THE
OSCHOLARS
___________
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Vol. IV |
No. 10 |
Issue
no 42: October/November 2007
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the main pages of the current issue of THE OSCHOLARS
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BEING
TALKED ABOUT
<< There’s only one thing in the world worse than
being talked about and that is not being talked about >>
A monthly page advertising Conference and Journal Calls, of interest or
potential interest to our readers, and supplementing the notices on our
NOTICEBOARD.
Some readers may not be aware that the
Calls for Papers once e-mailed to and by the
emailing cfp@english.upenn,edu, see
the web form submission at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/submit.html. Submissions will appear on the website
archive within 24 hours. Currently, submissions can only be
viewed within their categories. Links to the archive and more information
are on the main CFP page
http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/. The mass emailing part of CFP no longer
functions, having grown too large to continue.
Announcements will be made on the main CFP website.
Calls here are posted in a rolling list, in
chronological order of deadline, with the Table of Contents in alphabetical
order of subject, linked directly to each CfP. Calls are removed on
expiry. The list will run five months ahead. Those without deadline have the month of
entry printed and will remain posted for three months. Those with recently
expired deadlines are included when we received them too late for the last
issue of THE
OSCHOLARS, and we hope that the deadline may be extended, or at
least to alert readers of the conference to which they refer. These Conferences
will in turn be listed when their programmes are published, in our Forthcoming
Conferences page, now edited by Dr Florina Tufescu.
All
details should be checked for changes with the organisers, not with THE OSCHOLARS
Please send any Call you want us to include to oscholars@gmail.com and please mention THE OSCHOLARS if you are offering a paper.
Readers
who give papers may publish their abstracts in THE
OSCHOLARS.
Click
for quick access to any of these calls.
Calls in bold have a specific reference to Wilde.
Theatre-related calls will be found in our section 
Click
its icon to reach it.
A number of these calls relate to the next NEMLA Conference in April. The full Call for papers for NEMLA can be found at http://www.nemla.org/convention/cfp07.html
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Henry James |
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Edith Wharton |
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The Press |
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Oscar Wilde (1) |
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British Studies |
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Oscar Wilde (2) |
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Modern Love |
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Æstheticism
and/or Decadence |
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Modernism at the fin-de-siècle |
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Anarchism |
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Neo-Victorian Literature |
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Art
& Industry |
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Time
& Literature |
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Crime |
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Viennese
Cafés |
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Dress |
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Women
& Crime |
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Irish Childhood |
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Life
Writing |
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2007
NOVEMBER
I.
TIME AND LITERATURE
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ELN Special Issue, ‘Time and Literature.’ |
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A respected forum since 1962 for English
literary studies, ELN (English Language Notes) has undergone a change
in editorship and an extensive makeover. It is now a biannual journal devoted
exclusively to special topics in all fields of literary and cultural studies.
The new ELN is particularly determined to revive and reenergize its
traditional commitment to shorter notes, often no more than three to four
pages in print. This attribute of the journal provides a unique forum for cutting-edge
scholarly debate and exchange in the humanities. |
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Volume 46.1 of the new ELN (Spring/Summer
2008) will investigate the topic of time and literature, bringing new
theoretical and historical concerns to bear on this well-established area of
literary analysis. Contributors may wish to present recent research findings
on particular writers or texts, or they may venture insights on broadly
defined subjects, such as comparisons between the representation of time in
literature and in other art forms, or relationships between aesthetic
temporality and other modes of temporality (social, organic, geological,
technological, or religious). They may wish to explore topics where literary
temporality intersects with one of the following fields of study: colonialism
and post-colonialism; war; technology; philosophy; utopianism; economics;
gender and sexuality; politics; history of science; social groups or
identities; geography and space; or psychoanalysis and trauma. Work that
considers the relevance of literary temporality to our contemporary
historical or cultural predicament is also welcome. |
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Position papers and essays of no longer than
twenty manuscript pages are invited from scholars in all fields of
literature, history, and the arts. We would like to see work that moves
traditional literary analysis into new styles of critical writing.
