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» Events » The Unliterary Eighteenth Century: Gender and Marginal TextsThe Unliterary Eighteenth Century: Gender and Marginal Texts
This one-day symposium hosted by the Gender Institute at the Australian National University, and in collaboration with the Centre for Early Modern Studies, explores texts of the long eighteenth century that, despite their popularity and cultural centrality in their own time, have been marginalised because of their resistance to contemporary categories of literary genre, and, whatever else they might be called, are rarely if ever considered to be literary.
Their marginalisation has implications not only for our understanding of literary history but our knowledge of the history of gender and sexuality. Not only did women and anonymous writers work within “unliterary” forms, but these ephemeral and sometimes pornographic texts challenge contemporary understandings of bodies and gender. How might we better understand and appreciate the impact of these texts on eighteenth-century culture? How do they invite, and how might they resist methods of close reading? What does eighteenth-century literary studies do with the disjunction between contemporary definitions of our discipline, based around “literature” as a category, and what “literature” was understood as being in the eighteenth century?
Keynotes: Professor Kathleen Lubey, St. John's University; Professor Gillian Russell, The University of York.
Registration is free, but please register here for catering purposes.
Schedule
9.45-11.00 Session 1
9.45-10.00 Welcome, Acknowledgement
10.00-11.00 Keynote: Gillian Russell (University of York), “Writing the Ephemeral: Hester Lynch Piozzi and Elizabeth Inchbald on Queen Caroline in 1820”
11.00-11.30 Morning Tea
11.30-1.00 Session 2
11.30-12.00 Sarah Ailwood (University of Wollongong), “The Eighteenth-Century Women’s Legal Memoir”
12.00-12.30 Nikki Hessell (Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington), “Treaties and the ‘Unliterary’ Eighteenth Century”
12.30-1.00 Thomas H. Ford (La Trobe University), “Dancing contempt: an Aboriginal colonial poem”
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-4.00 Session 3
2.00-2.30 Julie McElhone (University of Sydney), “‘Let me live unenvyd & unpraisd’: uncovering female imitation in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's commonplace book (RB Add.Ms.35)”
2.30-3.00 Fauve Vanderberghe (Ghent University), “Satiric Scraps: The Re-Use of Caricatures in Women’s Scrapbook Culture of the Late Eighteenth Century”
3.00-3.30 Clara Tuite (Melbourne University), “‘a leaf of Pamela wrapt round the bacon’: Reading the papers in Byron’s ‘Ravenna Journal’”
3.30-4.00 Christina King (University of Sydney), “'More reason than madness: porcelain collecting and Lady Dorothea Banks's Dairy Book, 1807”
4.00-4.30 Afternoon Tea
4.30-6.00 Session 4
4.30-5.00 Claire Knowles (La Trobe University), “Poetry posies: the sociality of ‘light’ poetry in the eighteenth century”
5.00-5.30 Elizabeth King (Macquarie University), “Writing on the Margin: Unliterary Analysis in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews”
5.30-6.00 Amelia Dale (Australian National University) and Nicola Parsons (University of Sydney), “Harris’s List Among the Collectors: Bibliophilia and Scopophilia”
6.00-6.15 Short break
6.15-7.15 Session 5
6.15 –7.15 Keynote: Kathleen Lubey (St. John’s University), “What is a Trans Character? Literary Questions for Unliterary Texts”
