Call for Papers – Made in Class. Literary Education in Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century Europe

• Conference: 3-5 December 2025
• Submission deadline: 20 August 2025
• Download the full CfP

The conference “Made in Class” is organized at Leuven University in Belgium, as part of the research program “Learning Modern Literature: Literary Education in Western Europe (1880-1940)”, which is funded by the KU Leuven Special Research Fund. The research group is associated with the MDRN research lab (https://www.mdrn.be/).

Organizers
Dorian Barbieur, Bart Van Den Bossche, Eva Gijsen, Anke Gilleir, David Martens, Martin Michel
Giulia Scialanga, Pieter Verstraeten

Many of our ideas about literature – what counts as a literary text, how it should be read – are produced in classrooms. In The Teaching Archive (2021), Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan claim that “If it were possible to assemble the true, impossible teaching archive […] it would constitute a much larger and more interesting record than the famous monographs and seminal articles that usually represent the history of literary study.” Both in the field of literary studies as in in the larger public perception this is an uncommon point of view.
Nonetheless, when general school education gradually became a reality in nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Europe, there was a remarkable consensus across linguistic, national and social contexts on the central role of the vernacular languages and literatures in the curriculum. Literature was not only important for the advancement of basic literacy skills, it also fostered cultural and national socialization. Literary texts and writers fulfilled different didactic functions as part of the Bildung and socialization of the young citizen (Mathieson 1975, Hunter 1988, Johannes 2007, Lahire 2008). The school likewise became a central literary institution, “[overseeing] the transmission of the literary heritage and regulating the population’s access to the cultural capital with which that literary heritage was freighted” (Lynch 2015).
Yet while literary education at school was key to the production of the modern national citizen, modern(ist) literature fashioned itself increasingly as the aesthetic medium of the crisis of the modern subject and its flawless integration into society. This other perception of the relation between school and literary culture, which stresses antipathy, or even mutual exclusion, is a dominant narrative in literary discourse and still resonates today: “Far from harmonious, the relationship between the formational protocols of the novel and schooling remains perennially vexed” (Chalk 2024).
The aim of the conference “Made in Class. Literary Education in Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century Europe” is to entangle and chart the complex, various and indeed often contradictory interactions between school education and modern literature in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. How did literary education contribute to the making of modern literature (and vice versa)? We invite researchers from different disciplines such as literary history, literary criticism, cultural history, history and sociology of education to share their knowledge on the intertwining of the world of education and the world of literature, by tracing and analyzing the role of literature at school and/or the importance of school for the production, circulation and consumption of literature in its many forms and functions.

Download the full CfP
Conference languages: English and French
Submission deadline: 20 August 2025