Call for Papers
Seventh International Literary Juvenilia Conference
UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture
Deadline for Abstract Submissions
Sunday 30 January 2022
Literary Juvenilia, material imagination and ‘things’
A young writer’s learning and creative experience is built around things. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s evocative phrase ‘material imagination’, this conference will explore the material culture of juvenilia: the relationship between ‘things’ and literary imagination and practice.
Young writers ranging from Pope, Chatterton and Burns in the eighteenth century, to Austen, the Brontës, Eliot and Dickens in the nineteenth, and Edith Wharton, C.S. Lewis, Judith Wright, Margaret Atwood, and J.K. Rowling in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have found inspiration and example in the everyday context of their writing practice—in a materiality related to their physical, social and cultural worlds and in the material conditions of their play, learning, imitation and critique. They have also experimented with what might be termed the concrete forms of early writing, with the making of books and magazines but also with a variety of genres that manifest variously on the page, suggesting an early awareness of relationship between content and form. Thus we will consider especially questions of material agency: how things structure early lives and writing habits; and how young writers imagine place, space and history through literary and visual artefacts.
We welcome papers that address both theoretical issues and close readings, both general discussions and individual case studies. It is anticipated that these papers relating to literary issues may also have multidisciplinary implications that extend to cognate areas of cultural enquiry, such as history, art history, education, media, philosophy, politics and theology.