Literary London Conference 2023 Registration Opens

The theme of this year's Literary London Conference is ‘Fashioning London: Streets, Styles and Storytelling' and runs at Devon House on campus at Northeastern University London July 6–7.     

According to the organisers: 

"The conference will consider London as a city of fashion and self-fashioning – an abundant dressing up box where people, spaces and things are made and unmade. It will explore London’s role in the material production and circulation of fashions, styles and (sub)cultures. What stories do London’s fashions and the fashionings of London tell and how do they relate to concepts, images and performances of gender, ethnicity, class, and singular and collective identity? What are the relationships between stories of fashion and literary narratives? How do literary narratives interact with fabricated designs, plans and models of the city? How can we think through the ways cities are knitted together through urban materials, bodies, technologies and more-than-human networks?"

Keynote addresses will be delivered by Dr Lucie Whitmore (Museum of London), Dr Bethan Bide (University of Leeds), and by Dr Charlotte Grant (Northeastern University London) with panels covering:

• Thrifting: The London Rag Trade and History’s Hand-me-downs   
• Digital Cities: Mapping London’s Literary and Cultural Past   
• Regency Styles: Fashion and Fashionability in Early Nineteenth-century Magazines   
• Queer London: Style and Sexuality in Literature and Culture, 1950-2000   
• Authority, Self-Styling, and Feminist Visions of London Stitching the Shattered City: Literary Reflections of World War I and II   
• Shimmering Silks, Jewelled words: Faces of Fashion in Literary Culture  

On July 5 there will also be a walking tour of West Norwood Cemetery led by Jane Jordon. Known as the Millionaires’ Cemetery, West Norwood is predominantly the resting place of self-made industrialists and manufacturers. 

More details and tickets for the conference are available here.

The Literary London Society was founded in July 2011 to “foster interdisciplinary and historically wide-ranging research into London literature in its historical, social, and cultural contexts". This conference was originally planned for 2020 but postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.