Experimental writing is welcome as well interpretive and historical
scholarship. The editors also encourage collaborative work and are happy to
consider works that are submitted together as topical clusters. Another
format that we invite is a debate or conversation between contributors
working on a related aspect of temporality. |
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Special Issue Editor, ‘Time and Literature,’
English Language Notes, |
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Specific inquiries regarding issue 45.3 may be
addressed to the issue editor, Sue Zemka: (zemka@colorado.edu) |
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The deadline for submissions is |
II.
CHILDREN, CHILDHOOD, AND IRISH SOCIETY,
1700-2007
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Eire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Irish Studies welcomes submissions for a Spring/Summer 2009 special issue
that will consider the theme of ‘Children, Childhood, and Irish
Society1700-2007.’ |
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Childhood figures insistently across a wide
range of contemporary discussions and representations of Irish life, from
constitutional referenda and tribunals of inquiry to blockbuster films,
memoirs and award-winning novels, from the emergence of Gaelscoileanna to the
citizenship debate. |
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The guest editors seek essays that place these
recent developments in a broader social, cultural, and historical context. We
are especially interested in essays that offer interdisciplinary perspectives
from history, literature, visual culture, social welfare and social policy. |
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We also invite submissions informed by new
sources of archival research. We encourage articles responding to the
following areas: |
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Changing conceptions of childhood in Irish
society in the period 1700 to the present. The child and the state The child and religion Childhood and social class Childhood and educational policy/practice Childhood in the two The marginalised and/or institutionalized child
Irish childhood and the Diaspora Children and family: nuclear, single parent,
adopted, foster Idealised childhood and nostalgia Childhood sexualities Imaging children and childhood in film,
documentary, and art Literary Childhoods: fiction, poetry, drama, and
memoir |
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The
deadline for the receipt of proposal (two pages) is 1st November 2007, and completed articles
(6000-8000 words) will be due by |
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Send
proposals to Professor Maria Luddy at m.luddy@warwick.ac.uk
and Professor James Smith at smithbt@bc.edu
James M. Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Irish Studies
Program, |
III.
OSCAR WILDE’S CRITICAL ESSAYS
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I welcome abstracts and full essays for a proposed volume on Oscar Wilde’s critical essays with an emphasis on how those texts were received in the author’s own time and how they have impacted contemporary debates in criticism and theory. I will also consider abstracts that deal with Wilde’s fiction, poetry, or drama if they suit the collection’s emphasis. Abstracts should be approximately 500 words long. Please submit abstracts (or full essays) in MS Word or RTF by email attachment (or send inline) to Dr. Alfred J. Drake at ajdrake@ajdrake.com and include in your email’s subject heading the phrase ‘Wilde Collection’ along with your name. Please include a CV as a separate attachment, and if you maintain an academic website, you are welcome to include the address. My preference is for work that has not yet been published, but I will consider previously published material. The deadline for abstracts is |
IV.
WOMEN AND CRIME IN
BRITAIN NORTH AMERICA SINCE 1500
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An Interdisciplinary Conference, This conference will explore the complex
relationship between women and crime over the last five centuries in Britain
and North America: patterns of criminality, the experience of women criminals
and victims of crime; the shifting mechanisms by which forms of behaviour are
labelled deviant, and the representations of such behaviour in official and popular
discourse, in law, science, the media, literature, drama and art. The
conference is interdisciplinary in scope and encourages contributions from
different theoretical perspectives. Proposals for thirty-minute papers are
invited in the fields of social, cultural and political history, literature,
drama, gender studies, the history of ideas and the history of art. Papers in
social, political and literary theory together with historiography are also
welcome. |
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The conference proceedings will be entirely in
English. Proposals should contain a summary of not more than 500 words,
together with a curriculum vitae and may be sent by e-mail or post to the
conference organiser listed below. Deadline for proposals: |
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Neil
Davie, Professor of British History, Université Lumière Lyon 2, Faculté de
Langues, Département d’Etudes du Monde Anglophone, 74 rue Pasteur, 69365 Lyon
cedex 07, FRANCE. Neil.Davie@univ-lyon2.fr |
DECEMBER
V.
