The Workshop will combine conference-style papers, a keynote by Professor Marion Thain (KCL), and a group discussion session responding to pre-circulated reading, led by our keynote. The event will be followed by a drinks reception where we encourage attendees to keep the conversations going!

Our topic this year is Literary Form, with a particular focus on the work of literary form(s) in history. Our title, critical forms, asks what kinds of urgency literary forms take on in particular contexts, and how this in turn informs our own literary critical moment. As part of the so-called ‘formal turn’ in literary studies in the early twenty-first century, the valences, politics, and gendering of literary form have come under renewed scrutiny. Recently, in the field of feminist scholarship, scholars have looked not only at how women writers used different forms but also at how form was implicitly gendered. In the field of cognitive poetics, scholars have looked at how literary form might be shaped by cognitive processes and how form might respond to and in turn cultivate different modes of attention. Scholars in the field of the history of reading have looked at how bibliographical form might curate different reading experiences, turning to the physical evidence of historical readers to locate the valences of form in actual practice. Interest in the history of particular forms, including the essay, has renewed, and ideas of literary form continue to influence debates and theories of presentism.

We encourage papers from students studying literature of any period and invite creative approaches to the topic of literary form. Papers might address, but are not limited to discussing:

• The politics of form
• Form and attention
• Gender and form / the gendering of form
• Form and history / modernity
• Form and play
• Material form / the book as form
• Form and tradition / myth
• Form and the practice of criticism / scholarship
• The ecology of form(s)

This year, we are excited to announce that our keynote speaker will be Professor Marion Thain (KCL). Professor Thain is interested in the relationship of literary form – especially the lyric – to modernity, and her research focuses on the nineteenth century and fin de siècle. Her monograph The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (2016) argues that the poetry associated with the aesthetic movement of the late-nineteenth century often addressed the ‘problem of modernity’ obliquely: through form as opposed to content. Her current projects include the Form in Dialogue Network – an experimental digital forum discussing the valences and politics of literary form, aimed at fostering more dialogic research and pedagogical practices – and a printed volume, edited in collaboration with Dr. Ewan Jones (Downing College, Cambridge), on close-reading as attentional practice (forthcoming; c. 2024–25).

Please submit abstracts by completing the form linked below:

https://forms.gle/VhiLgW63Cz1yKZxE7

Deadline for abstracts: 1 June 2024