Author: modernistudies

A one-day symposium at University of Westminster on 26 October 2019.

One hundred years after its publication, the School of Humanities at the University of Westminster are hosting a one-day symposium to celebrate and interrogate Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day.

In her diary in 1920, Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘I don’t suppose I’ve ever enjoyed any writing so much as I did the last half of N. & D.’ Her happiness with the novel was characteristically short-lived. In 1932 she wrote that ‘N. & D. is dead.’

Likewise with critics, the novel has moved in and out of favour. Coming as it did after the often surreal subversion of the Bildungsroman that is The Voyage Out, it has been sometimes read by Woolf’s contemporaries and more recent critics alike as a step back towards realist fiction. Famously described by Katherine Mansfield in 1920 as ‘Jane Austen up to date,’ and by critic Randy Malamud in 1989 as ‘a stillborn modernist artefact,’ the question of where this novel exists on the spectrum between realist and modern is one that persists in Woolf criticism, right up to present day.

But as well as considerations of its position in the broad narrative of Woolf’s relationship to realism and modernism, Night and Day has provided fertile ground for critics to explore a wide range of ideas presented by its content. Its engagement with Shakespeare, with women’s suffrage, with mathematics, with class; its portrait of London; its silence on the First World War – all have led critics to new and exciting enquiries.

One hundred years after its initial publication, this one-day symposium in the heart of London seeks to encourage work that considers Night and Day and its innovations, breaking away from readings of the text as a mis-step to consider the rich, unusual, and sometimes difficult ideas that the novel offers.

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: the relationship between literature and mathematics and astronomy; dreaming and daydreaming; body consciousness; ghosts and haunting; writing practice represented in fiction; spatial geography; London and its addresses; women’s suffrage; marriage and courtship plots; literary celebrity; family portraits; generational conflict; vagueness.

We welcome papers that consider how writers other than Woolf have also explored Night and Day’s themes.

Funding is available to contribute towards speaker travel costs. Lunch will be provided.

Please send abstracts of 150–250 words for 20 minute papers to rosie.reynolds@my.westminster.ac.uk by 31 July 2019.

The period between 1750 and 1918 is widely acknowledged to have been one of dramatic societal and cultural change, not least in terms of people’s experience of the spaces in which they lived. The unparalleled urbanisation that took place over the course of the long nineteenth century necessitated new ways of existing in increasingly built up environments. The move to such locations demanded new habits, routines, and modes of movement, all of which had a discernible impact on the body. As Elizabeth Grosz points out, ‘through exercise and habitual patterns of movement, through negotiating its environment whether this be rural or urban […] [that] the body is more or less marked, constituted as appropriate, or, as the case may be, an inappropriate body for its cultural requirements’ (1994). Where, for example, the navigation of uneven rural terrain would have strengthened certain muscles, the negotiation of flat, urban streets produced a markedly different body. Beyond the purely muscular level, the countless cultural elements of the nineteenth century city also impacted in numerous ways upon the embodied subject.

This one-day interdisciplinary symposiuminvites papers that explore how the shifting relationship between the body and the built environment was interrogated in literature and culture of the long nineteenth century. The symposium aims to stimulate academic discussion on a range of topics relating to embodiment and architectural space in the period ranging from 1750-1920. As such, we welcome papers from those working in the fields of Literature, History, Medical Humanities, Geography, Architecture, Philosophy, Film and Media, Psychology, Modern Languages, Gender/Women’s Studies, Law, and Politics.

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to, considerations of: questions of ownership and access; health; urban planning; agoraphobia and other spatially related disorders; sensory perception; the diseased body; policing, surveillance, and public order/disorder; sanitation and pollution; and phenomenological approaches to the body and space.

Potential research questions might include:

• In what ways did the built environment either encourage or preclude access to certain kinds of bodies in the long nineteenth century?
• How was the relationship between the embodied subject and architectural space interrogated in literature and culture of the period?
• What impact did scientific and medical advances in the understanding of the human body have on the construction and/or organisation of the built environment?

