Remapping the Rise of the European Novel: 1500-1800

An international conference organised in conjunction with the
Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, to mark the 25th anniversary of the
Besterman bequest.

To be held at St Hugh's College, Oxford, 8-11 September 2001.

"The caustic responses of various classicists suggest that the
novel never did 'rise' at all, but rather that it was 'raised' by scholars
who wished to nationalize, rationalize, or even monopolize the
genre. But it is also possible, if more laborious, to 'raise' the novel
in order to transnationalize it. The time has come to stop thinking
of the novel as a national commodity. Instead, we might think
about it as a wildly mixed genre given to vigorous rises - whether
with Heliodorus or Cervantes or Defoe -- from the hybrid soil of
multilingual empires and, in the case of the last two writers, from
specifically American soil." Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the
Novel, and the New World.

The development of the modern novel has largely been studied
within the context of national boundaries. This has not only been
for pragmatic reasons; the novel has played a crucial role in the
construction and exploration of national consciousness. Yet the so-
called 'rise of the novel' in early modern Europe is an international
phenomenon which can be better explored if approached from an
international perspective. The purpose of this conference is to bring
together scholars from a range of languages and disciplines to
investigate ways in which the crossing of geographical, cultural and
linguistic boundaries helped to shape the early development and
diffusion of prose fiction in Europe.

Several new areas of enquiry have emerged since Ian Watt's
pioneering study, which are informing and encouraging the
convergence of empirical and theoretical perspectives on the novel.
These include:

- the history of the book and the study of the material conditions of
production, dissemination, ownership and readership

- large-scale bibliometric and bibliographical studies which use
information technology to track the physical traces of literary
influence within and across national boundaries, including
collection development in private and public libraries

- translation and transculturation studies, which try to understand
the often subtle distortion inherent in moving between languages
and cultures =85 post-colonial perspectives, which are increasingly
revealing the non-European dimension to much European novelistic
discourse.

The conference will focus on key themes such as: the traffic of
books, translation and transculturation, travel and territoriality. The
following leading scholars have offered to provide position papers
focussing on key questions and establishing a theoretical
framework within which others speakers might work or with which
they might enter into debate:

Lise Andries (Institute des Sciences de l'Homme), 'Is the novel a
popular genre in early modern France?'

Roderick Beaton (King's College, London), 'The Greek novel and
the rise of the European genre: a cautionary tale'

John Bender (Stanford University), 'The Novel and Science: the
Culture of Diagram'

Margaret Anne Doody (University of Notre Dame), 'The
representation of consciousness in the ancient novel'

Andrew Hadfield (University of Wales, Aberystwyth), 'When was
the first English novel and what does it tell us?'

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (College de France), 'Library history: a
report on the quantitative study of the literary genre, especially the
novel, according to the computerised catalogue of the Bibliotheque
National from the 15th -20th centuries'

Michael McKeon (Rutgers University, New Jersey), 'Watt's Rise of
the Novel within the tradition of the rise of the novel'

James Raven (Mansfield College, Oxford), 'The English novel, 1750-
1830'.

John Richetti (University of Pennsylvania), 'Representing women:
male and female novelists and the sex/gender question in the
eighteenth century'

Jonathan Usher (University of Edinburgh), 'The shadow of the
Decameron: the plague of Renaissance imitators'

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly (Exeter College, Oxford), 'The early
modern German novel and the business of narration '

Diana de Armas Wilson (University of Denver), 'Of pilgrims and
polyglots: Heliodorus, Cervantes and Defoe'

The conference organisers are now seeking a limited number of
short papers (not more than twenty minutes) to be read at the
conference in response to the position papers which will be
precirculated.

Papers might cover such areas as:

The languages of fiction: the rise of the novel and the development
of vernacular languages; Bakhtine's theory of heteroglossia and the
early novel

Publication and translation: publication histories and the role of
translation in disseminating, importing and exporting knowledge of
international literary developments; translation as a way of
negotiating national literary and ideological boundaries

Books and readers: who owned and read which books, the role of
fiction in the building of private and national collections; the use of
information technology to map inventories and catalogues; studies
of what characters in the novels are themselves reading

The colonial context: New World stimuli; accounts of discovery and
conquest

Test cases: key texts such as Don Quijote and La Nouvelle
H=E9lo=EFse as case studies for detailed exploration of cross-national
points of reference

Histories of the novel: how the emerging genre has been defined
and redefined.

All offers of papers or other enquiries in the first instance to Jeannie
Tweedie, Principal's Office, King's College London
([log in to unmask], tel: 0207 848 3305)

Selected papers from the conference will form a proposed volume
of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, published by
the Voltaire Foundation.

Organisation

The conference is jointly organised by:

Dr Nicholas Cronk, Director, The Voltaire Foundation, University of
Oxford ([log in to unmask])

Professor Barry Ife, Cervantes Professor of Spanish and Vice-
Principal, King's College London ([log in to unmask])

Dr Jenny Mander, Newnham College, Cambridge
([log in to unmask])

Dates

The conference will be held at St Hugh's College, Oxford. It will
begin at 2pm on Saturday 8th September, 2001 and close after
lunch on Tuesday 11th September 2001.

Conference fee

There will be a conference fee of =A385. This will include Sunday,
Monday and Tuesday lunches and Monday dinner at St Hugh's
College, and a conference dinner at St Edmund Hall on the Sunday
night.

Accommodation

Bed and Breakfast accommodation will be available at St Hugh's
College @ =A349.67 per night.

Sponsors

Sponsors to date include: King's College London; the Faculty of
Modern Languages, University of Cambridge; Newnham College,
Cambridge; the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford; Instituto Cervantes;
the French Embassy in London

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