THE RECEPTION OF OSCAR WILDE IN
EUROPE
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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is now widely recognised
not only as one of the most representative figures of the British fin de
siècle, but as one of the most influential Anglophone authors of the
nineteenth century. His texts command a wide readership outside the
Anglo-American context and his plays are regularly performed in the major
European theatres. But the history of his critical reception in the twentieth
century is complex and discontinuous. In Britain Wilde suffered a long period
of comparative neglect and lack of scholarship that followed the scandal of
his conviction for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895; and it is only in the last few
decades that his works have been fully reassessed and reinstated as central
in the literary and dramatic canons of the nineteenth century. While Wilde
was subjected to silence in |
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This colloquium, to take place in |
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Proposals are therefore invited for papers that
explore any aspect of Wilde’s European reception, from the nineteenth to the
twenty-first century. Contributions might include, but are not limited to
questions of literary influence, performance history, translation, cultural
and intellectual history, censorship, gender, the Wilde myth, etc. |
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Please
submit 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers to Stefano Evangelista (stefano-maria.evangelista@trinity.ox.ac.uk)
by |
VI.
Dress and the Natural World
Courtauld History of Dress Association, Courtauld
Institute of Art, University of
From feathers to leathers, bones to stones, jewels
and furs and hair, this conference will explore the convergence of dress and
the natural world. From the ermine-lined robes of medieval monarchs to today's
catwalk-strutting feather-clad models, people have long adorned their bodies
with such materials, or their facsimiles. Clothing made from animal parts or
representing other elements of nature has provided some of the most striking
dress through time and across cultures such as the splendour of a 19th century
Siberian salmon skin coat or the aspirational luxury represented by the 1950s
fur-clad movie star.
Papers are solicited that draw on a wide variety
of symbolic, cultural and technical aspects of flora and fauna in dress, from a
diversity of approaches and a spread of historical periods and geographical
areas. Topics may include fur, feathers, skins and other creature components in
dress across cultures; fashion's florals; the use of hair, straw, insects in
dress and accessories; sumptuary laws and their aim of regulating the use of
fur and other animal elements; imitation fur, ivory, jewels, tortoiseshell and
other; precious jewels; moments of significant rebellion against using animals
and their parts in dress; conserving clothing that uses fugitive materials from
the natural world; the renewed enthusiasm of the early 21st century for furs
and skins and the ecological movement and its impact on fashion.
CHODA hopes that this conference will explore many
of these symbolic, cultural, social and technical aspects of the convergence of
dress and the natural world. This conference welcomes contributions from
dress, textile and art historians, conservators, ethnographers,
anthropologists, fashion theorists and social historians. Preference will be
given to papers that include images.
CHODA regrets that it is unable to pay for any
expenses involved in the preparation and presentation of a paper, or for travel
to the conference. Please send a one-page abstract and brief CV by
Sonnet Stanfill, Furniture, Textiles and Fashion
Department V & A South Kensington London SW7 2RL
Email s.stanfill@vam.ac.uk
VII. Characters
of the Press
Research Society for Victorian
Periodicals (RSVP) 40th annual conference
“Character” was the term commonly used of the Victorian press for what today we might call the “brand personality” of a periodical - its distinctive features as a commodity in the marketplace. But how was this “character” created? Some periodicals identified themselves as people (one thinks of Mr Punch, or the less voluble human figures on many a masthead) or with people (Howitt’s Journal, Reynolds’s Miscellany, Blackwood’s, or perhaps a reliable stable of authors, or a named editor). Many sought to improve the character of readers by offering heroes or heroines for emulation. Some preferred a recurrent set of textual practices – format, layout, size, range of departments. Some characters were generated through the targeting of specific audiences such as grocers or suffragettes, radical workers or young imperialists. Others were prompted by the occasions on which they expected to be encountered – for reading en famille on Sundays, over weekday breakfast or while commuting. And then there is the vital question of how the press in general (or sections of it) were characterised by those within and outside it: what metaphors were mobilised and why?
