The past three decades have seen an explosion of pioneering and influential scholarship in 18th-century gender studies, especially in the recovery of the works of “lost” women writers and on analyzing the representation of women in male- and female-authored texts.

On Thursday and Friday, April 10 and 11, New York University will host a symposium on “Writing Women 1700-1800: Literary History at the Crossroads.” The event will take place at NYU’s Fales Library, 3rd floor of the NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South. It is free and open to the public. For more information, visit http://nyu-18c.pbwiki.com/Women+Writing, or call 212.998.8800.

Participants include: Paula Backscheider, Auburn University, who will deliver the plenary lecture at 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, April 10; April Alliston, Princeton University; Toni Bowers, University of Pennsylvania; Joanna Brooks, San Diego State University; Simon Dickie, University of Toronto; Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University; and Mary Poovey, NYU.

Topics to be discussed include: the advantages and disadvantages of various scholarly boundaries and frameworks, such as national, aesthetic, disciplinary; seduction narratives; Afro-English writing; new work in European and circum-Atlantic comparative studies; and the question of literary canons - necessary, unnecessary, premature?

NYU’s Fales Library holds a significant collection of rare books and other materials for the study of 18th-century women. The collection includes works by such pioneering women writers as Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Clara Reeve, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth.