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Print Culture and Gender in the British Empire
University of Warwick
June 5, 2014
Deadline: February 21, 2014
Keynote speakers: Tanya Agathocleous (Hunter College,
USA) & Priti Joshi(University of Puget Sound, USA)
The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of print culture
not just in Britain but also across the Empire and beyond. This conference
recognizes a significant shift in nineteenth-century studies towards print
culture as an important form of Anglophone responses to various aspects of
imperialism and globalization, including the renegotiation of gender relations
in imperial and extra-imperial locations. While it has been argued that the
colonies and the wider Anglophone world formed a large market (with India being
the largest single market) for British publishers, the relationship between
imported British periodicals and emerging global print media is still
underexamined. The reprinting of materials from metropolitan British newspapers
and periodicals offers key insights into how ‘news’ travelled and re-circulated
at local and regional levels. Moreover, the British press
during this period obsessively returned to colonial subjects, often featuring
scenes of colonial life and sketches of particular ‘types’ of imperial
subjects.
In this conference, the committee is keen to open up a space for
counter-narratives to such representations, by showing Britain and evolving
gender conceptions, such as separate spheres for men and women, through a
different perspective. Imperial periodicals emerged as a new medium for
expressing the social and political role of colonial peoples and their
investment in bourgeois subjectivities in a widening public sphere. They also
provided a platform where new Anglophone elites and expatriate Britons could
write about their lives and experiences in a multiplicity of ways – in
articles, fiction, poetry, and letters. The committee is especially interested in the
role of periodicals in shaping and disseminating literature (fiction, poetry,
drama, and travel narratives) so as to broaden our field’s understanding of the
global in the long nineteenth century and of the place of women and sexuality
within a “Greater Britain” structure.
The committee invites papers on:
Gender and the colonial press
The woman’s magazine in the non-metropolitan environment
Colonial and extra-colonial responses to the British press
The British and American press in the wider world
Feminist and nationalist movements
Colonial politics and law
English literacy and sub-literacy in the Anglophone press
The circulation and dissemination of the British and
English-language press inside/outside of Britain and the ‘settler’ colonies
Print technology and graphic design
The depiction of same-sex and ‘non-normative’ sexualities in
the colonial and extra-colonial press
Please send an abstract of up to 500 words and a brief
biographical note (100-150 words) to: Dr Tara Puri (T.Puri@warwick.ac.uk) or Dr Ross G. Forman
(R.G.Forman@warwick.ac.uk)
Deadline for Abstracts: February 21, 2014. Decisions
will be announced in early March 2014.
