UPDATE: CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 1st OCTOBER 2006 FOR

'Print Culture and the Novel: 1850-1900'

A One-Day Conference, English Faculty, University of Oxford

20th January 2007

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

 - Laurel Brake, Professor of Literature and Print Culture, Birkbeck,
University of London

  - Simon Eliot, Professor of History of the Book, IES, University of
London

Exhibition of nineteenth-century print media materials from the Bodleian
Library's John Johnson collection.

Sponsored by the British Association for Victorian Studies

Wine Reception sponsored by Proquest

No longer was it possible for people to avoid reading matter; everywhere
they went it was displayed - weekly papers at a penny or twopence, complete
books, enticing in their bright picture covers, at a shilling, and all fresh
and crisp from the press. No wonder that the fifties, which saw the spread
of Smith's stalls to almost every principal railway line in the country,
were also the period when the sales of books and periodicals reached
unprecedented levels.

             Richard Altick.

2007 marks fifty years since Richard Altick's The English Common Reader.
That book tells us that printed matter was, from the 1850s, ubiquitous in
British society. Consequently, the novel was accessible to readers via a
newly diverse and dynamic print culture, - an accessibility which affected
its structure, reputation and content. This model has served critics of
Victorian literature for almost fifty years, but as Altick's groundbreaking
and influential work approaches its half-century it is perhaps time to
consider, review and collate work on print culture and the novel.

This conference seeks to interrogate the various relationships not only
between the novel and the periodical, but between a whole range of emergent
print forms as they developed in the period, such as advertising,
illustration, cartoons and pamphlets. Adumbrated in the Common Reader, the
ways in which the novel was made available to readers can be productively
re-thought in the light of new research taking place in this field.

Focussing on the second half of the nineteenth century we encourage a broad
interpretation of themes which might include, but is not limited to:

The commercialisation of the novel

The author as professional

Serialisation

The role of the publisher in the development of the novel

Readerships: were different print-forms read differently?

The novel as an institution of print culture

We welcome papers taking an interdisciplinary approach that productively
combine literary with book-history methodologies.

We invite proposals for papers of 20 minutes duration. 200-250 word
proposals should be sent to printculture_at_ell.ox.ac.uk by 1st OCTOBER 2006.

For further details see the conference website at

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~printcc/conference/index.htm

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Received on Sat Sep 09 2006 - 10:54:06 EDT