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Emily Rohrbach
Emily Rohrbach
Visiting Assistant Professor of English Emily Rohrbach presented a paper at the supernumerary meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism in Bologna, Italy, March 12-15. The conference brought together the North American and Italian Romanticism associations at the University of Bologna to explore issues of (trans)national identities and reimagined communities. 

Rohrbach presented a paper on "Austen's 'Gipsies' and Narrative Technique," suggesting that to understand the significance of an encounter with the Romani represented in Austen's Emma, one has to compare the scene, however unlikely the comparison may seem, to the ball in the preceding chapter. With this comparative analysis and sustained attention to Austen's use of narrative techniques, the paper shows how, by juxtaposing these events, Austen presents the real threats to the community as coming not from itinerant outsiders (where the community thinks), but from within, at the center of the dance scene.
 
In the encounter with the "gipsies," Austen thus dramatizes a critique of the political imaginary, insofar as she critiques the people of Highbury's need to imagine themselves as a community by envisioning culturally marginalized people as a threat to their well-being, contrary to all the evidence. The genre of the novel has been observed to maintain a peculiar capacity for helping readers to imagine the nation; at the same time that Emma fulfills that role, the novel contains its own critique.

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