LIMITED SPACES - BOOK YOUR SPACE HERE. (SANDWICH LUNCH INCLUDED)

How do scholars locate unpublished letters? How do we date an undated letter, or identify unfamiliar correspondents? And what business do we have even looking at the private letters of long-forgotten individuals? This workshop will serve as an introduction to working with nineteenth-century letters. We will discuss the challenges of discovering, transcribing, editing, and annotating letters, consider both the overt and subtle messages suggested in a letter’s wording, margins, and even method of delivery, and discuss the literary historian’s responsibility to the written past.

Perfect for anyone interested in history, historical biography, historical fiction and literary exploration.

Thomas McLean is Associate Professor in English at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is the editor of Further Letters of Joanna Baillie (FDUP, 2010), author of The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire (Palgrave, 2012) and co-editor with Ruth Knezevich of a new edition of Jane Porter's 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). He is currently preparing an edition of Frances Browne’s Legends of Ulster.