Upcoming Events

SYMPOSIUM

The RED team is organising a symposium on Women’s Reading in the Nineteenth Century, which will

take place on Thursday, 26 March 2009 at the Institute of English Studies, London.

Confirmed speakers include Rosalind Crone, Katie Halsey, Gill Sutherland and David Finkelstein, and papers will focus on the different ways in which nineteenth-century female readers reacted to the many and various texts that

they encountered. The day will end with a visit to the Women’s Library in Whitechapel, including a guided tour of the collections, and a look at the exhibition Between the Covers: the Politics and Pleasure of Women's Magazines.

For further information, please contact Shafquat Towheed (S.S.Towheed@open.ac.uk), Rosalind Crone

(R.H.Crone@open.ac.uk) or Katie Halsey (Katie.Halsey@sas.ac.uk)

SEMINAR SERIES

Seminars in Book History and Bibliography

Organised by the Book History Research Group, the Open University, and the Institute of English

Studies, University of London.

Organiser: Dr Shafquat Towheed , Open University.

2008-2009: Transatlantic Publishing

Wednesdays, 17:30-19:00

Venue: Room ST273 (2nd Floor, Stewart House), Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU. Tel:

0207 8628675

• 22 October 2008 – Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London), ‘“Our Time is Time of Fairly Tales”: Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales across the media and the Atlantic’

• 19 November 2008 – Amy Flanders (IES, University of London), ‘Sharing the World: how British and American publishers negotiated the international Anglophone book trade, 1940-1960.’

• 3 December 2008 – Eric White (Anglia Ruskin University), ‘Modernist Journals, Transatlantic Print Culture, and the Rise of the American Avant-Garde’

• 28 January 2009 – Kate Macdonald (University of Ghent), ‘The American editions of John Buchan, 1875-1940’

• 11 February 2009 – Claire Parfait (Université Paris 13), ‘Transatlantic Publishing and the Anti-Slavery Debate, 1840s-1850s’

• 25 February 2009 – Caroline Copeland (Napier University, Edinburgh), ‘Writing for her life: Katherine Cecil Thurston’s exploitation of celebrity’

• 11 March 2009 – Sara Haslam (The Open University), ‘Publishing Parade’s End’

The theme for the 2009-2010 seminar series will be 'The History of Reading'. If you are interested in

giving a paper please contact Dr Shafquat Towheed (S.S.Towheed@open.ac.uk)

CONFERENCE

Reading and the Age of Gladstone

23-25 January 2009

St Deiniol’s Library

Several recent and ongoing projects have sought to provide new histories of the book and examine the role and position of readers within that history. This conference not only aims to explore the issues that surround reading in the period c1830-1901, it also seeks to explore the ways in which the Victorian period is read today. Increased literacy, unprecedented developments in publishing, the widespread availability of texts through periodicals and a new library culture: all mark out the nineteenth century as

one of the most active in terms of the ‘reading experience’. But how did readers of the time set about their task, and how should the modern critic or teacher set about theirs? What engagement did readers in the period have with the whole machinery of producing and disseminating books, with publishing houses, with libraries, with periodicals, and how do such material considerations affect our reading of the Victorians today? What did the act of reading mean for them – and what does it mean for us?

The conference will take place at St Deiniol’s Library, which was founded by the Victorian statesman and

polymath William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898). The Library is the National Memorial to Gladstone and is both the only residential library and purpose-built prime ministerial library in the United Kingdom. Part of the programme will consist of the official launch of the Gladstone’s Reading Database. The research for this project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2006-09), has been conducted at St Deiniol’s, and database represents a virtual recreation of Gladstone’s library, and a unique and

comprehensive record of his reading of each item. For further details about the database, please contact

m.d.bradley@liverpool.ac.uk.

A Gladstone Centre for Victorian Studies in Wales and the North West Conference in partnership with

the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Victorian Studies.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Romantic Circulations: The 11th biennial International conference of the British Association for

Romantic Studies (BARS)

23-26 July 2009

Roehampton University, London, UK

Some of the most productive recent work on the literature and culture of the Romantic period has explored ideas of circulation. The range of scholarship influenced by this approach includes studies of sociability, reading, publishing, anthologizing, conversation, visual and verbal cultures, the history of affect, medicine and disease, and colonialism and slavery. This aim of ‘Romantic Circulations’ is to investigate the transmission of Romantic ideas, knowledge, cultural forms and literary discourses in the context of changing relations between artist and audience, writer and reader, producer and consumer, elite and popular, national and trans-national.

Topics might include, but not be limited by the following:

• The circulation of sympathy: models of the social as a system of circulation.

• The circulation and transformation of ideas: Conversation and sociability; lectures and debating

clubs; education, Sunday schools.

• Reading, reception and audiences: studies of the transmission and reception of visual and verbal

texts in the period.

• Visual Circulation: the dissemination of paintings and prints; extra-illustration, marginalia and

Grangerization; public spectacle and galleries.

• Circulation of print: Anthologies, pamphlets, publishing, libraries, lending and borrowing;

circulation through translation.

• Economies of circulation: money as a material object; economic theory and political economy; the

circulation of objects.

• Travel and Technologies of circulation: Transport by road, river, canal, balloon; the post.

• Metaphors of circulation: water, fountains and light.

