'Transatlantic Print Culture' symposium slated for April

5:04 p.m., March 6, 2007--This spring, the University of Delaware will host a symposium of scholars working on the next frontier of material and historical research in modernist studies. "Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms" will be held April 27-28, in various location on the UD campus in Newark. In panel discussions participating scholars will present cutting-edge research on the transatlantic print marketplace and on product changes in that marketplace from 1880-1940.

New research on periodicals, such as The Freewoman, CRISIS, The New Age and The Smart Set, is contributing substantially to current efforts in the field of modernist studies through the study of the arts in their original social, political, cultural and intellectual contexts.

The literary critics, media studies scholars and historians who will be presenting works-in-progress at the symposium are exploring modernism's first emergence in these venues and are investigating material changes in publishing brought about by the emergence of new, mass-produced, printed materials such as national newspapers, political publications, mass-market magazines, paperback books and other new media forms in Britain and the U.S. from 1880-1940.

The invited speakers will demonstrate how readers caught wind of “new style" in newspaper gossip columns and book reviews; how readers learned to aspire to or disdain the difficulties of modernism in comic cartoons in The New Yorker and Punch; and how readers first encountered modernist masterworks in high-circulation, pulp-fiction formats and in magazines like The Smart Set, which deliberately undermined cultural divides.

Inviting us to think in new ways about modernism's emergence in a public sphere that was, even by 1900, complexly segmented, the
symposium contributors will offer fresh insights into the history of Anglo-American print culture as they call attention to important but under-explored issues, genres, artifacts and patterns of circulation between British and American audiences. They also will offer case studies of revealing and significant instances of publicity using the period's new media; provide new models for theorizing the public sphere in the period; and consider methodological problems and strategies for research on these issues.

The symposium is sponsored by UD's Center for Material Culture Studies, the departments of English and history, the Women's Studies Program, the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, CAPE, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for International Studies and the University of Delaware Library.

For more information on the symposium or for a registration form, visit [www.english.udel.edu/transatlantic/index.html].

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