cfp.english.upenn.edu

Deadline extended til January 7, 2013
Call for Papers
Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing
University of Reading Early Modern Studies Conference, 9 - 11 July 2013

We invite papers for the 2013 Reading Early Modern Studies Conference on any aspect of the various material cultures through which early modern women’s writing has been produced, transmitted and received. Criticism of the last decade has increasingly emphasised women’s engagement with diverse generic forms and modes of circulation, expanding the parameters of the field beyond literary interpretation of the texts themselves to a new engagement with their textual histories. This strand of this conference builds upon the increased visibility of form and transmission in the field to focus specifically on early modern women’s engagement with material textual cultures: the material objects they produced, the forms in which they wrote, the ways in which they circulated their work and the ways in which their texts were read by both their contemporary and later audiences. Questions that might be considered include: How was early modern women’s writing originally packaged and promoted, how did it circulate in its contemporary contexts, and how was it read in its original publication and in later revisions and redactions? How do we configure publication and authorship in relation to early modern women’s writing? What shifts are necessitated by recent theories within history of the book scholarship that view texts as material artefact, textual collage, social network, publication event and collaborative enterprise? What relation do the material cultures of early modern women’s writing have to the material cultures surrounding male-authored writing of the period?
Papers may be on any aspect of the material cultures of early modern women’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 for complete panels, roundtables, and workshops on women’s writing from any nation in the early modern period. Please send proposals of @200 words to Wendy Alexander (Wendy.Alexander@newcastle.edu.au) before January 7, 2012.