Gendering the Book in the Long Eighteenth Century
13 July 2013
University of Leeds

This conference aims to connect recent scholarship in the areas of book-history and material culture to work on Romantic constructions of masculinity and femininity by considering how men and women in the long eighteenth century imagined their relationship to textual objects. How did cultures of production, consumption, and exchange contribute to the construction of gendered identities? Did these practices and identities change over time, and how far was the book itself a gendered object?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Gift books, anthologies, miscellanies, and collected works
• Men and Women of Letters
• Circulation, conversation, and communities
• Book-history and the book-as-object
• Textual production and consumption
• Authorial identity

The conference will close with a keynote address from Professor Richard Cronin (University of Glasgow).