At Home with Charles and Mary Lamb

A One-Day Conference at Christ Church, Oxford: Saturday 11 November 2006

Invited Speakers: Jane Aaron, Gurion Taussig, Kathy Watson, Duncan Wu

This will be the first one-day conference dedicated to the work of
Charles and Mary Lamb. It aims to remember the Lambs as radicals,
readers, and writers and to recreate the atmosphere of sociable
creativity recalled by Hazlitt in his accounts of those 'many lively
skirmishes' at their evening parties. Reflecting on their links with the
London stage and periodical culture as well as an early
nineteenth-century metropolitan milieu of literary sociability, the
conference will reassess the Lambs' position in the 'canon' and
highlight the continuing importance of their writing to our
understanding of the complexity of romantic literature.

In recent years, the Lambs' work has attracted increasing scholarly and
critical interest, thanks in no small measure to the Charles Lamb
Bulletin, and to studies such as Jane Aaron's A Double Singleness
(1991), Joseph Riehl's That Dangerous Figure (1998), Judith Plotz's
Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (2001) and Adriana Craciun's
Fatal Women of Romanticism (2002). More recently, wider public interest
has been drawn by Sarah Burton's biography, Double Life (2004), Kathy
Watson's The Devil Kissed Her (2004) and Peter Ackroyd's fictional The
Lambs of London (2005). This conference, supported by the Charles Lamb
Society, will aim to capitalise on the latest developments in Lamb
studies by extending recent areas of debate and exploring new lines of
inquiry.

Possible themes

Retirement and sociability
Literary collaborations and conversation
The familiar essay
Autobiography and confessional writing
The domestic Violence and inwardness
Childhood and education Time
Performance and play
Commerce and the work of writing
Reading 'against the grain'
The London book trade
Space, landscape and the city
The London theatre
Tragedy and irony
'Minor' literature
Literature and melancholy
Food, drink and consumption
Sickness and convalescence
Dreams
Forms of Dissent

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers (no more than 300 words,
please) by May 31st to:

Tim Milnes (University of Edinburgh) tim.milnes_at_ed.ac.uk
Felicity James (Christ Church, Oxford)
felicity.james_at_christ-church.oxford.ac.uk

Web page: w
ww.englit.ed.ac.uk/research/conference/lambconf06/lamb_poster.htm

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Received on Thu Mar 02 2006 - 11:44:52 EST