Modern Literary Manuscripts Course and Reading Experience Database

Modern Literary Manuscripts Course by Dr Wim Van Mierlo

Modern literary manuscripts course by one of the Keynote speakers of 'Reclamation and Representation' Dr Wim Van Mierlo.

Monday 4th July - Friday 8th July

This course will address issues of auth or ship and creativity through the study of literary manuscripts from the modern period (1700-2000). The objective is to develop an 'archaeology' of the literary work based on the principles and ideas of genetic criticism and hist or ical bibliography, and to give students expertise in handling and interpreting an array of pre-publication documents. The emphasis will be on methodology as well as on developing skills to give the student the necessary the or etical and practical tools f or analyzing literary drafts. The course is aimed at students of literature who want to integrate archival research and textual scholarship into their critical w or k as well as early-career professionals in the book trade and librarianship who want to widen their understanding of draft materials. While f or practical reasons, this course will mostly make use of print and digital facsimiles, students will have the opportunity to work with original documents.

Reading Experience Database

UK RED is an open-access database housed at The Open University containing over 30,000 easily searchable records documenting the history of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945. Evidence of reading presented in RED is drawn from published and unpublished sources as diverse as diaries, commonplace books, memoirs, sociological surveys, and criminal court and prison records. In January 2010 the RED project received generous AHRC funding to develop an international digital network for researching the history of reading across borders, in collaboration with partners in Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, and New Zealand.

The RED team would like you to contribute information to the database by completing a RED form. Follow the links on the left for more information about members of the team, what we mean by a ‘reading experience’, what sorts of data we’re looking for, how you can contribute, and to view the latest news on how RED is progressing.

Follow this link to browse and search the Reading Experience Database.

Oxford University's Graduate Conference "The Famed and the Forgotten"

This conference will be of interest to postgraduates. Obviously "The archive: inclusion and exclusion" will be the most interesting!


Oxford University's English Graduate Conference, to take place 10 June 2011, will provide English postgraduates across the United Kingdom with the opportunity to explore the ideas "famed" and "forgotten" in the broadest possible terms, considering genre, methodology, materials, characters, language, periods and everything in between.

Presentations topics may include, but are not limited to:

    * Canonicity: sustainability and amenability
    * The archive: inclusion and exclusion
    * Rendering identities: authors, authorship and authority
    * Literary heroes, villains and outlaws
    * Construction and transmission: biography and autobiography
    * Performativity and normativity: the public/private stage
    * Immortality and posterity
    * Isolation, alienation and literary homelessness
    * Memory and historical amnesia
    * Representing the famed/forgotten: gender, genre and gendered genres
    * Language of fame: the spoken and the unspoken
    * Reinscriptions of silences and categorization as an othering mechanism
    * Representation/misrepresentation: text, narrative, translation, transcription
    * Celebrity and its attendant myths, misconceptions and phantasmagorias

Organised and staged by Oxford English postgraduates, with the generous support of the English Faculty, this event promises to be a dynamic forum, allowing postgraduate students of English Literature to share their innovative research and engage intellectual enquiry within a supportive environment.

This year's event comes at a time when relationships to text and textual production are undergoing reassessment. In addition to four sessions of student presentations, the conference will include a panel discussion on The Future of Reading and a keynote address from Penelope Lively.

We welcome submissions from English postgraduates for individual papers or presentations of 20 minutes. Please submit your name, department, university, conference paper or presentation title and a 250-word abstract to Claire Waters [ claire.waters@ell.ox.ac.uk ] by 1 March 2011.

The cost of attendance for non Oxford students is £15 and cheques should be payable to the University of Oxford. Online registration is available here --> http://graduate-conference.english.ox.ac.uk/registration.php