{"id":1484,"date":"2016-04-06T11:16:03","date_gmt":"2016-04-06T10:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/?p=1484"},"modified":"2016-04-06T13:46:46","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T12:46:46","slug":"the-ladys-magazine-project-at-the-authorship-appropriation-conference-dundee-89-april-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/2016\/04\/06\/the-ladys-magazine-project-at-the-authorship-appropriation-conference-dundee-89-april-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lady\u2019s Magazine Project at the Authorship & Appropriation conference (Dundee – 8\/9 April 2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dundee\"<\/a>

Beautiful Dundee, by B4bees on Flickr (click pic for link)<\/p><\/div>\n

We are approaching that time of the year again. Every year from spring to late summer, Conference Season brings opportunities to learn about the research of colleagues working all over the world, to see old friends, and to meet new ones. This festive period lasts longer than Christmas time, and in many ways, it\u2019s better. You get to talk freely about your obsessions without relatives and friends diverting the conversation to less esoteric subjects, and who doesn\u2019t like a good wine reception? At the bottom of this post you will find a calendar of conferences and workshops which will be attended by Team Lady\u2019s Mag in the near future, but in this blog post I will zoom in on an early event that I have been particularly looking forward to: this week\u2019s Authorship & Appropriation<\/a> conference at the University of Dundee (8 \u2013 9 April 2016).<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 As we have been telling you from our first post<\/a>, gaining insight into the authorship<\/strong> of the Lady\u2019s Magazine<\/em> is a major goal of our research project. We soon found that the myriads of reader-contributors who supplied the bulk of the magazine\u2019s contents did not just submit original productions, but also acted as intermediates who disseminated the work of others. Often, their submissions elaborated on or were downright identical to previously published texts by other authors<\/a>; in other words, they engaged in appropriation<\/strong>. We were therefore very excited when we read in the CFP for this event that papers were invited on the \u201ctheory and practice of the adaptation and appropriation of literary texts\u201d. Jenny DiPlacidi and I proposed a panel on ‘Appropriation as Cultural Transmission in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Press’, which was lucky enough to be accepted. Ours is session 3C on Friday afternoon, in case you\u2019re around and would like to join us! Jenny and I will of course be talking about the Lady\u2019s Magazine<\/em> (when are we not?), but this isn\u2019t strictly a Lady\u2019s Mag<\/em> panel. Jennie Batchelor will unfortunately not be able to join us, but we were very happy to find a third speaker in our Kent colleague Dr Kim Simpson<\/a> (@AmatoryAnon<\/a>). Kim works on anonymity and appropriation in early eighteenth-century prose fiction, and has recently been exploring the afterlives of these narratives in mid-century periodicals. We expect that the three of us together will be able to do justice to the central role in literary history of appropriations from<\/em> and in<\/em> eighteenth-century periodicals.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 Most readers of this blog will know that periodicals were the primary site of literary publication throughout the eighteenth century. The number of authors who made it to the stage of getting their own books published was dwarfed by the myriads of those contributing essays, verse and short or serial fiction to the essay papers, newspapers and magazines of their day. Encouraged by a more lenient attitude towards intellectual property, and a smaller risk of prosecution due to less stringent copyright laws, magazines in particular liberally repurposed material from other sources such as books and competing periodical titles. This practice was often justified<\/a> at the time as a form of cultural transmission: in the spirit of the Statute of Anne that limited the ownership of copyright to a limited period so that texts could later circulate freely, periodicals would have disseminated meritorious literary productions so a wider readership could benefit. In this period the distinction between repurposed content and original copy is problematic, because appropriated texts were often subtly adapted and subsequently with no qualms claimed by the author-appropriators as their own. The three papers in this panel discuss instances of how this practice of appropriation in British eighteenth-century periodicals contributed to the development and popularization of certain literary modes, themes and genres, either reading long-forgotten original publications from periodicals as possible models for now canonized texts, or, conversely, demonstrating how the legacy of famous texts was kept alive in periodicals through unacknowledged adaptations written by minor authors.<\/p>\n

Jenny DiPlacidi: \u2018\u201cFull of pretty stories\u201d: Literary Afterlives in the First Series of the Lady\u2019s Magazine<\/em>\u2019<\/h4>\n
\"LM,<\/a>

LM, V (Aug 1774): 182. Image \u00a9 Adam Matthew Digital \/ Birmingham Central Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

This paper examines appearance and reuse of Gothic conventions in the fiction of the Lady\u2019s Magazine: or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex <\/em>(1770-1832), analysing the fiction\u2019s engagement with earlier texts and assessing its influences on later and better-known works. It argues against the critical tradition that has long disparaged the periodical\u2019s tales as derivative works produced by amateurs to suggest that its fiction was a significant cultural form that reworked classical and contemporary tales to establish and shape eighteenth-century popular literature. For example, the short tale \u2018Alphonso; or, The Cruel Husband\u2019 (1774) reframes Boccaccio\u2019s story of Ghismonda and Guiscardo, popularized by Hogarth\u2019s 1759 painting, and, arguably, participates in a cultural practice in which classical works were marketed and consumed via translations later reformulated within the magazine. The History of an Humble Friend<\/em> (1774-76), an anonymous serial novella, shares marked similarities to Frances Burney\u2019s Evelina<\/em> (1778) and Ann Radcliffe\u2019s The Italian<\/em> (1797). The serial deploys standard eighteenth-century Gothic tropes such as the reclamation of the missing mother early on in traditional chronologies of the genre. Likewise, its presentation of the sentimental orphan prefigures later representations in novels by Burney and Charlotte Smith. Stories like this, The Governess <\/em>(1778-80) and The History of Lady Bradley <\/em>(1776-78) are preoccupied with issues such as women\u2019s education, laws, marriage and inheritance and the conflict between duty to family and self-autonomy; concerns central to eighteenth-century society that featured prominently \u2013 and similarly \u2013 in later canonical texts.<\/p>\n

