Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies
CECS Day Conference
Saturday 8th January 2011 at the King's Manor K/122
WRITING MARGINAL LIVES or A Medley of Characters
Convenor: Harriet Guest
Writing Marginal Lives: A review by Ruth Mather and Rosemary Hendrie review of Writing Marginal Lives (MS Word 
, 15kb)
This colloquium will explore the problems of producing biographies of obscure, incomplete or fragmentary lives. This topic draws on the older, social-historical concern with recovering the life stories of relatively hidden people; subjects whose voices may have been obscured by differences of class, gender, or region. It links this with a more recent concern with the problems of indigenous biography, or transnational biography, and even the incompleteness found in narrating the lives of more so-called canonical figures. What does it mean to structure such lives according to the traditional conventions of biography; to impose individualist genres onto peoples of non-Individualist cultures; to give heroic centrality to lives shaped by marginalisation, by linguistic inaudibility or cultural invisibility?
PROGRAMME
9.30-10.00: Registration and Tea/Coffee
10.00-11.30
John Barrell (York), ‘Edward Pugh: Not Much of a Life’
Colin Jones (QM London), 'Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, a Voltairean Embroiderer at the Court of Louis XV'
11.30-11.45: tea/coffee
11.45-1.15
Jon Mee (Warwick), ‘'Louse' Pigott’
Mark Philp (Oxford), 'Improper Levity: Sarah Elwes's Calling'
1.15-2.15: lunch
2.15-4.30
Emma Major (York), 'Exemplarity and Anonymity: women and praise in the long Eighteenth Century'
Kate Fullagar (Macquarie), 'Writing Indigenous Biography: The Parallel Lives of Ostenaco and Mai'
Iain McCalman (Sydney), 'In search of pre-contact Indigenous lives. The narrative of Barrier Reef castaway Barbara Thompson.'