Conferences
The Aphra Behn Europe society is pleased to announce its 5th conference:
12th-14th April 2012
APHRA BEHN IN HER SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS
organised by Prof. Elaine Hobby, at the Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University, UK
Provisional Schedule
Plenary speakers will be Mary Ann O’Donnell (Manhattan College), Margarete Rubik (University of Vienna) and Jane Spencer (University of Exeter).
Aphra Behn, the most successful female playwright of the seventeenth century, forged her public identity in the theatre. However, her oeuvre extends to a range of genres including prose fiction, translation, and verse. This conference aims to explore Behn’s writing and the writings of her forebears and contemporaries, in order to begin the process of placing Behn and her literary peers back into their context of seventeenth-century England.
The deadline for submission of papers has now passed. Titles of papers accepted include:
- Aphra Behn's Bedroom Scenes
- Dramatic and Narrative Influences in the Prose Fiction of Aphra Behn
- 'Best for being old', or 'New and Strange'?: Unnamed Husbands and Widow Behn's Adapting Strategies
- 'Literary pimping' or Business as Usual? Sex and Publishing in Restoration London
- 'A pretty turn of State': Public and Private Passions in Behn's Moorish Tragedy
- 'The Extravagance of her Frights': Politicizing the Force of the Maternal Imagination
- Aphra Behn and Raillery in the Salons of Seventeenth-century Europe
- From Epistle to Epistemology: Love-Letters and the Royal Society
- Harlequin Science. Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon and Commedia Dell'Arte
- Aphra Behn: Female Libertine?
- History on the Stage during the Popish Plot the Exclusion Crisis
- 'Eternal discord': The Theatrical Influence on the Use of Aphra Behn as Model for Women Writers
- Aphra Behn, Fontenelle, and the New Science
- 'The Language of the Sword' in Behn's Plays
- Aphra Behn the Dramatist
- Oroonoko in the Context of Late Seventeenth-Century Time-Thought
- 'My stubborn muse': Some Aspects of Behn's Poetic Practice
- 'Memoiralls for Mrs Affora': Aphra Behn and the Restoration Intelligence World
- Susanna Centlivre: Conversation, Literary Communities, and the Stage
- 'Worldly' Spaces: Space and Place in Aphra Behn's Isle of Love and Margaret Cavendish's Blazing Worlds
- Aphra Behn and Jonsonian Comedy
- What is it that honour that keeps such a bustle in the world?': Honour and Politics in The Widdow Ranter
- Astrea Incognita? Mary Davis, the Dark Star of Early English Opera
- Mrs Behn and Mr Betterton: Or, Aphra and the Actors
- Aphra Behn in Cultural Debates of her Time
- Leaving the 'Father's House': Aphra Behn's Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684-7) and the Genre of the Female Complaint
- Aphra Behn and the Gods: Poems Upon Several Occasions: Self-Authorization and Women's Literary History
- Glimpses of Arcadia: The Political Poetry of Aphra Behn and Lucy Hutchinson
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN. Details are available from the Department of English and Drama's website. The registration fee is £120, with a reduced fee of £50 for postgraduate students.
The programme is likely to include an optional visit to Bolsover Castle and Hardwick Hall on the final afternoon of the conference.
Contact: aphra@lboro.ac.uk
Prof. Elaine Hobby
Department of English and Drama
Loughborough University
Loughborough
LE11 3TU
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Letter to Aphra Behn
(Published in Poetry Review, Summer 2011)
‘All I ask is the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me (if any such you will allow me) to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have so long thriv’d in, to take those measures that both the ancient and modern writers have set me, and by which they have pleased the world so well. If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom, but that you will usurp all to yourselves: I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me.’ Preface to The Lucky Chance, 1686
To Madam Behn at her lodging in New Street
My dear,
In your last you required to know how we women poets did now that we have a woman laureate, who is treated with that honour you were denied although satirized in your time as The Female Laureate. Though there are now many more women poets than in your day (as there are many more citizens even of London and the world), and some of ‘em acknowledged to be of the first rank, which only Katherine Phillips, the Matchless Orinda, was among you (apart from among your own friends who wrote their praises of you into the many commendatory verses to your several collections) yet we have not progressed against the more subtle forms of discrimination as you would expect.
