Saturday 30 May 2015
Dr Williams’s Library, 14 Gordon Square WC1H 0AR
A conference organised as part of the distinguished visiting fellowship of Timothy Whelan at QMUL.
This conference seeks to shine a light on the literary cultures that flourished among orthodox dissenting communities in the period 1650–1850. Often informal, familial, and ambivalent towards the commercial and urban imperatives associated with print publication, these intimate groups sustained complex traditions over time, and were shaped by faith, practice, and locality. In focusing attention on women writers—including those represented in Timothy Whelan’s eight-volume collection Nonconformist Women Writers (2011)—the conference will explore work that is under-studied in scholarship both on eighteenth-century Calvinist literature and on women’s writing of the period more generally.
Programme
10.15am Registration
10.30–11.15am Introduction & PlenaryTimothy Whelan (Georgia Southern): ‘Prove yourself a Heroine!’: Mary Steele’s Danebury and Women’s Manuscript Coteries
11.15 – 12.30pm Poetry and InfluenceKatarina Stenke (Cambridge): Time of death: the metres of Anne Steele’s graveyard poems
Jessica Clement (York): ‘Philomela, Theodosia, and the Divine: Writing the Self in the Poems of Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Anne Steele’
Nancy Jiwon Cho (Seoul National University): Theodosia’s Sisters and Daughters: Three Contemporary Nonconformist Women Writers’ Poetic Negotiations with Anne Steele’s Exemplary Authorial Identity
12.30–1.30pm Lunch
1.30–2.30pm Narrating ExperienceSylvia Brown (Alberta): Foremothers of Eighteenth-Century Nonconformist Spiritual Autobiography: From Evidences to Experiences
Karen Smith (Cardiff): ‘To know myself’: The spiritual discipline of self-examination in the diary of Frances Barrett Ryland
2.40–3.40pm Creative Practices in ContextFelicity James (Leicester): Mary Scott: Calvinist, Arian, Unitarian
Amy Culley (Lincoln): ‘My ever lov’d companion’: faith and friendship in the writing of Jane Attwater and Mary Fletcher
3.40–4.10pm Tea
4.10–4.30pm Roundtable & Closing RemarksTimothy Whelan, James Vigus, Tessa Whitehouse
4.45pm Drinks reception
Conference themes
Genres: Poetry, letters, diaries, orations, eulogies, drama, hymns, spiritual meditations, professions of faith, conversion narratives, spiritual autobiography, religious tracts and moral fiction, historical writing; formal and informal modes of writing
Circles: families, friends, servants, religious associates
Emotions: how are they expressed, theorized and practiced? What generic conventions are at work in representations of love or friendship (for example) that are specific to nonconformist writers, to women, and to nonconformist women writers?
Cycles and tradition(s): the life-cycles of individual writers and their associates; connections between generations; dissent as a movement with a history and future
Faith: the impact of specific Calvinist doctrines on writing; denominational experience; community worship; literary and sociological practices inculcated by religious tradition (such as diary-keeping); faith may be sustaining and generative or disabling and alienating
Varieties of dissemination: publication in manuscript and printed forms; anonymous, pseudonymous and public writing; collaborative composition and distribution; occasional and durational work
Processes of preservation and recovery: familial archival practices; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publication of seventeenth-century texts; twenty- and twenty-first century attitudes to these writers; editorial practice; gaps in literary history