10th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference

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   due 9/30/01
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Department of
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University of
   Wisconsin-Madison

       The Conference on Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers originated in 1991 when a group of graduate students from the Universities of Oregon and Washington noted and were troubled by the lack of presentations on women writers during a regional British Studies conference.  In between sessions, we discussed the possibility of organizing a conference focused solely on women’s writing—particularly those writers who have been historically overlooked, ignored, or excluded from the canon.  By encouraging important archival work on lesser-known women writers and by inviting divergent critical approaches to a broad variety of texts, we hoped to expand the range of critical approaches for both scholars and students, researchers and teachers.  Our desire to revise the conventional canon was matched by our desire to reconstruct the conventional conference format.  We sought to break down traditional hierarchies by allowing more space for graduate student voices, an initiative that is closely connected to the critical and pedagogical work of creating space for historical women to speak.
       In focusing on British women’s literature and culture, we neither imply the existence of an essentially female literary tradition nor an exclusively white literary past.  Instead, we hope that the focus on Britain will provide a specific cultural context in which we can investigate a dense and complicated intersection of colonial and national subjects as well as gender and racial issues.  The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer a distinctive period in British women’s history, starting with the rise of organized feminism, developing into the feminization of literary culture, and leading into the various movements of modern, twentieth-century feminism.  In exploring the agency of women in literary history, we hope to encourage the creation of richer, more complex cultural tradition, incorporating a wide range of interdisciplinary interests.  Likewise, the conjunction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encourages a re-examination of the existing constructs of traditional literary historiography, especially in the ways that women’s literary history tends to break down canonical divisions between eighteenth-and nineteenth-century culture, such as the “Augustan” and “Romantic,” and the “Romantic” and “Victorian” periods. 
     The tenth conference at the University of Wisconsin continues a fine tradition of diverse, exciting events.  After the first conference at the University of Oregon in 1992, the site rotated to the following institutions:

1993 University of Washington
1994 Michigan State University
1995 University of Notre Dame
1996 University of South Carolina
1997 University of California, Davis
1998 University of North Carolina
1999 University of New Mexico
2001 Kansas University.

The conference will move to Texas Christian University in 2003 and University of Georgia in 2004, and shows every possibility of maintaining its tradition as a welcoming, innovating conference. 

(Excerpted from the Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol. 19 (1996)).