call for Papers

2027 MLA Convention – January 7-10, 2027, Los Angeles, CA

Panel sponsored by the Lessing Society      

Emancipatory Narratives in Eighteenth-Century German Literature and Drama                                                                  

“The totality of the happiness of each member is the happiness of the state. […] Any other good fortune of the state for which even a few members suffer and must suffer is merely a cover-up for tyranny.” By the time G.E. Lessing formulated this statement in Ernst und Falk (1778), political debates across Europe had long become inseparable from questions of natural rights, human equality, and the conditions under which power could claim legitimacy. The theoretical rethinking of concepts such as ‘tyranny’ and ‘despotism’, to which Lessing’s quote points, provided further effective – if not uncontradictory – tools for diagnosing coercion in different forms (Koebner, Turchetti). In the German-speaking lands, however, philosophical discourses on emancipation unfolded within a fragmented political landscape marked by lingering feudal structures and pervasive censorship.

Within this context, literature and drama emerged as crucial sites for negotiating the premises and possibilities of emancipation. Plays staged tensions between despotic rule and individual freedom, whether by displacing these conflicts in time or space – such as in antiquity or the Orient – or by exposing oppression in contemporary bourgeois milieus.Novels and moral weeklies likewise engaged with questions of gender, education, and self-determination. Literary texts also registered Europe’s entanglement with colonial expansion, racial hierarchies, and slavery, at times reproducing and at others criticizing these formations. Well before the French Revolution, many works grappled with the tension between Enlightenment reform and the specter of armed emancipation, exploring the delicate boundary between ethical principle and violent resistance. Concepts of Vernunft, Toleranz and Humanität thereby offered powerful frameworks for envisioning emancipation, while also exposing the exclusions and contradictions inherent in Enlightenment understandings of it (Pečar/Tricoire).

This panel invites contributions examining how eighteenth-century German literature and drama translated ideas and debates on emancipation into imaginative form. We welcome papers that explore representations of social, political, or colonial emancipation; the narrative and discursive strategies through which oppression and resistance are staged; the use of historical reference and geographical displacement as aesthetic devices or responses to censorship; and the ways literary forms enabled, interrogated or constrained visions of freedom across axes of power, property, gender, and race.

Please send a 250-word abstract along with a short bio to Gaby Pailer (pailer.gaby@ubc.ca) and Elena Stramaglia (elena.stramaglia@fau.de) by March 20, 2026.

Contact Information

Elena Stramaglia, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Gaby Pailer, University of British Columbia

Contact Email

elena.stramaglia@fau.de