Deadline extended til January 7, 2013
We invite papers for the 2013 Reading Early Modern Studies Conference onany aspect of the various material cultures through which early modernwomen’s writing has been produced, transmitted and received. Criticismof the last decade has increasingly emphasised women’s engagement withdiverse generic forms and modes of circulation, expanding the parametersof the field beyond literary interpretation of the texts themselves to anew engagement with their textual histories. This strand of thisconference builds upon the increased visibility of form and transmissionin the field to focus specifically on early modern women’s engagementwith material textual cultures: the material objects they produced, theforms in which they wrote, the ways in which they circulated their workand the ways in which their texts were read by both their contemporaryand later audiences. Questions that might be considered include: How wasearly modern women’s writing originally packaged and promoted, how didit circulate in its contemporary contexts, and how was it read in itsoriginal publication and in later revisions and redactions’ How do weconfigure publication and authorship in relation to early modern women’swriting? What shifts are necessitated by recent theories within historyof the book scholarship that view texts as material artefact, textualcollage, social network, publication event and collaborative enterprise?What relation do the material cultures of early modern women’s writinghave to the material cultures surrounding male-authored writing of theperiod’
Papers may be on any aspect of the material cultures of early modernwomen’s writing, including but not limited to the following:
? The material text
? Authorship and early modern women’s writing
? Paratexts
? Marginalia
? Circulation and reception
? Transmission and redaction
? Early modern women and patronage
? Early modern women and editing
? Early modern women and publishing
? Early modern women and print
? Manuscript cultures
? Literary networks and coteries
? Collaborative writing practices
We welcome the submission of individual papers as well as proposals forcomplete panels, roundtables, and workshops on women’s writing from anynation in the early modern period. Please send proposals of @200 wordsto Wendy Alexander (Wendy.Alexander@newcastle.edu.au) before December12, 2012.
The stream will be curated by Rosalind Smith and Patricia Pender,coordinators of an Australian Research Council project on the MaterialCultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2012-2014) and founders of theEarly Modern Women’s Research Network (EMWRN) at the University ofNewcastle, Australia. For enquiries contact Wendy Alexander, ProjectAdministrator, The Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing:Wendy.Alexander@newcastle.edu.au