Please send abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers to: bodybuiltenvironment@gmail.com by 17 May 2019. For further details, visit: http://bodybuiltenvironment.wordpress.com

This event is supported by the Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies, and is presented in association with the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University.

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 23 April

#LCCT2019 Call for Papers – *Deadline Extended*

London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT)
Friday & Saturday, 5–6 July 2019
Goldsmiths, University of London 

*Deadline Extended*
Now Closing: Sunday 31 March 2019

The deadline for the Call for Papers for the 8^th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted and supported by the Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP) at the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, has now been extended until Sunday, 31 March.

The LCCT is a free, inter-institutional, interdisciplinary conference in critical thought that takes place annually in different institutions across London. LCCT follows a non-hierarchical, decentralised model of organisation that undoes conventional academic distinctions between plenary lectures and break-out sessions, aiming instead to create opportunities for intellectual critical exchange regardless of participants’ disciplinary field, institutional affiliation, or seniority. LCCT has no overarching or predetermined theme.  The conference’s intellectual content and academic tone are set anew each year, stemming from thematic streams that are conceived, proposed and curated by a group of stream organisers.  The streams for #LCCT2019 are:

• Art MANIFESTOS: The future of an evolving form
• Automating inequality: AI, smart devices and the reproduction of the social
• The Cold War Then and Now: Theories and legacies
• Culture/Politics of trauma
• Difference, evolution and biology
• Gendered technologies, gender as technology
• Immanence, conflict and institution: Within and beyond Italian Theory
• Multiplying Citizenship: Beyond the subject of rights
• Radical Ventriloquism: Acts of speaking through and speaking for
• Rethinking new materialisms: Ethics, politics and aesthetics
• Thinking critically with care

The full call for papers with details of the streams can be found at:

LCCT 2019 Call for Papers

Please send abstracts for papers and presentations proposals with relevant stream title indicated in the subject line to: paper-subs@londoncritical.org. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words and must be received by the extended deadline of Sunday, 31 March 2019.

We aim to make the LCCT open and accessible to all.  For any queries about accessibility requirements, please get in touch with us at: access@londoncritical.org.
More information about the conference is available at www.londoncritical.org.

Scholarship on the contemporary has a unique relationship to questions of canonicity and value. What values shape the choices made in research and teaching on the contemporary? What canons does this work produce? And how do these values and canons relate to those produced in education and the publishing and cultural industries?

This one-day symposium will debate the ideas of canonicity and cultural value that inform research and teaching in contemporary literary studies. It aims to enable researchers at all levels, and working in all areas of contemporary literary studies, to theorise, articulate, and critique the role played by canons and values in their teaching and research, and to develop strategies for engaging with debates about canonicity and value beyond academia.

This event is supported by the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies, who have generously provided support for a number of travel awards to enable the participation of PGRs and ECRs working without institutional support.

Please see our website for details about the Call for Participants, and for details about how to apply for a bursary: https://contemporarycanons.wordpress.com/

Women in Publishing, a one-day symposium at the University of Reading, Friday 14 June 2019

“All publishing was run by many badly-paid women and a few much better-paid men”

(Diana Athill, Stet: An Editor’s Life, 2002)

Feminist book history and print culture is thriving. Recent books and projects exploring feminist publishers, modernist presses, and women’s work in periodicals and magazines has revealed the variety of ways in which women contributed to the circulation and production of nineteenth and twentieth-century print cultures. Academic interest in the value of networks and collaboration and the often overlooked aspect of women’s creative labour (#thanksfortyping) is at the forefront of some of this renewed interest in women’s diverse, deeply embedded work in publishing and the circulation of global print cultures.

