14th Annual British Women Writers Conference 23 - 26 March 2006. Gainesville, Florida

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Talia Schaffer

General Keynote Information :: Talia Schaffer :: Carolyn Steedman :: Lynne Vallone

Talia Schaffer is an associate professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has written widely on late-Victorian popular culture, material culture, domestic conditions, and non-canonical women writers, with articles in anthologies including Wilde Writings, Marketing the Author, The Recipe Reader, Women’s Experience of Modernity, and The New Woman in Fact and Fiction, and in journals including Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Poetry, ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture.

Her books include The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001), which argued that women writers like Ouida, Alice Meynell, and Lucas Malet were instrumental in the development of aestheticism; a collection called Women and British Aestheticism (1999), co-edited with Kathy A. Psomiades; and a new edition of Lucas Malet’s controversial novel of 1901 The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2004). Her current work analyzes the Victorian domestic handicraft as a model for mid-Victorian realism and a paradigm for alternative ideas about art, economics, and representation in the mid-nineteenth century.

Entitled "Reading the Recovery: Feminist Criticism of the Fin de Siècle," Schaffer's keynote address will examine some of the recent developments in recovery work of late-Victorian women writers as a field, including attempts to get beyond sheer advocacy to create a more complex critical perspective and critiques of the assumption that writers must be "feminist" or "subversive" to make them worth recovering, with the beginnings of attempts to find other ways to argue for writers' significance.