Life and Works: The Contexts and Practices of Victorian Life-Writing
16th -17th June 2008

Keynote Speakers: Professor Kathryn Hughes (University of East Anglia),
Professor Joanne Shattock (University of Leicester), Professor David
Vincent (Open University) and Professor Colin Cruise (University of
Wales, Aberystwyth).

Keele University solicits submissions for a two-day conference to be held
in celebration of the 40th anniversary of its Victorian Studies Programme.

Victorian Britain was a nation anxious to tell its own story. In the
press, in published biography and public statues of its heroes and
through national events like the Great Exhibition the Victorians
accumulated, ordered and edited the material that defined the life of
their nation for themselves and for posterity.

This conference seeks to look at Victorian life-writing in this broader
context, seeking to understand it as part of the cultural process of self-
fashioning by examining the different forms and practices of life-writing
that developed during the nineteenth-century.

Topics might include:

Victorian biography: textual practices and formal conventions.
Victorian biography and Victorian history.
Biographical sources: letters, journals etc.
Life-writing and the press.
Biography and literary history: editing and publishing the Victorians.
Writing Victorian lives: 21st-century biographical practices
Non-textual forms of life-“writing”.
Literary legacies.

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Please send a 250-word abstract
and a brief biographical statement to a.barton_at_engl.keele.ac.uk or
d.amigoni_at_engl.keele.ac.uk by 29th February 2008.

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Received on Mon Jan 07 2008 - 12:11:35 EST