Kim Simpson: \u201cAnomalous & Anonymous: Locating Links and Chasing Tales in Amatory Fiction and Beyond\u201d<\/h4>\n
\"Aphra<\/a>

Aphra Behn, by unknown artist<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1723, Jane Barker, writing as Galesia in\u00a0A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies<\/em>,\u00a0spoke indignantly and scornfully of Aphra Behn, despite, in the 1726 sequel,\u00a0The Lining of the Patch Work Screen<\/em>, borrowing from her short fiction plots for inset narratives. One of these borrowings was from Behn\u2019s \u2018The Wand\u2019ring Beauty\u2019 (1698). Although Carol Shiner Wilson, amongst others, have noted this particular reworking, in 1723 the text had undergone another adaptation by the little-known Arthur Blackamore, which was crucial to Barker\u2019s version. Reading these three versions together, this paper traces and analyses the transformations of the original plot. It contends that Blackamore\u2019s rendering develops the disguised amatory heroine, foreshadowing later works that address\u00a0proto-feminist strategies of dissimulation.\u00a0Meanwhile, Barker\u2019s self-conscious positioning of Behn\u2019s romance tale alongside\u00a0the inset narrative \u2018The History of Dorinda,\u2019\u00a0a reactionary warning about the dangers of quixotic reading practices, prefigures Charlotte Lennox\u2019s \u00a0The Female Quixote<\/em>\u00a0(1752), as well as some of the concerns articulated by Eliza Haywood in her periodical the Female Spectator\u00a0<\/em>(1744-46). This case study explores the complex and contradictory ways in which the generative potential of the original was exploited by subsequent writers.\u00a0It maps out influence between amatory writers, between early and mid-century writers, and between short fiction and the periodical. But it also makes a claim for the importance of lesser known and anonymous writers in this time period, demonstrating that despite our tendency to place known authors at the centre of study, a fuller picture of the array of understudied texts might demonstrate that they shaped and informed attributed ones as much as the other way around.<\/p>\n

Koenraad Claes: \u201cPoetics of appropriation: re-occasioned occasional verse in the Lady\u2019s Magazine<\/em>\u201d<\/h4>\n

The Lady\u2019s Magazine<\/em> (1770-1832) stands out among periodicals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century because of the exceptionally large extent to which it relied on readers\u2019 submissions for its copy. According to the scholarly consensus, the early years of this periodical coincided with the breakthrough of sentimental verse, and much of the poetry submitted by readers does adhere to what Jerome McGann has identified as \u2018the poetics of Sensibility\u2019: featuring a strong emphasis on the recording and communication of an individual\u2019s \u2018affects\u2019, i.e. emotional responses to specific situations. Most of the poetry submitted by the readers to the magazine belongs to the subgenre of \u2018occasional verse\u2019, usually short lyrical poems that were meant to mark a specific event that had impressed the poet. However, research by the Lady\u2019s Magazine<\/em> Project has shown that most of these poems were not merely influenced by the leading poets of Sensibility of the period, but are undeniably appropriations. These appropriations often are near-verbatim copies of famous or more obscure originals in which only references to the absolute specifics of settings or addressees were altered. This paper will discuss how such loose notions of intellectual property could coexist with the valuation of emotional authenticity that is apparent from the poems themselves and from the reception of other work in this genre, and will identify which specific aspects of appropriated texts were adapted to detach the source text from its original author and publication context.<\/p>\n

We would love to meet our readers attending the conference in Dundee, so if you are around, please do come say hello. Alternatively, this spring and early summer you will be able to hear us at the following events<\/em>.<\/p>\n

13 May \u2013 University of East Anglia (Norwich)\u00a0\u2013 CHASE workshop \u201cPeriodical Studies<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

17 May \u2013 Cardiff University \u2013 Cardiff Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Seminar: CRECS\u00a0Annual Conference<\/a> <\/u><\/p>\n

7-8 July \u2013 Liverpool John Moores University \u2013 European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit): Conf. Periodical Counter Cultures<\/a><\/p>\n

15 July \u2013 Athenaeum Club (London) \u2013 Conf. Victorian Periodicals Through Glass<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr Koenraad Claes<\/strong><\/h5>\n
School of English, University of Kent<\/strong><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are approaching that time of the year again. Every year from spring to late summer, Conference Season brings opportunities to learn about the research of colleagues working all over the world, to see old friends, and to meet new ones. This festive period lasts longer than Christmas time, and in many ways, it\u2019s better. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39799,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1484"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39799"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1484"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1500,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1484\/revisions\/1500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ladys-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}