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Collaboration, Authorship and the Renaissance

Collaboration, Authorship and the Renaissance: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives

January 13-14, 2012

Now online:  Collaboration, Authorship and the Renaissance - Final programme  

Over the past three decades, the increasing attention paid to the collaborative practices of the early modern theatre has generated new opportunities for critical enquiry. In particular, it has been possible to explore more deeply the role of the author and his/her implication in networks of performance and textual polyphony. In tandem with these developments, criticism has addressed the multiple ways in which Shakespearean and other early modern texts have been reconceptualised and rewritten in modern and postmodern digital technologies—in film, television and the expanding creative environments of Web 2.0—and how such appropriations affect received notions of authorship, authenticity and originality. This conference seeks to initiate a dialogue between these two crucial schools of thought. It will investigate potential cross-fertilizations between early modern constructions of authors and collaborators and postmodern paradigms of auteurs and ‘digital Shakespeares’; in so doing, further areas of interest will be illuminated, and fresh understandings of texts and their producers will be facilitated. 

The conference invites abstracts on topics which may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Authorship in early modern manuscript, material and print culture
  • Authorship, collaboration and revision in Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean playtexts; collaborative practices in early modern theatres, and wider literary and textual culture
  • Shakespeare and auteur theory; Shakespearean texts in Anglo-American and world cinema
  • The 'author' and contemporary theories of textuality, materiality, gender and intentionality; authorial identity and its 'recovery' via the early modern and postmodern text
  • Shakespeare and the Renaissance in post-modern digital technologies; videogames, video and sound technology, the Web and user-generated content
  • New and renewed editorial strategies in postmodernity; authorship and collaboration in the age of hypertextuality


Plenary Speakers: 

  • Professor Gary Taylor (Florida State University)
  • Professor Barbara Hodgdon (University of Michigan)
  • Professor Grace Iopollo (University of Reading)
  • Dr. Deborah Cartmell (De Montfort University) 

 

Please direct enquiries and submit abstracts (250 words) to: collaboration2012@qub.ac.uk

Deadline for abstracts: 1st August 2011 

(note: a small registration fee may be required, further details forthcoming) 

This conference is generously supported by the Society for Renaissance Studies.