This conference, then, offers a wide and varied
route into the exciting and still only partially explored
VIII. JAMESIAN
STRANDS
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Third International Conference of the Henry
James Society, 9-13 July 2008 in historic mansions by the sea at Salve Regina
University, Newport, Rhode Island. |
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Keynote Speakers: Bill Brown, Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor University of Chicago Richard Howard Professor, |
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Proposals: We invite papers and panels on any
aspects of James’s work, life, or influence; on Jamesian narrative, cultural,
historical or critical *strands*; on James in Newport/Newport in James; and
on new directions and critical legacies in James studies. |
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For paper proposals, maximum 500 word abstract
and brief vitae; for panel proposals, maximum 700 word abstract-summarising
the panel’s rationale and describing each paper-and a brief vitae for each
speaker. Panels will be accepted or rejected as a whole. Proposals must
include titles of papers (and panel if appropriate); presenter’s (and panel
organizer*s) name(s) and institutional affiliation(s); mailing address,
phone, fax and email address; two (2) copies of submitted materials (for
hard-copy proposals). Presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes long
and in English. Panels should consist of three to four papers and may be chaired
by one of the presenters. |
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Deadline for receipt of proposals: |
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Susan M. Griffin Dept of English, U of |
2008
JANUARY
IX.
MID-ATLANTIC CONFERENCE ON BRITISH STUDIES
The Mid Atlantic Conference on British Studies
will hold its annual meeting on
Our plenary speaker will be Julia Rudolph,
The Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies invites both established scholars and graduate students to submit proposals for panels or individual papers. Thematic, round table, and pedagogical sessions will receive special consideration. We are particularly interested in proposals that cross chronological and disciplinary boundaries. We will also be entertaining specific proposals for one special session panel: ’Women's Agency in Early Modern Britain: Family, Finance and Friendship,’ organized by Rosemary O'Day, Professor of History, The Open University.
Description: Welcome attention has been given of late to the ways in which early modern women displayed both ingenuity and resilience in the face of the many obstacles in the way of their having a fulfilling life. Less attention has been accorded the context in which their agency was set. This special session will explore the purposes for which women, married and unmarried, exercised agency and assess the importance of their agency for family, connection and society. Papers (and a commentator) from all disciplines and covering all aspects of female agency will be considered but especially welcome will be those covering patronage, network building and education.
Finally, the conference will also feature a panel discussion of Seth Koven's Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London.
All proposals should include a 200 word abstract and a one-page CV with mailing address, phone number, fax number, and email address. Applicants should also specifically indicate if they would like their proposal considered for the special session on ‘Women's Agency.’ Please also indicate if you will need AV support.
Inquiries can be made via email to the program co-chairs: Philip Stern (stern@american.edu ) or Julie Taddeo (taddeo@mail.umd.edu ).
Please send proposals, either by mail or
electronically, by
Philip Stern, Department of History, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016-8038. stern@american.edu
X.
The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural
Exchange
A two-day conference organised by the Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture Research Project, to be held at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art, London on 17th and 18th October 2008.
As today, the cafés of fin-de-siècle
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• The complex inter-relationships between urban modernity and artistic modernism in relation to the Viennese café. |
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• The Viennese café as a liminal space: public and private, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. |
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• The café as a site for consumption: coffee and commerce. |
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• Contrasts and comparisons between the Viennese café and the café cultures of other world cities. |
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• The café as a site for performance. |
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• The café as a designed space: interrelations between modern design, society and fashion. |
The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Research Project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is based at the Royal College of Art and Birkbeck, University of London. www.rca.ac.uk/viennacafe
We invite abstracts of 400 words to be submitted electronically to Dr Charlotte Ashby charlotte.ashby@rca.ac.uk
The deadline for submissions is
XI.
‘Edith
Wharton and History’
Edith Wharton Conference in
The broad theme of this conference, organized by
the Edith Wharton Society, aims to bring historical, cultural, and literary
contexts to Wharton's life and all of her work. Please send abstracts of no
more than 1000 words and a one-page cv to Carol
Singley [singley@camden.rutgers.edu] by
Possible topics include:
§
Edith Wharton and women's history and women's
studies
§
Edith Wharton and women's writing
§
Edith Wharton in the work of others (her
influence on others, her appearance in the work of others)
§
Historicizing aspects of Wharton's work
§
Edith Wharton and popular culture
§
Edith Wharton and cultural phenomena and
practices
§
Edith Wharton and illness, addiction, etc.
