Monday 13th April 2015
Venue: Chawton House
A Commemorative Conference at Chawton House Library
Keynote speakers: Professor Jim Chandler (University of Chicago) and Professor Heather Glen (University of Cambridge)
Professor Marilyn Butler (1937-2014), leading scholar of English literature, and latterly Rector of Exeter College, University of Oxford, was the author of paradigm-shifting books and articles, and a patron of Chawton House Library, which will host this conference in her honour. Butler’s research set up new directions in literary criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and her editions of women writers enabled subsequent generations of scholars to access these important texts in newly fruitful ways. Marilyn Butler’s important work on Maria Edgeworth – biographical, critical, editorial – seeded new scholarship in the field of Irish romanticism.
In this fortieth anniversary year of the first publication of Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), the conference will include papers that both commemorate her scholarship, and move discussion forward in the twenty-first century.
The conference is supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies and Cambridge University Press, and will see the launch of Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry and Cultural History, a book brought to completion by Heather Glen from a manuscript that Marilyn left in near-complete form, and published by CUP in 2015.
Confirmed speakers include:
Isobel Armstrong, Serena Baiesi, Ros Ballaster, Will Bowers, Linda Bree, Stephen Bygrave, Emma Clery, Deirdre Coleman, Claire Connolly, Mary-Ann Constantine, Sophie Coulombeau, Amy Culley , Josie Dixon, Roxanne Eberle, Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Ewers, Mary Fairclough, Michael Falk, Gary Farnell, Anna Fitzer, James Grande, John Owen Havard, Grace Harvey, Ian Haywood, Cora Kaplan, Gary Kelly, Helena Kelly, Jacqueline Labbe, Nigel Leask, Anthony Mandal, Susan Manly, Jo McDonagh, Jon Mee, Anne-Claire Michoux, Jane Moore, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Lissa Paul, Márta Pellérdi, Mark Philp, Fiona Price, Jane Rendall, Michael Rossington, Gillian Russell, Diego Saglia, Matthew Sangster, Ada Sharpe, Kerry Sinanan, Jane Spencer, Mary Spongberg, Carl Thompson, Janet Todd, Anne Toner, Clara Tuite, David Wheeler.
Conference programme here (opens PDF)
This event is now sold out.
Speakers who are booked to participate can register here or call us on 01420 541010.