You boldly spoke out in your own defence and in defence of women to have the full freedom to write on any subject and in any terms, rejecting any suggestion that there was anything in the masculine makeup, apart from their better education, that made them better equipped to be poets, and even that, you said, was not necessary to being a good writer. Yet if one of us was to speak out in such terms we would be sneered at as ‘feminist’, as if that was itself a mistake, and dubbed by some ‘hysterical dykes’. We are told that we have enough equality yet you have only to count up the number of male and female writers reviewed in the literary pages and note that women’s books are reviewed by women and in much smaller numbers than those by men. So too, although a woman has won the most prestigious fiction prize, that form that may be said to have been first successfully written here by you, (although Defoe is still accorded that honour), nevertheless women’s fiction is still not given the serious and equal attention that it should have, and the Orange Prize, Virago and Only Women Press remain necessary to attempt to redress the balance.
As for the canon of English poetry it is still a largely masculine preserve, and your own talents largely unappreciated tho’ I must confess the literary achievements of your age are woefully under represented even in the theatre where they were so manifest. You will remember that your admirer, Virginia Woolf, said that we women should all lay flowers on your grave, while demanding true equality and a room of one’s own which I take to mean the freedom and the means to write, and be free of that stereotyping which would channel us into the domestic and the sentimental away from politics and ‘ideas’, as well as sex, all of which you tackled in your day.
There will be some who will regard this as a trivial issue yet it is but the outer fringe, the shallows as it were, of more dangerous discriminations which stretch from the so-called glass ceiling for women in board rooms or the cabinet, even in the way parliament conducts its business like a beargarden where women’s voices are easily drowned out, through domestic violence, forced marriage, honour killings, female circumcision and numerous such horrors unknown among the Caribs when you visited them. Low level discrimination in all areas still masks our hidden inequalities so I have brought these matters to your attention knowing how bravely you spoke against those which might have caused you to lay down your pen in disgust, and that we should continue to salute you for it, and for your presentation to the world of your noble black slave, Oroonoko, and his struggle for freedom.
The editors of Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830 invite submissions for the second volume of this online annual to be published in March 2012. Submissions will be considered in four categories: scholarly articles, articles on pedagogy, book reviews, and essays on new media/women on the web. In all areas, work should be related to women in the arts between 1640-1830, including literature, visual arts, music, performance art, film criticism, and production arts. While Aphra Behn is our guiding figure, the journal encourages submissions on all women in the arts from all areas of the globe during this era.
Our second volume will feature essays on the question of open access. Issues of accessibility have come to the fore with the advancement of technology in the past two decades, issues that resonate widely across all fields and periods. Essays might consider various types of access (physical, gendered, racial, able-bodied, or class-based), various points of access (to power, to audiences, to voices, to technologies), or the implications of such access (what does it mean for a woman’s body to be accessible? for women’s writing?). How do we make the eighteenth century accessible to today's students in today's classrooms, in today's world? How do we make eighteenth-century women accessible?
See http://www.aphrabehn.org/aphraonline/ for general submission guidelines as well as specific guidelines for each journal section.
DEADLINE: October 31, 2011
Editor:
Laura Runge (University of South Florida)
Section Editors:
Kirsten Saxton, Scholarly Editor (Mills College)
Laura Runge, Pedagogy Editor (University of South Florida)
Anne Greenfield, New Media / Women on the Web Editor (Valdosta State University)
Robin Runia, Book Review Editor (Angelo State University)
Debbie Welham, Notes and Discoveries Editor (University of Winchester)
Managing Editors:
Jennifer Golightly (University of Denver)