Is There Such a Thing as "Literary History from Below"?
Event
This event has now finished.
Event date
Wednesday 18 February 2026, 4.30pm to 5.30pm
Location
C/A/140, Chemistry Buildings, Campus West, University of York (Map)
Booking
Event details
Modern School Research Seminar with speaker Dr Conrad Steel (Oxford).
According to the latest survey data, around two million adults in the UK have written some form of story, poem, or play within the last twelve months. How, if at all, should this kind of writing practice figure in our accounts of literary history?
Via the example of a short text produced as part of a writing group for people with disabilities in Liverpool in the 1990s, this talk will present two possible but contradictory answers to that question, in order to consider what might be left of the aesthetics of contemporary writing if our fantasies of social recognition could be bracketed out.