English Graduate Conference 2012

Panel discussion talk on 'Book as Object' for the Oxford English Graduate Conference 2013.

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, draws on her experience as a trustee of the Booker Prize and as a judge for many other literary prizes to offer a response to the question, 'What is a Classic?'.

Judith Luna, the Senior Commissioning Editor at Oxford World's Classics, draws on her practical involvement in re-launching the Oxford World's Classics series in 2008 to give a publisher's take on the question, 'What is a Classic?'.

Dr Ankhi Mukherjee, Wadham college, Oxford, speaks to the question 'What is a Classic?' by examining the residual influence of the Eurocentric literary canon in the age of world literature and emergent formations of canons and classics.

Cecilia Bennett considers the use of the English language in black Atlantic narratives. These include Olaudah Equiano's 1789 work, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, and Andrea Levy's 2010 work, The Long Song. She explores the way in which a tension between the English language and black voice has evolved over time and the extent to which it continues to influence modern thought.

Erin Nyborg draws parallels between Michael Faber's 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. She argues that Faber has appropriated narrative elements in order to rewrite the ending of Jane Eyre, already a feminist classic, in explicitly feminist terms.

Dominic Davies talks about Olive Schreiner, the postcolonial South African author, and how her work, The Story of the African Farm, engages with the critical question of European hegemony in literary understanding and expectations of literary works. Davies explores how Schreiner incorporates local reading tradition into her own work and encourages her readers to do the same.

In this talk, Sophie Duncan examines suffragists' interactions with Shakespeare and his works, as performers, directors, consumers and critics. Suffragist readings of Shakespeare variously cite Shakespeare's feminism as a source of authority, justifying their right to vote, and attack Shakespeare's patriarchal impulses in a manner that anticipates second-wave feminist, cultural materialist readings of the plays by half a century.