Chawton, May 2008

READERS, WRITERS, SALONNIÈRES:
FEMALE NETWORKS IN EUROPE, 1700-1900

Proposals are invited for an interdisciplinary two-day conference to be held at Chawton House Library, Hampshire, on May 22-23, 2008. The event is jointly organised by the University of Southampton English Department, the University of Warwick French Department and the University of Wales Swansea German Section.

The conference is the second in a series being held in the context of the NWO Project “New approaches to European Women’s Writing” which is based at the University of Utrecht and is directed by Dr Suzan van Dijk. The first one has been organized in Geneva 2007; the last one in Bochum 2009.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an explosion of interest in Europe in foreign languages and literatures, and recent research has begun to explore the part played by women in cross-cultural interchange. This conference seeks to examine the trans-national links between literary women in Europe in the period 1700-1900. To what extent were women writers from different countries aware of each other and each other’s work? We invite papers which look at women who read or were inspired by the work of women abroad, as well as papers exploring actual links (for example, through correspondence, visits or contact in the salons) between women writers of different nationalities.

Papers should be a maximum of 20 minutes and should be given in English. Please send a 250-word abstract for the attention to any one of the organising committee by 7 January 2008, to the conference administrator Sandy White: sw17@soton.ac.uk.

We intend to publish selected papers.

Organising committee: Gillian Dow (Southampton), Katherine Astbury (Warwick) and Hilary Brown (Swansea).

For further information on Chawton House Library, please see www.chawton.org.