W. J. Alexander Lecture in English Literature

This richly illustrated lecture samples the practices of collecting, excerpting, collaging, and scrapbooking that were a popular female pastime across Britain and even Lower Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries. To 21st-century eyes, the compilations of paper scraps assembled through such practices might look, for better and for worse, like forerunners of today’s junk journals. This lecture, however, recovers from this mode of female handicraft a feminist media theory that, centered on unbound paper, both countered an emerging division between ephemeral print and the bound book and challenged increasingly conventional notions of creativity. For these female amateurs (as likewise for a host of women writers, from the 18th-century English poet Isabella Lickbarrow to contemporary Canadian author Lisa Robertson), to occupy the role of archivist of the ephemeral was to participate in the dynamism of modernity.