Women Writing Space

Deadline for abstracts/proposals: 30 October 2008

http://www.conferencealerts.com/seeconf.mv?q=ca1xm6sm

 7 March 2009
Coventry, United Kingdom
This conference invites papers from a range of disciplines, reflecting the scope of contemporary feminist interest in spatial configurations. Whilst the theoretical scope of the conference is broad, the central issue of "how British women writers represent space" will remain the focus of the day, considering questions such as, how do women writers construct literary space? What types of spaces/places are represented in works by women? How are received notions of space/place interpreted, accepted, or contested? How do we theorise the textual spaces in women's writing?

We welcome papers covering British women's writing over a period ranging from the mid-19^th century to the present. This choice conveys our intuition that the contemporary interest in space may be traced back to the Victorian age, when industrialization, and the rapid changes in landscape and workplace it involved, considerably developed the writers' spatial awareness. Without losing sense of the specificity of the historical periods involved, this conference will therefore provide the site for a productive comparative perspective.

 Papers will be focused around themes such as: definitions of the 'public sphere' and their subversions; enclosed places/spaces of confinement; "Woman and the City"; feminist dystopias/utopias; bodies in space/sexuality and space; borders and boundaries, liminality; theorising textual spaces through women's writing; the (in)visibility of women's position on social/cultural/ethnic maps.

More information.