The Burney Society of North America
Portland, Oregon on October 28-29, 2010
Burney and the Gothic
Frances Burney and the Gothic elements of her works will be the theme of the 17 th annual
general meeting of The Burney Society in North America on Thursday, Oct. 28, and Friday, Oct. 29,
2010, at the Hilton Portland and Executive Tower in downtown Portland, Oregon.
Cynthia Wall, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, will be the plenary speaker.
Professor Wall is the author of author of The Prose of Things: Transformation of Description in the
Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Literary and Cultural Spaces of
Restoration London (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and the editor of Blackwell's Concise
Companion to the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (Blackwell, 2004).
Fifteen speakers will present papers on Burney and the Gothic, including such topics as
“Deflating Gothic Clandestine Marriage in Cecilia,” “Evelina and Northanger Abbey: Allegories of the
Real (Gothic),” “Death Embraced: Camilla’s Dream as Vampiric Fantasy,” “Frances Burney’s Economic
Gothic,” and ““Edwy and Elgiva and Gothic Sexuality.”
The Burney Society will be sponsoring a reception on Thursday evening with the Jane Austen
Society of North America at the Collins Gallery in Portland’s Multnomah County Library. The library
will exhibit first editions of works by Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Inchbald, Ann Radcliffe, Hannah
More, Charlotte Smith, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth, as well as Burney letters and Gothic
cartoons by Gillray and Rowlandson. The exhibit is based upon the collections of Burney Society
President Paula Stepankowsky, and Marian LaBeck and James Petts.
The Burney Society conference will begin with registration at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, and end at
12:30 p.m. on Friday. The conference fee is $150, which includes the plenary, all discussion panels,
two continental breakfasts, the reception, and Thursday dinner at the Hilton. Anyone with questions
can contact Alex Pitofsky, pitofskyah@appstate.edu, Secretary/Treasurer, or Paula Stepankowsky at
pstepankowsky@comcast.net.