The "Re-reading Georgette Heyer" colloquium was held on Saturday 7 November 2009 in Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.
Since my summaries of the papers are quite long I've decided to give each of them its own post. Links to each of the summaries are provided in the list below:
- Jennifer Kloester: ‘The Life of Georgette Heyer’
- Jay Dixon: ‘Heyer and Place’
- Laura Vivanco: ‘“So educational!” she said. “And quite unexceptionable!”: The Nonesuch as Didactic Love Fiction’
- Sam Rayner: ‘Publishing Heyer: Representing the Regency in Historical Romance’
- Mary Joannou: ‘Heyer and Austen’
- Kerstin Frank: ‘The Thermodynamics of Georgette Heyer: Variations on the Quest for Revitalisation’
- Catherine Johns: ‘Class and Breeding’
- Sarah Annes Brown: ‘Lady of Quality and Homosexual Panic’
- K. Elizabeth Spillman: ‘Cross Dressing and Disguise in Heyer’s Historical Romances’
Professor Sarah Annes Brown said: [...] I've organised quite a few conferences now - but none have received quite so much enthusiastic attention as Re-reading Georgette Heyer. But perhaps that's because I've never organised a conference about a writer who generates so much pure pleasure and enthusiasm in her readers.'As she wrote in her observations on (and summary of) the colloquium, this enthusiasm was much in evidence on the day itself: "I’ve attended quite a lot of academic conferences – but never one where there was anything like so much cheering and laughter!" No doubt Heyer herself can take much of the credit for the laughter, since her novels are so full of comic moments and characters. Many of the cheers, however, were elicited by Jennifer Kloester, who had new discoveries and announcements to make.
Other summaries of the day have been written by:
- Sarah Annes Brown, who has also posted a summary of the responses to a questionnaire completed by roughly half of the people who attended the conference.
- Una McCormack
- Bex Lewis, who has written up a very detailed summary which also includes an outline of some of the topics raised during the pre-lunch and post-conference discussions.
- Ann
- Sally Houghton, of Georgette-Heyer.com
Hi Sarah:
ReplyDeleteI got to your website because of an article you wrote about two years ago. "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know, or just a jerk." Great article and I am enthused about that topic as were your readers.
I am so fascinated by the topics you research and study and write about, It could make an interesting documentary of some sort.
Anyway I live in CO USA and I have been reading Ero/Rom for only about 3 months. It is like a whole new literary genre I have never given much thought to previously. I think it has hit me at the right time in my life.
Aitch Slavic
Love the topics you are disscussing in your blog.. very excited to read more!!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Aitch. I appreciate it. So glad you've come to romance! It's a fabulous field.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Be-Strong. I'm glad you're enjoying reading the summaries. I'll be adding more gradually, over the course of the week.
ReplyDeleteJust to say that I've now collated (though not very scientifically) the questionnaire answers from the day.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.adjb.net/sab/index.php
Thanks, Sarah. At the bottom of my post I've added a link to your post about the questionnaire.
ReplyDeleteThank you for these terrific posts reviewing the conference.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you're enjoying reading them, Una! It's quite time-consuming to write up the summaries, but I'm sure it's helping to fix all the papers more firmly in my memory and it's also giving me the chance to go and do a tiny bit more background research on some of the things mentioned in passing by the speakers. I'm also very much enjoying continuing the discussion of Heyer and her novels: it makes it feel like the conference hasn't really ended yet.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't resist a bit of a review either: http://bexlewis.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/georgette-heyer-conference/!
ReplyDeleteBex, I tried getting to that url, but I got a message that said "Sorry, no posts matched your criteria." Looking at the url, it occurs to me that it's got tomorrow's date in it. Could that be why I can't see the post?
ReplyDeleteApologies for that - http://bexlewis.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/georgette-heyer-conference/ is now live and hopefully fully readable. I thought blogs were readable before official publication, but maybe that's just because I'm logged in!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Bex. It's definitely live now. I've added a link to your summary in the body of my post, so that people can see it easily without having to get down to here in the comments thread! I'm really glad you added the bits about the discussions. They were quite fast-moving and I didn't take notes on them, so I didn't have any way of summarising those.
ReplyDelete