Postwar Women’s Writing Now

Over the last fifteen years or so, postwar women novelists, particularly those who wrote innovative fiction, have been rediscovered. Writers such as Ann Quin, Anna Kavan, Brigid Brophy and Christine Brooke-Rose have been the subject of conferences, journal articles and monographs and have also gathered attention in broader literary culture. Postwar Women’s Writing Now will examine our interest in these writers now. Underlying the day will be two broad questions: Why these writers? And why now? In framing the discussion with these questions, the symposium addresses questions of academic fashion, the history of publishing, literary cultures, and feminist theory and practice.

Postwar Women’s Writing Now

PROGRAMME

9:30 – 10:00 Coffee & Registration, Room UG02

10:00 – 11:30 Panel 1: Framing Rediscovery: The Academy and the Economy (Chair: Leigh Wilson,University of Westminster)

‘A canon of one’s own? Rediscovery, Wiederentdeckung, recuperation’, Carolin Slickers (University of Bonn)

‘Two-Thousand-and-Late: The Return to Post-War Women’s Writing as a Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis’, Joseph Darlington (Futureworks Media School)

‘Postwar Women Writers as Early Sociologists of Emotion’, Emily Ridge (University of Galway)

11:45 – 1:15 Panel 2: Recovery as revisioning: tracing relationships between postwar and contemporary women’s experiment (Chair: Melissa Tanti, Coventry University)

‘Women Writers and Periodicals: Experiments, Magazines, and Global Networks’, Louise Kane (University of Central Florida)

‘Palimpsesting as Re-Vision’

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (Utrecht University) and Liedeke Plate (Radboud University)

‘Queer Experiments’, Kaye Mitchell (University of Manchester)

1:15 – 2:15 Break for lunch

2:15 – 3:15 Panel 3: Rediscovery and Genre (Chair: Victoria Walker, Independent)

‘The Travails of Josephine Saxton’, Paul March-Russell (Independent)

‘Recovering Genre: Republishing Celia Dale’s Crime Fiction’, Jade French (Loughborough University)

3:15 – 4:15 Panel 4: Rediscovery, ‘Sex’ and Desire (Chair: Carole Sweeney, Goldsmiths, University of London)

‘Republishing Brigid Brophy’s In Transit: Re-membering ‘Sex’’, D-M Withers (University of Exeter)

‘Ann Quin & Desire’, Lydia Roy (Falmouth University)

4:15 – 5:00 Break

5:00– 6:00 Literary Publishing Now: Leigh Wilson (Westminster) in conversation with Clara Farmer (University of Reading/ Chatto & Windus/ Vintage)

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Host or Publisher Leigh Wilson, Carole Sweeney, Victoria Walker