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"Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1880-1940"
Sept 9-10, 2011
University of Delaware
This two-day symposium will provide a forum for literary scholars, historians, media historians, and art historians to share works-in-progress on the transformations of print media and Transatlantic public spheres at the turn of the twentieth century. The symposium will feature work that probes artificial literary-historical boundaries, challenges national divisions, traverses the divide between nineteenth- and early-twentieth century print culture, and links texts and or/writers across different genres or sectors of the print media of the period. There will be ample time for open discussion; there will be no concurrent panels; participants will be expected to attend all sessions. The symposium is conceived as a follow up to the 2007 symposium, "Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms," which resulted in an edited collection under the same title (Palgrave 2008).
A wide array of work is welcome, but papers should engage substantially with several of the following areas of common interest:
advancing our understanding of print culture's role in the period's movements for racial, class, and gender equality.
- identifying and theorizing the relationship between print culture, empire, and cross-cultural (transatlantic, transnational) writing, reading, and publishing.
- bringing the theories and methods of material culture studies to bear on the analysis of print artifacts as "objects" or "things."
- grasping the increasing textual hybridity of the period's print artifacts, by examining such phenomena as the interactions between illustration and text and the complex collage effects created by advances and experiments in typography and image reproduction.
- developing our knowledge of Anglo-American links, interactions, and networks among writers, publishers, editors, agents, and other participants in the period's print culture.
- analyzing and theorizing the relationship between transformations in print culture and evolving notions of authorship and the literary, including the role of the nascent academic field of English, in Britain, the United States, and/or the colonies/commonwealth.
