“Revisiting the Marriage Plot”
2017 British Women Writers Conference
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
June 21-24, 2017
Moderator: Kathy Psomiades, Duke University
Over the past ten years, there’s been a general rethinking of how we write about marriage and kinship in the 19th century—one thinks of work by Sharon Marcus, Mary Jean Corbett, Elsie Michie, Talia Schaffer, Claire Jarvis—to name only a few of the scholars who have given us a fresh view of these concepts. This workshop is interested in how changing conceptions of marriage and kinship over the past twenty-five years have changed how we read marriage plots, as well as in how changes to how we read marriage plots—how we periodize and nationalize for example—have altered the ways in which we conceive of marriage and kinship. Topics covered so far include the role the work of Decadent women writers (Michael Field, Ada Leverson) played in early-twentieth century rethinking of marriage and family, what happens to periodical form, the marriage plot and the nineteenth-century British woman writer when we broaden our spatial and temporal conceptions of what constitutes the nineteenth-century (Margaret Oliphant, Moto Naoko) and how nineteenth-century women writers use Victorian anthropology to think about marriage.
If you’re interested in having your work considered for this roundtable, please email kpsomiad@duke.edu with a brief abstract (200-300 words) by January 15, 2017.