Voices of the Clay Country: a literature symposium
Voices of the Clay Country is an event being held as part of the Rescorla Festival designed to explore the history, literature and culture of the area – involving novels, poetry, autobiography, ghost stories, and oral history.Highlights include:
- Professor Philip Payton (Institute of Cornish Studies) speaking on A. L. Rowse and St. Austell
- Dr Alan Kent (Open University) will discuss a novel about the Clay Country, Out of the Fury by A. W. Holmes, in relation to social change, and will also give a reading from his own work at the festival
- Gemma Goodman (University of Warwick) will consider Salome Hocking’s Norah Lang and the figure of the balmaiden
- Dr Ronald Perry (Cornwall College) will talk about the Clay strikes of 1875-6 and 1913
A full programme for the event is available as a PDF here.
September Conference
A further event will be held on 5-6 September at University of Plymouth. This event will provide the opportunity to look at the Clay Country in relation to a much wider context. It will explore the experience of various localities through consideration of written and oral narratives, in forms including but by no means limited to novels, autobiography and oral history interviews. One of the aims is to bring together papers which engage with different kinds of stories about place, especially literary and/or oral, and thereby to consider relations between the written and spoken word. The conference will seek to engage with a diversity of approaches, as represented by Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Benedict Anderson's account of “print-nationalism” in contrast to “speech-localities”, and Alessandro Portelli’s ‘What Makes Oral History Different?’For a poster, please click here.
For more information about either of these events please contact the Research and Education Officer, Shelley Trower: shelley@rescorla.org