• Circulation and the body: Blood and medical circulation; contamination and disease; sexual

circulation: libertinism and prostitution.

• Trade, commerce and empire: Romantic colonialism; utopias; slavery; orientalism.

Please send 200-word proposals for 20-minute papers and brief affiliation details to:

I.Haywood@roehampton.ac.uk. Deadline for submission: 31 October 2008.

Conference organisers: Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews

Conference website:

http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/romanticcirculations/

CALL FOR PAPERS

What Did Mr Miniver Read? The Fears and Aspirations of the "Masculine Middlebrow" Writer, 1880-1950

A two-day conference hosted by the Institute of English Studies, London

13-14 March 2009

Writers of the feminine middlebrow have been studied with increasing discernment and energy since the publication of many forgotten titles by women novelists by Virago from 1977, and by Persephone Books from 1999. Increasingly research has sought to link texts by both male and female writers associated with middlebrow tastes and to identify the kinds of cultural status they were afforded or denied. This

conference focuses on the masculine middlebrow: texts aimed at Mr rather than Mrs Miniver. We aim to look in the den, and on his side of the bed, rather than on her bedside table. ‘Middlebrow' was a pejorative term by 1925, and can be traced as an increasingly complex social indicator until after the Second World War. The cultural tastes of the ‘middling sorts' became increasingly difficult to police and categorise. Though the cultural distinctions reflected in the use of the term persist to this day, we wish to encourage examination of the texts produced during the period when the culture wars were fiercest: the period 1880-1950. In rereading texts, some forgotten and long disregarded, we also revisit works which are unfashionable and morally repugnant to many in our own time. For a better understanding of middlebrow we need to be open to these aspects, and to understand what the ‘ordinary' reader of the day was absorbing from the texts of the ‘masculine middlebrow'. We invite abstracts for papers which consider the fears and aspirations expressed in middlebrow texts by masculine authors and which were associated with a ‘middlebrow' readership. We are particularly interested in issues arising from the list of suggestions below:

• Which periodicals were associated with a masculine middlebrow audience?

• Did certain genres, such as travel, biographies, and whodunits, address a specifically masculine rather than a feminine readership?

• Can ‘masculine middlebrow' reading be associated with different social classes? Which cultural zones can be securely identified with class strata?

• Did club libraries have the same reading and borrowing patterns as municipal libraries, works libraries, or army libraries?

• Who was ‘safe'? Why were some novelists associated with ‘the ageing intellectual'? Why was Shakespeare ‘nasty ranting stuff'? What role did anti-intellectualism play?

• Was John Buchan read for his historical novels or his thrillers? What happened to the masculine middlebrow texts that crossed the borders of cultural classification?

• What role did texts about the occult play in middlebrow reading? We are interested in papers which relate the esoterica of Charles Williams, Aleister Crowley and Arthur Machen to their readers' lives and wishes.

• How did society deal with ‘problem' novelists, such as Warwick Deeping, Gilbert Frankau, and A S M Hutchinson?

• Who were the taste formers of the ‘masculine middlebrow'? How influential were Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, for example, as novelists and journalists?

You should expect your final conference presentation to last for 20 minutes. Please attach this information to your abstracts:

• name

• academic affiliation (not obligatory: we welcome contributions from independent scholars)

• contact email address

• any relevant publications

• a short account of how masculine middlebrow fits into your past or current research (this is without prejudice to your application: it will help us understand which authors or issues are being worked on, and where)

• whether you need an early decision on acceptance to enable an application for travel funding to be

made

• whether you need particular facilities or equipment for your proposed presentation

Organisers: Dr Mary Grover, University of Sheffield Hallam (mkg0401@aol.com) and Dr Kate

Macdonald, University of Ghent (kate.macdonald@ugent.be). Please send abstracts to

kate.macdonald@ugent.be by 28 September 2008.

Enquiries: Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street,

London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email jon.millington@sas.ac.uk

CALL FOR PAPERS

SHARP 2009: Tradition & InnovatioN - The state of book history / Le point sur l'histoire du livre

23 - 27 June 2009

St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, Canada

The conference theme, Tradition & InnovatioN, provides an opportunity to explore developments in the field of Book History. Professor Natalie Zemon Davis (Princeton and the University of Toronto) and Professor Dominique Kalifa (Paris 1) will deliver plenary addresses.

In keeping with previous SHARP conferences, we welcome proposals on all aspects of book history and print culture, but especially those that address issues related to the conference theme, such as:

• the future of the discipline

• methodologies: theory versus case studies?

• the legacy of material bibliography

• the 'newmedia' and book culture

• trans-national approaches

• the technologies of reading / assessing readerships

• the evolving nature of authorship

• book history and publishing studies

Presenters must be members of SHARP (by the time of registration) in order to present at the conference.

For information on membership, please visit the SHARP website at http://www.sharpweb.org/

Proposals may be submitted in English or French for: a) individual papers of 20 minutes, which will be combined into 90-minute panel sessions by the Programme Committee; or, b) organized panels of three papers.

Deadline for submission is 30 November 2008.

Conference website: http://www.utoronto.ca/stmikes/sharp2009/

2009 RSS CONFERENCE ON RECEPTION STUDY

Purdue University

September 12-13, 2009

See the announcement on this website