2016「遗忘之书与文化记忆」国际学术研讨会

• Topics of papers may include (but are not limited to) the following:
• What is a forgotten book? How do we define the term?
• Contextualizing the forgotten book
• Recovering (or failing to adequately recover) literary history using digital methods, macroanalysis, distant reading, sampling, statistics, etc.
• Famous unrecoverable, unreadable books. (Books, influential in the past, that have been lost or destroyed and are now only known from summaries or excerpts quoted elsewhere)
• Books forgotten for decades or centuries that subsequently became key parts of the canon (Beowulf, Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, Blake’s work, etc.)
• Books that have never been and should not be canonical but which tell us something important about literary history
• Once popular and influential books that have now been forgotten (or books and authors that were once greatly admired but are now usually read only by specialists)
• Once-popular forms and genres that have since gone out of fashion (e.g. miracle plays, epistolary novels, the blank verse epic, volumes of famous sermons, serialized fiction, clerical novels, three-volume novels, etc.). Papers may also address whether these genres have since reappeared in another form, e.g. modern equivalents to miracle and morality plays.
• Highly successful books that once languished unprinted, either in the authors’ possession or in publishers’ offices (e.g. Northanger Abbey)
• Particular unique manuscripts which had (or may still have) a limited number or readers, and these manuscripts’ reception history
• The significance of books on esoteric subjects that have always had a limited appeal.
• Forced forgetfulness (when conflicts, revolutions [e.g. The French Revolution, China’s Cultural Revolution], censorship, and changes in government have made publishing or procuring certain kinds of books difficult).
• The significance of forgotten or nearly-forgotten Mandarin, Japanese, Taiwanese, Hakka, aboriginal-language, and English texts in Taiwanese history.
• Politically motivated remembering or forgetting
• Books written by marginalized authors and/or communities

Transported/Transplanted books. Books originally written in one place for one culture that, while forgotten or ignored by that culture, have become influential in another place and/or time. Similarly, books that are more popular in translation than they ever were in their original language.

• The reception history of translations of works that were highly successful in one country, were translated to meet a particular interest or need in another country, and have since been forgotten either in their original or in their translated form.
• Academic monographs as forgotten books
• Marketing’s effect on the loss or survival of books (e.g. The Great Gatsby’s increase in popularity after World War II [When Books Went to War]). Papers may address the creation of readership markets or books that failed to fit prescribed markets.
• Film adaptations as (in part) erasure of the text they adapt.
• The effect of the internet, e-readers, or other technology on literary memory and books’ survival.