Canon? Practice? Commodity? The Past, Present and Future of the Literary Anthology
The power of the anthology as an instrument of knowledge production has long been recognised, and, since the 1980s, the genre has been problematised and contested both within specific instantiations and in scholarly research which takes the anthology as its subject. The anthology as such, however, has yet to be fully theorised, and this conference aims to move toward a more comprehensive conceptualisation of its forms, functions and cultural dynamics.
Confirmed keynote speakers
Prof. Martin Puchner
Harvard University
Prof. Karen Kilcup
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Prof. Tom Mole
The University of Edinburgh
Conference Programme
Graduate Centre, Queen Mary, University of London
Friday 14th June
9.30-10.00 Registration and coffee Graduate Centre Foyer
10.00-11.15 Welcome and plenary session Peston Lecture Theatre
Martin Puchner (Harvard University) ‘How to anthologize the world’
11.15-12.45 Parallel Panel Sessions A
1. Poetry anthologies and the school GC222
Julie Blake (University of Cambridge)
‘30 years of canon formation in GCSE English Literature 1988 to 2018’
David Whitley (University of Cambridge)
‘Ted Hughes’s influential contribution to anthologies for school children’
Tim Shortis (Poetry by Heart)
‘Innovating a born-digital anthology for schools’
2. Culture and identity GC204
Tsafi Sebba-Elran (University of Haifa)
‘“Inside my heart, a Museum” – The Multiple Facets of the Jewish Humoristic Anthology’
Solène Méhat (Université Paris 8)
‘The double function of anthologies in the promotion of Native American poetry’
David Evans (University of St Andrews)
‘Curating Regional Identity in Anthologies of Breton Poetry 1800-2000’
12.45-1.30 Lunch Graduate Centre Foyer
1.30-3.00Parallel Panel Sessions B
3. Genre/canon GC222
Victoria Stewart (University of Leicester)
‘Constructing the Crime Canon: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Interwar Anthology’
Andrey Logutov (Lomonosov Moscow State University)
‘The Anthology as a Vehicle of Institutionalization: Rock Poetry in Russian Academia’
Artem Zubov (Lomonosov Moscow State University)
‘Science Fiction Anthologies and the Formation of the Generic Canon’
4. Anthologies and Diaspora GC204
Emma Bond (University of St Andrews)
‘New Geographies of the Book: The Refugee Anthology as Transnational Toolkit’
Rachelle Grossman (Harvard University)
‘Postwar Yiddish and the Anthological Urge in Argentina’
Marta Arnaldi (University of Oxford)
‘The Diasporic Canon: Anthologising Contemporary Italian Poetry in the United States’
3.00-3.15 Coffee Graduate Centre Foyer
3.15-4.00 Roundtable: The Task of the Anthologist GC101
Martin Puchner (Harvard University)
Karen Kilcup (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Robert Chandler (Penguin)
Emma Wagstaff (University of Birmingham)
Nina Parish (University of Bath)
Ellen Wiles (University of Stirling)
Tim Shortis (Poetry by Heart)
Julie Blake (University of Cambridge; Poetry by Heart)
4.00-5.30 Parallel Panel Sessions C
5. Authors: reception and afterlives GC114
Camila Querino (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
‘The music anthologies of William Blake’
Roberta Klimt (Queen Mary, University of London)
‘“The temporality of taste”: John Milton’s Poems (1645) in the eighteenth-century anthology’
Reshu Singh (Bhavan’s M. A. S. College, Mumbai)
‘Anthologizing Manto’s Short Stories: A Case Study’
6. Demarcations: identity, place, movement GC204
Tine Kempenaers (Ghent University)
‘Passing for a Poem: Anthologizing Trans and Genderqueer Poetry in Troubling the Line’
Lyn Marven (University of Liverpool)
‘The City Anthology: A Case Study of Berlin Anthologies from 1885 to the present’
Leah Budke (Ghent University)
‘A Dynamic Duo: The Modernist “Little Anthology” and Little Magazine’
7. What do we learn from anthologies? GC222
Rachael King (University of Edinburgh)
‘Anthologies and the Lifelong Learner’
Anne Welsh (University College London)
‘A Portrait of the Anthologist as Auto-Didact’
