The Unliterary Eighteenth Century: Gender and Marginal Texts

This one-day symposium hosted by the Gender Institute at the Australian National University in collaboration with the Centre for Early Modern Studies, explores texts of the long eighteenth century that, despite their popularity and cultural centrality in their own time, have been marginalised because of their resistance to contemporary categories of literary genre, and, whatever else they might be called, are rarely if ever considered to be literary. Their marginalisation has implications not only for our understanding of literary history but our knowledge of the history of gender and sexuality. Not only did women and anonymous writers work within “unliterary” forms, but these ephemeral and sometimes pornographic texts challenge contemporary understandings of bodies and gender. How might we better understand and appreciate the impact of these texts on eighteenth-century culture? How do they invite, and how might they resist methods of close reading? What does eighteenth-century literary studies do with the disjunction between contemporary definitions of our discipline, based around “literature” as a category, and what “literature” was understood as being in the eighteenth century?  Keynotes: Professor Kathleen Lubey, St. John's University; Professor Gillian Russell, The University of York.