CfP (AGS 2023) In Her Own Hand: Media of Female Agency in the Long 18th Century

We are inviting proposals for a Special Panel entitled In Her Own Hand: Media of Female Agency in the Long 18th Century at the 91st annual AGS Conference at Trinity College Dublin, Tue 29–Thu 31 August 2023.

In the long eighteenth century, women found new ways to engage with a male-dominated public sphere and to express their agency in textual media. One famous example would be Sophia de La Roche’s Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771) or her Frauenzeitschrift Pomona (1783/84). Due to many digitisation efforts, manuscripts, letters and other paraphernalia from that time period have become available for analysis for the first time. Particularly writing in the margins, deleted parts, and drafts deemed unfit for publication can form the basis of a re-examination of the polyvalent agency of female authors such as Bettina von Arnim, Caroline von Günderrode or Caroline Pichler. This panel therefore asks how women put their hard-worn textual agency into practice: what were the media of female agency in the long 18th century and how did women writers understand their own writing?

Please send your proposals of ca. 250 words and a brief bio (100 words max.) in either English or German by 31 March 2023 to Helga Müllneritsch (helga.muellneritsch@ucd.ie) and Dennis Schäfer (dennis.schaefer@princeton.edu).