Eleanor March (University of Surrey)
‘Constructing the carceral: Paratexts in UK prisoner writing anthologies’
5.30-7.00 Wine reception Graduate Centre Foyer
7.30 Conference dinner (optional) Verdi’s, 237 Mile End Rd
Saturday 15th June
9.30-10.00 Arrival and coffee Graduate Centre Foyer
10.00-11.30 Parallel Panel Sessions D
8. Alternative Anthologies and Literary Canons in South Asia GC222
Sarah Abdullah (Lahore College for Women University)
‘Popular Fiction, Women Digests and Literary Anthologizing in Pakistan’
Amina Wasif (Lahore College for Women University)
‘Jasūsī Fiction and the need for Alternative Anthologies in Urdu’
Zahra Shah (Government College University, Lahore)
'Poetic Tazkiras and the Indo-Persian Literary Canon in Nineteenth-Century India'
9. 21st Century translation GC204
Emma Wagstaff (University of Birmingham)
Nina Parish (University of Bath)
‘Editing bilingual poetry anthologies in the twenty-first century’
Valentina Gosetti (University of New England, Australia)
‘In Defence of “Transloiterature”: Poetry Anthologists as Cultural Mediators’
Ellen Wiles (University of Stirling)
‘Saffron Shadows: Challenges of curating a translated ethnographic literary anthology in Myanmar’
11.30-12.30 Plenary session Peston Lecture Theatre
Tom Mole (University of Edinburgh) ‘How Many is Enough? Reading the Nineteenth-Century Literary Anthology at Scale’
12.30-1.15 Lunch Graduate Centre Foyer
1.15-2.45 Parallel Panel Sessions E
10. Two Hundred Years of Russian Anthologies GC222
Alexey Vdovin (National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
‘The Russian Literary Canon As Seen from School: a Distant Reading of 130 School Anthologies and Reading Books, 1805-1917’
Alexandra Smith (University of Edinburgh)
‘Between Memory and History: Evgenii Evtushenko's 1995 Anthology Stanzas of the Century’
Katharine Hodgson (University of Exeter)
‘Two Wars, One Canon: Russian Anthologies of Twentieth-Century War Poetry’
11. ‘Foreign’ canons GC204
Dragos Jipa (University of Bucharest)
‘Anthologies of French Literature in Interwar Romania or How to Use a Foreign Literature as a Tool for Nation-Building’
Elena Ostrovskaya (National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
‘The Anthology of New English Poetry (1937) and Canon Formation in the Stalinist USSR’
Caterina Scarabicchi (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘“How do you spell postcolonial?”: Problematizing the English Literary Canon in the Italian School Curriculum’
2.45-3.00 Coffee Graduate Centre Foyer
3.00-4.30 Parallel Panel Sessions F
12. Empire/world GC204
Mehmet Yildiz (Harvard University)
‘Imperial Literary History: A Case on Gibb's A History of Ottoman Poetry'
Maddalena Italia (SOAS, University of London)
‘Sanskrit poetry by Western poets in Mark Van Doren’s An Anthology of World Poetry (1928)’
Ben Holgate (Queen Mary, University of London)
‘The Writer’s Dilemma: Avoiding Biases in an Anthology or Canon’
13. Nationalism and the Anthology GC222
Brigita Speičytė (Vilnius University)
‘Canon alternatives in anthology: choices of representative texts’
Helena Markowska-Fulara (University of Warsaw)
‘The Rise of “Polish Literature”’
Ameya Tripathi (Columbia University)
‘Anthologies, Romantic Nationalism and Revolution: Poems for Spain and The Spanish Civil War’
14. The Politics of Anthologising GC114
Matthew Beeber (Northwestern University)
‘Collectivist Collections: Coalitional Formation in the 1930s Radical Anthology’
John Dunn (Queen Mary, University of London)
‘The first and last words of George Oppen: 21 Poems and the non-canon’
Muhammad Sheeraz (International Islamic University Islamabad)
‘Anthology as Revenge: A study of silencing in Resistance Literature and Mazahmati Adab’
4-30-5.30 Plenary session Peston Lecture Theatre
Karen Kilcup (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) ‘Anthologies’ Affects’
5.30-6.00 Conference ends
The conference is open to anyone, in any discipline, working on or interested in anthologies.
Fees
Full delegate fee: £80
Graduate student delegate fee: £40
Register here