Keynote Speakers:
- Prof. Sylvia Adamson (Emeritus Professor, University of Sheffield, UK)
- Dr. Joe Bray (University of Sheffield, UK)
- Prof. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Participants:
- Prof. Anne Bandry-Scubbi (Université de Strasbourg)
- Dr. Rebecca Anne Barr (National University of Ireland)
- Dr. Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press)
- Prof. Michele Cohen (Richmond American International University in London)
- Dr. Juliette Dorotte (Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV))
- Dr. Michael Johnduff (Princeton University)
- Dr Anna M. Fitzer (University of Hull)
- Prof. Antonia Forster (University of Akron)
- Dr. Jane Hodson (University of Sheffield)
- Dr. Bill Hughes (University of Sheffield)
- Prof. Katharine Kittredge (Ithaca College)
- Prof. Jacqueline M. Labbe (University of Warwick)
- Dr. Jenny McAuley (Oxford University)
- Prof. Carol Percy (University of Toronto)
- Dr. Anne Toner (Trinity College, University of Cambridge)
- Prof. Miriam L. Wallace (New College of Florida)
Recent scholarship has questioned established accounts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, revising traditional periodisations in order to foreground continuities, overlaps, and dialogues. The nature of current scholarship itself reflects the move to dissolve former boundaries, with the linguistic turn of literary scholarship in the 1980s contributing to revisionist discussions of style during periods traditionally described as Enlightenment or Romantic. However, although there has been steady linguistic interest in the poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, developments in the style of prose fiction of the period remain largely unexplored. Fiction written by women offers a particularly rich site of investigation.
A glance at an archival resource such as that at Chawton House Library (http://library.chawton.org/heritage/) confirms that women writers made significant contributions to fiction throughout the period 1750-1830. Women writers worked in a variety of genres, ranging from the gothic and historic, to novels of sentiment and manners; they produced hybrid forms, such as gothic romance or the moral novel, and hybridizations which drew on European fiction through their work with translations; women writers experimented with form also, producing innovative narrative strategies, and metafictional narrations. Such novels allowed their writers to engage with contemporary debates on gender, class, regionalism, nationalism, language, identity and other social and political issues.
This conference aims to bring together scholars working at the interface of language and literature, who are interested in the historicization of literary language, style practices and effects in the fiction of this broad period. In particular, the conference invites contributions from scholars interested in works by women, or works traditionally categorized as being predominantly for female reception. The organisers invite papers which consider:
- How writers made choices of language for generic or thematic purposes
- How far writers' linguistic choices were influenced by contemporary attitudes to standard or regional Englishes, and by contemporary theorizations of language that related it to notions of thought, 'truth', ethics and identity.
- In what ways editorial decisions and printing conventions manifest themselves in stylistic features in fiction
- The extent to which the aestheticization of literary style by periodical reviews influences writers' language choices
Organisers:
- Victorina González-Díaz (University of Liverpool)
- Christina Davidson (University of Southampton)
- Gillian Dow (University of Southampton and Chawton House)
For any questions or more information, please send an e-mail to info@languageapproachesatchawton.co.uk
