Coughlan, Sean. "Tudor Coroners' Records Give Clue to 'Real Ophelia' for Shakespeare." BBC NEWS June 8, 2011.

An Oxford historian has found evidence of a story that could be the real-life inspiration for Shakespeare's tragic character, Ophelia. Dr Steven Gunn has found a coroner's report into the drowning of a Jane Shaxspere in 1569. The girl, possibly a young cousin of William Shakespeare, had been picking flowers when she fell into a millpond near Stratford upon Avon. Dr Gunn says there are "tantalising" links to Ophelia's drowning in Hamlet. A four-year research project, carried out by Oxford University academics, has been searching through 16th century coroners' reports. . . .

Coroners' reports of fatal accidents are a useful and hitherto under-studied way of exploring everyday life in Tudor England," says Dr Gunn. "Some medieval historians have used them, but the Tudor records are much fuller. The enquiries into the deaths were extensive and solemnly undertaken."

Visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13682993.

Cfp: Harrison, Christine, and Angeliki Spiropoulou, eds. HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. SYNTHESIS 5 (2012).

Deadlines:

1 December 2010 submission of abstracts
1 February 2011 notification of acceptance
1 October 2011 submission of articles

The ‘turn to history’, witnessed in both literary studies and literature since the 1980s, has ensued in part from new developments in the theory of history itself, which have stressed the relevance of literature for history and the affinity of historiography with fictional narration, long suppressed by historiography’s traditional empirical status and positivist claim to truth (c.f. the groundbreaking work of Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, as well as that of Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt and Dominick LaCapra, for example). The turn to history has, inversely, also derived from an acknowledgement of the need to take into account the historicity of the historiographical, literary and critical acts. Fredric Jameson, for example, contributed to the elaboration of a sophisticated notion of historicity in the field of literary studies in the early 80s, and at much the same time there also appeared ‘new historicist’ and ‘cultural materialist’ trends, inspired by diverse history-based theoretical paradigms.

Simultaneously, and related to the above developments, there has emerged a trend within literature itself of evoking historical epochs, personages and texts of the past, culminating in what Linda Hutcheon has called with reference to fiction ‘historiographical metafiction’, namely a set of texts which exhibits a concern with the historical past and with issues of historiography while retaining an acute language consciousness and a leaning to formal experimentation. Even more recently, over the past decade, both historicist models of criticism and established theorizations of new historical literature have been challenged for some of their presumptions. However, historical literature, and especially fiction, continues to dominate the literary production of the twenty-first century in forms and for reasons that need exploring as they may point to yet newer directions in both literature and the conceptualization of the relationship between history and literature.

We invite contributions that engage with the modes in which contemporary fiction, poetry and drama address, employ and revise history and historiographical practices, and/or discuss new critical trends and theoretical approaches to literature and history. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:
• New trends and subjects of historiographical representation in contemporary poetry, fiction, drama (e.g., gender and topographical approaches; interrogations of particular historical periods, methodologies and mythologies; challenges to divides between the literary/popular and private/public; contemporary historical literature and realism, modernism, postmodernism)
• Revisions of literary history, the literary canon and traditional literary genres (e.g., the historical novel, historical drama, gothic romance)
• New directions in historical literature and critical approaches since 2000
• National/regional contemporary historical literature
• Re-writings of colonial history and the history of the European periphery (Balkan, Mediterranean) through literature
• Memory, auto/biography, visual material and contemporary literature
• Historical fantasies and utopias of the future
• The past-present dialogue in contemporary theory and literature
• New challenges to recent historicist models and critical taxonomies of contemporary historical literature

Detailed proposals (800-1,000 words) for articles of 6,000- 7,000 words, a short bio (up to 300 words) as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both guest editors: Christine Harrison at and Angeliki Spiropoulou.

For their details please contact:

Mata Dimakopoulou
Faculty of English Studies
University of Athens, Greece
Email: sdimakop@enl.uoa.gr.

Parini, Jay. "Dead Poets' Society." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION April 11, 2010.

Poetry is conversation, and poets like to sit at an imaginary table, agreeing with what was said by other poets, chafing at their arguments, avoiding or responding (directly or indirectly) to their assertions. This conversation is the stuff of culture, and without the rough-and-tumble of what scholars often loosely call "influence," there would be no poetry. There is a further layer here, contained in a phrase from T.S. Eliot, "under the sign," that Christopher Ricks—critic, poet, and professor of humanities at Boston University, to say nothing of one of the finest readers of poetry in our time—uses in his new book, True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (Yale University Press). Eliot used the suggestive phrase in a letter, saying that four poems in his earliest collection were written "sous le signe de Laforgue"; what that means, I suspect, is that Eliot felt conscious of Laforgue's presence while writing those poems. He felt the sway of his precursor, his guiding intellect, a certain dry ironic tone that he found useful in his own verse at the moment of writing. Critics have long discussed "influence," often in vague terms, and there is a never-ending stream of influence studies within academe—as in Harold Bloom's idiosyncratic but suggestive sequence of books in the 1970s and 80s, beginning with The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Bloom famously "theorized" the concept of influence by putting the process within the framework of Freudian psychoanalysis and its anxiety principle. He saw poets in perpetual conflict with those who went before them. Weak poets, in his view, depended too heavily on those whom they imitated; strong poets necessarily pulled away from their influences as they struggled to create voices of their own, often engaging in a process of misreading, which Bloom mapped in elaborate ways. Needless to say, the Bloomian notion was fraught for poets, as they looked over their shoulders with a sense of terror. Influence became an obstacle to creativity. In my view, that seems a mistaken notion, however intriguing for critics. Perhaps as we think about poetry this month—National Poetry Month—we may reconsider the idea of influence. I would argue that poets have always thought of themselves as participating in a larger conversation, and that anxiety is not necessarily involved. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Dead-Poets-Society/64989/.

Cfp: "Technology, Textuality, and Transmission," Third Material Cultures Conference, University of Edinburgh, July 16-18, 2010.

Keynote Speakers:

• Roger Chartier
• Jerome McGann
• Peter Stallybrass

Following the Material Cultures conferences which took place at the University of Edinburgh in 2000 and 2005, the third in the series is scheduled to take place in July 2010. The key theme of the conference is ‘Technology, Textuality, and Transmission,' though proposals relating to all aspects of Bibliography and the History of the Book are welcome:

• Materiality and Textuality
• Electronic Text
• The Cultures of Print
• Censhorship and Regulation
• Collections and their Preservation
• Readers and Reading Practices
• Technology and Transmission
• The Information Revolution
• Geographies of the Book

Proposals of 200-300 words are invited on these or any other topic related to the history of the book, to be sent no later than 30 November 2009, to Material Cultures, Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh, 22a Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW or by email to materialcultures@ed.ac.uk.