Call for Papers
The Novel, the Periodical Press, and the Global Circulation of Texts, 1789-1945
A two-day workshop at the University of Warwick, 16-17 February 2016
Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Professor Andrew King (University of Greenwich)
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2015
This workshop attends to the recent explosion of interest, within literary studies and related fields, in the periodical press. It follows on from two earlier workshops held at Warwick, “Print Culture and Gender in the British Empire” (2014) and “Networks of Media and Print in the Age of Imperialism” (2015).
Since its rise and consolidation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel has never recognized any frontiers. Instead, it has challenged what constitutes a polity or nation and what is internal or foreign to these boundaries. Evidence of this porousness can be found in the intersections, the mutual appropriations and cross-fertilization that have always characterized the genre—as hybrid, mixed, mimetic, and cosmopolitan.
This workshop begins from the premise that the periodical press played a key part in these exchanges. Participants working on different geopolitical contexts are invited to come together to consider how the novel and print culture have interacted. How was the novel—despite its association with the European bourgeoisie and capitalism—able to travel and prosper in other environments, in part because of the global growth of the periodical press? How did fiction circulate across geographic and linguistic boundaries? In what ways was the relationship between fiction and the periodical press dynamic and mutually constitutive? How did new technologies—such as the telegraph, the railroad, and the steamship—erase and/or reinstall the boundaries that the periodical press and the novel sought to transcend?
Papers addressing the following topics are invited:
-The novel with and without frontiers
-Serialisation
-Responses to the novel and to fiction in the periodical press, including reviews, letters, and other literature
-The periodical press and the growth of literary criticism
-Women’s (and men’s) magazines and the novel
-The circulation of the European and North American novel in Latin America, Asia, and Africa
-The novel and advertising in the press
-Local and translocal print and fiction cultures
-Tensions—productive or otherwise—between metropolitan fiction and non-metropolitan fiction, “at home,” in empire, and beyond.
-The translation and transculturation of novels and fiction in the global press
-“Greater Britain,” the novel, and the periodical press
-The shipping and transport of novels and the press
-Booksellers, bookshops, and the marketing of fiction
-Law, censorship, and the circulation of fiction
-Colonial editions; colonial libraries/imperial club libraries
-Technology, print culture, and fiction
Please send an abstract of up to 500 words and a brief biographical note (100-150 words) to: R.G.Forman@warwick.ac.uk and/or T.Puri@warwick.ac.uk.
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2015. Decisions will be announced in early December.
This workshop forms part of a larger project on “The Novel without Frontiers,” based at the University of Warwick and the University of São Paulo, and funded by the British Academy’s Newton Mobility Network scheme.