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Speaker: Catriona MacLeod

Abstract: Romantic author Helmina von Chézy’s singular and late contribution to the eighteenth-century British genre of the it-narrative is told from the ungendered perspective of a paper collar as it rides the tides of production and circulation of both texts and textiles. Titled “Jugendschicksale, Leben und Ansichten eines papiernen Kragens. Von ihm selbst erzählt,” the narrative was published in Vienna in 1829 with the express aim of raising money for women spinners in the Salzkammergut, who were suffering economically in the face of the increasingly industrialized manufacture of paper. My talk will place this loquacious unnamed collar, which shifts identities between paper and garment, yet also possesses a sentient and rational consciousness, within the context of female authorship in what Thomas Carlyle famously called the Paper Age.