The Barbara Pym Society

The 2008 ANNUAL Meeting & CONFERENCE

Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th August 2008 at St Hilda’s College, Oxford

Program

‘Under the Influence’

Authors Barbara admired and those who were influenced by her.


   SATURDAY 9 AUGUST

          8.00-9.00am       BREAKFAST (Dining Hall)
11.00                 COFFEE BREAK (Hall of South Building)

11.30-12.45pm    The Annual General Meeting

1.00-1.45            LUNCH (Dining Hall)

                    2.00                   First Session (Vernon Harcourt Room)
                                             
                                              'Uneventful Lives' ?  Home, family and parish in the novels of                                                   Charlotte M Yonge, Ivy Compton Burnett and Barbara Pym.
                                              Julia Courtney

                                             Under the Influence of Elizabeth von Arnim and Robert Liddell
                                             Eleonore Biber

3.30                   TEA & BISCUITS (Hall of South Building)

4.00                   Second Session (Vernon Harcourt Room)

       Pym and the Poets
       David Fuller

                                             Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin: Mutual Respect and Mystification
                                             Janice Rossen

7.00                   RECEPTION (Hall of South Building)


7.30                   THE ANNUAL DINNER (Dining Hall)
                          Memories of Barbara
      Paul Binding
SUNDAY 10 AUGUST

8.00-9.00am       BREAKFAST (Dining Hall)
       
9.00-11.00         Free Time
                         Church, Sightseeing, Videos, Relax in the SCR

11.00                 COFFEE BREAK (Hall of South Building)

          11.30-12.45pm   Discussion (Vernon Harcourt Room)
               An Open Session for all participants
               Led by Kate Charles

          12.45-1.50         SUNDAY LUNCH (Dining Hall)

          2.00                  Dramatised Readings (Vernon Harcourt Room)

          3.30                  TEA & BISCUITS (Hall of South Building)

Speakers

ELEONORE BIBER read English and German, specializing in Anglo-Saxon, sociolinguistics, the English novel and Austrian dialectal research.  She holds a doctorate from the University of Vienna in English language and literature and has taught English, German, comparative literature and drama at a grammar school in Vienna.  A member of the Barbara Pym Society, she has delivered papers on the novelist in England and the US.  She is also a member of the Charlotte M. Yonge Fellowship and Mörderische Schwestern.  Her areas of expertise are the Church of England, the Anglo-Catholic novel and Victorian literature of faith and doubt. Her  most recent research interest is the British and American crime novel and aspects of Vienna in modern literature.  Eleonore is married and lives near Vienna.

JULIA COURTNEY is an Associate Lecturer with the Open University, tutoring on undergraduate and postgraduate literature courses. Charlotte M. Yonge, an author whom Barbara Pym knew well, was the subject of her PhD research: this focused on Yonge's influence on younger women novelists, Church workers and teachers.  She has edited, with Clemence Schultze, a collection of essays Characters and Scenes: Studies in Charlotte M. Yonge (2007). She has also published on Stevenson and Flaubert; and is co-editor with Paula James of The Role of the Parrot in Selected Texts from Ovid to Jean Rhys (2006).

DAVID FULLER is Emeritus Professor of English and former Chairman of the Department of English Studies in the University of Durham.  From 2002 to 2007 he was also the University’s Public Orator.  Amongst his many books he is the author of Blake’s Heroic Argument, James Joyce’s Ulysses’, Signs of Grace, and essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Blake, Shelley, Keats, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and the theory and practice of criticism.  He is the editor of Tamburlaine the Great, for the Clarendon Press complete works of Marlowe and editor of Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose.  He trained initially as a Musicologist, plays the piano and organ, and has written on Jacobean stage music and on opera.  His current research is on Shakespeare in performance, including a book on the Sonnets to be published by Continuum in the series Shakespeare Now!

JANICE ROSSEN has written The World of Barbara Pym and has edited a volume of essays on Pym entitled Independent Women.  She has also published a book on Philip Larkin, followed by The University in Modern Fiction, and most recently Women Writing Modern Fiction.  A Passion for Ideas, which discusses twentieth-century writers such as Pym, Byatt, Murdoch, and Bowen, who carry on a tradition of Victorian realism in their novels.  She is currently at work on a study entitled Epiphanies in Literature.


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