This one-day symposium at the University of Reading will engage with the varied nature and roles of women’s work in twentieth and twenty-first century magazines and book publishing. Though high-profile women publishers and editors continue to attract public and scholarly attention, there are many aspects of women’s labour in the print and publishing trades, understood broadly, that are often overlooked. We invite papers exploring the broad and diverse ways in which women have shaped recent modern print cultures in a variety of roles: as translators, designers, illustrators, booksellers, advertisers, patrons, editors, travellers, office staff, publisher’s readers. We are particularly interested in work exploring transnational exchanges.

Papers may consider any of the following:

* Women’s work in the book, magazine, newspaper, and publishing trades

* Women publishers, editors, author-publishers, publisher’s readers, travellers, booksellers, office staff, printers

* Women translators, designers, illustrators

* Sex + gender + literary production and the literary marketplace

* Women as patrons, booksellers, feminist bookshops

* Archives, cataloguing, and women’s labour

* Women in publishing and the gender pay gap

* Politics and methodologies of recovery work

* Women and the suffrage press, feminist presses, lesbian presses, BAME press

* Networks/collaborations

* Women entrepreneurs and the creative industries

* Womens’ trade organisations in publishing and bookselling

Please submit abstracts (up to 200 words) and a short 2-line bio by 26 April 2019 to Dr Nicola Wilson at n.l.wilson@reading.ac.uk. Speakers will be notified by 3 May.

The event will be held at Special Collections, University of Reading, UK, with no fees to attend. https://www.reading.ac.uk/special-collections/
Organising committee: Dr Nicola Wilson, Dr Sophie Heywood, Dr Daniela la Penna.

Engaging with Twentieth-Century Pageants: Performance and Study

17 June 2019, Hosted by the School of English, University of St Andrews, Scotland

This conference seeks to foster scholarly dialogue on the methodologies of twentieth-century pageant research as well as generate discussion on the aesthetic, historical, and political significance of pageants. The conference will consider pageants’ preparation, staging, and performance; relationships to British Imperialism, gender, war, and social class; and understudied status within criticism and disciplinary study. A few topics are proposed below; additional areas of pageant scholarship are warmly encouraged.

• Pageant-specific (e.g., The Pageant of Great Women, The Pageant of Empire)
• Discipline-related (e.g., costumes, set and artistic design, book history, music)
• Writer/composer/artist-specific (e.g., Louis N. Parker, Gustav Holst, Edith Craig)
• Pageant eras or periods (e.g., Edwardian, inter-war, wartime, post-war)
• Methodological practices (e.g., location and space, archive research)
• Pageant themes (e.g., pastoral, historical, religious, suffrage, civic)
• Genre (e.g., pageant plays, pageant novels, pageant films, radio pageants)

The study of pageants (primarily outdoor amateur historical drama but also other forms such as pageant plays, pageant novels, and pageant films) is steadily increasing as researchers explore the richness of this intermedial art form. There is much potential for interdisciplinary research, largely due to pageants’ combinations of literature, music, history, art, religion, and politics. Despite the pageant genre’s relative critical obscurity, many prominent British writers, composers, directors, and actors were involved in pageants and pageant-making: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Charles Williams, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, Martin Shaw, Frank R. Benson, E. Martin Browne, Gwen Lally, Edith Craig, Ellen Terry, and Sybil Thorndike.

The conference will feature a unique musical and spoken-word performance of selections from pageants including T. S. Eliot and Martin Shaw’s The Rock (1934). The University of St Andrews Special Collections Library will also give a presentation on some of their pageant materials, including related texts published by the Hogarth Press.

The conference organisers are pleased to welcome Professor Paul Readman (King’s College London) and Dr Angela Bartie (University of Edinburgh) as panellists and speakers for the conference. Both are researchers for the pageant database The Redress of the Past.

The conference will combine round table panel discussions and scholarly papers. In the first instance, indications of a proposed topic/area of interest should be emailed to the conference organiser Parker T. Gordon (pg58@st-andrews.ac.uk) by 25 March 2019. Formal abstracts will be due on 22 April.