Literature and History Conference - Australasian Association for Literature

Second Annual Conference of the
Australasian Association for Literature
24-25 July, 2008
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia

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Confirmed keynote speakers:

Professor Terry Castle (Stanford University)
Professor Charles Altieri (University of California, Berkeley)

Debates about the relationship between literature and history have long haunted literary practice, history and criticism. For some, historicism can be seen as a form of hermeneutical aggression, for others it provides the key to the literary representation of psychological and cultural phenomena. The archive, viewed from these diverging perspectives, obfuscates or illuminates. Recent flirtations with reading literally have been equally contentious, shifting the focus away from aesthetics towards the traces of material culture that clutter narrative space with forgotten or repressed histories.

Papers will be given addressing the troubled, complex relationship between literature and history, and will include some of the following issues:

• Tensions between theory and history
• Resistance to history / anti-historicism
• Writing and re-membering lives
• Temporality – literary and historical time
• Ficto-historical writing / historical fiction / history and fiction
• Literature and material culture
• The interaction between a work and its contexts
• Political, ethical and / or legal implications of historical fiction
• Reconsidering the literary significance of ‘history from below’
• Literary history and its mediations (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.)
• Problems of memory and epistemology in writing history
• Questions of genre, periodisation and dis/continuity
• Reflections on reading history / the history of reading
• Any other issues that concern the relationship between
literature and history

The literary works discussed might be drawn from any period and from any language (though all papers will be presented in English).

Please note that the conference venue is in the Macquarie Graduate School of Management - see our travel page for maps of the campus and venue.

Conference address: www.aal.asn.au/conference/
AAL address: www.aal.asn.au

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