Alan Garner to talk at Magdalen College

Alan Garner is giving a talk on two occasions this week at Magdalen College, Oxford. His talk is entitled 'A Bull on My Tongue' and accompanies the Bodleian exhibition Magical Books: From the Midde-Ages to middle earth. The first talk, on Wednesday 23 Oct. at 3pm, is open to all members of the University and free of charge. The second is open to all members of the public and will take place on Friday 25 Oct. at 6pm (tickets cost £ 12).

For more information and to book please email conferences@magd.ox.ac.uk.

Michaelmas 2013 Term Card: Children’s Literature and the Environment

We have two terrific speakers lined up for Michaelmas term 2013 on the emerging and thought-provoking research area of Children’s Literature and the Environment:

Friday Oct. 25^th, 4pm: Dr Jane Suzanne Carroll (University of Roehampton) ‘Landscape History for Imagined Worlds'

Friday Nov. 22^nd, 4pm: Dr Jenny Bavidge (University of Cambridge)

‘Natural Causes: Urban Nature and Children's Literature’

The Colloquium will take place at an inspiring new venue: St Cross Room, St Cross College, St Giles, OX1 3LZ, Oxford. As the colloquium will take place at an Oxford College, it is necessary to register for these events. Please do so for the first talk simply by emailing me (cara dot bartels-bland at stx dot ox dot ac dot uk) no later than Wednesday Oct. 23^rd. 

Frances Hardinge Talk

 

Children's author Frances Hardinge will give the keynote address at this year's Oxford English graduate student conference. The talk is at five o'clock on Friday 31 May in Lecture Theatre 2 at the English Faculty. Ms Hardinge will discuss the roles of books and the printing press in her first novel, Fly by Night. All welcome!

Bodleian Summer 2013 Exhibition

The Bodleian's summer exhibition, 'Magical Tales: From the Middle Ages to Middle-earth', opens today and runs until 27 October 2013. In conjunction with the exhibition, which showcases the Bodleian's astonishing children's literature holdings, there will be a series of lunchtime lectures. This term these are as follows:

29 May - 'Once and Future Arthurs: Arthurian Literature for Children' (Dr Anna Caughey, Lecturer in Old and Middle English, Keble College)

12 June - 'Books of Magic' (Dr Diane Purkiss, Fellow and Tutor of English, Keble College)

18 June - 'King Arthur Joins the Boy Scouts: Children and Arthurianism, 1860–1918' (Dr Anna Caughey, Lecturer in Old and Middle English, Keble College)

All talks will take place at Convocation House in the Old Bod. More details here, but in the meantime, check out the exhibition!



An Arthur Rackham illustration for a 1917 abridgement of the Morte Darthur: to hear about King Arthur's immense popularity within children's literature, attend one of Anna Caughey's upcoming lectures.

Cara Bartels-Bland on Prydain

 

We are delighted to have Cara Bartels-Bland (St Cross College, Oxford) speaking on the Newbery Medal-winning author Lloyd Alexander in a week's time.

Cara's title is 'Mapping Boundaries: Otherworlds and Mortal Worlds in Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain', and her talk will take place in the History of the Book Room, Oxford English Faculty, on 11 February 2013 at 5.15pm.

Dame Penelope Lively at the University Museum

Last Friday, Penelope Lively gave Somerville College's James Bryce Memorial Lecture at the University Museum. The setting for the talk, evocative as it is at any given time, couldn't help but strike the fan of Lively's children's books especially: The House in Norham Gardens has scenes set just down the stairs in the Pitt Rivers Museum. (As does His Dark Materials, making the Pitt Rivers itself an artefact of children's literature, though Lively positioned it more irreverently via James Fenton's description: 'shut / 22 hours a day and all day Sunday'.) Lively's lecture, which took shape around themes of memory, remembering, and history, also gave a substantial record of her reading in childhood and youth. 

Reading that shaded into writing: early encounters with classical mythology via Andrew Lang, which were followed by her own retellings (although Penelope was front and centre and full of virtue in the Odyssey, Lively ascribed other attributes to her namesake). Forbidden reading, reading as 'cherishing a subversive practice' amid the 'stern philistinism' of her boarding school. The Oxford use of reading to describe undergraduate study ('reading History', 'reading English'), with the phrase glossing such study as 'long-term inclination rather than mandatory application'. The distinction between 'undirected, unstructured reading' and 'deliberate reading', or research, as it pertains to her career as a writer. 

Lively's readings ranged over an hour, and it wasn't nearly long enough.

Above: A house in Norham Gardens, circa 1875.

Centre for the History of Childhood in Michaelmas

The Centre for the History of Childhood at Magdalen College will hold four Michaelmas sessions dedicated to new work on the history of childhood and young people in Britain and its empire since 1700. The details are as follows:

17 October: Laurence Brockliss & George Rousseau: ‘Orphans and the History of Childhood’: a discussion based around Cheryl L. Nixon, The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature. Estate, Blood and Body (Ashgate, 2011).

31 October: Hugh Morrison (Otago), ‘Competing Kingdoms? British Settler Children, Religion and Imperial Identity c.1890-1930’.

14 November: Hilary Marland (Warwick), ‘“Bounding Saucy Girls”: Visions and Practices of Health and Girlhood in Britain 1874-1920s’.

28 November: Heather Ellis (Liverpool Hope), ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the West, 1800-2000’.

All meetings take place in the Old Practice Room, Magdalen, at 5 pm.

The CfP for the 2013 Child and the book conference, to be held at the University of Padua, has also been released: see here for details.