§
Edith Wharton and publishing
FEBRUARY
XII. BRITISH
ÆSTHETICISM AND/OR DECADENCE
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Modernism/Modernity's special issue on Submissions may treat any aspect of Aestheticism/Decadence and its relation to modernism and/or the formation of 20th-century ‘modernity.’ The field is open, but topics such Aestheticism and/ or Decadence and Victorian visualities, technology, architecture, or science in 19th-century painting, poetry, literature as they ‘interface’ with related phenomena and art in modernism are welcome. Essays dealing with the Decadent Aesthetes
foremost and their relation to definitions of ‘modernity’ will be
considered. Essays need not make connections with
20th-century writers if they incorporate some discussion of ‘modernity’
drawing on any of its many definitions.
Essayswill be accepted on topics/authors whose work dates back to
1860. Indeed, the issue will contain a special ‘archival’ section containing
the first translation of Gautier's brief chapter on the Pre-Raphaelites
Millais and Hunt from the 1855 exhibition. |
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Send by attachment to: claity@drew.edu and tdiefenb2002@yahoo.com or by post to
Prof. Cassandra Laity, Department
of English, Drew University, 36 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ 07940, USA.
Deadline |
XIII. 'AN
INVESTIGATION OF MODERN LOVE'
The Durrell School of Corfu will host 'An
Investigation of Modern Love', an international seminar, at its Library and
Study Centre,
RATIONALE:
'Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition.... The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love'
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From this provocation, the May seminar of the Durrell School of Corfu takes its inspiration to discuss 'Modern Love' as a notion debated across the Humanities and Social Sciences. What do we mean when we consider 'modern' and 'love'? What of Early Modern Love? To make the matter more complicated, this prefatory note originally read 'bisexual love', and bisexuality is censored from the other epigrams. What then does 'love' entail, how does it relate to gender, sexual identity, plurality, and what role does science play in discussing the matter? |
We aim to draw on expertise in as many areas as
possible in order to elucidate the multiple ways Love and Gender Relations are
experienced, described and understood in the 21st century (and in the cultural
and literary context of key writers and investigators of the past).
'Durrell later came to realise... that 'modern love' was in itself an impossibility'. Richard Pine, Lawrence Durrell, The Mindscape
PROVOCATIONS:
Opening from the issues surrounding Durrell's views on sex, his attitudes to
love and women, to the gaps between man and woman, and the problems of gender
and identity, seminar participants are asked to discuss any aspect of Modern
Love. How representative were Durrell's views of his period? This query may be
posed equally with regard to any author or artist. What is the relationship
between art or literature and sociocultural attitudes toward sexuality? In what
ways have both changed over time? Do we truly have 'no unities'?
Moreover, what does science offer in the 21st century, fifty years after the
publication of Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet,
in terms of the investigation of modern love? What has changed since
Shakespeare (eg, The Sonnets), John Donne, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy and
George Meredith (Modern Love); since Sade, Freud, Jung and D.H. Lawrence; since
the Kinsey reports or Alex Comfort (a poet and correspondent of Durrell's),
since Judith Butler, bell hooks, Judith Jack Halberstam, and so forth?
What have we learned about monogamy, polygamy, promiscuity, fidelity and the
varieties of sexual experience in Humans and the Animal Kingdom? Since the Durrell
School of Corfu reflects the concerns of both Durrell brothers, do Zoology or
animal studies offer any new insights? What may be gleaned from Gerald
Durrell's work, and that of other zoologists and conservationists, about the
sexual life of primates, about breeding in captivity, and so forth?
Potential topics might include (but are not limited to):
§ Recent research, psychological, biological, zoological and scientific, about the nature of human and animal love, sexual behaviour and preferences (male and female), the gap between man and woman;
§ Fictional and poetic investigations and explorations of Love and 'Modern Love' in all its aspects;
§ Modernism, Post-Modernism and 'Modern Love';
§ Lawrence Durrell, especially The Alexandria Quartet, concepts of love, & sexual relations;
§ Papers on ground-breaking writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Constantine Cavafy, Sade, Olga Broumas, Doris Lessing;
§ Theoretical and scientific investigations of sexuality:
§ 'Preference' versus 'Identity';
§ Eroticism and the Exotic, Intercultural relationships, the 'Female Other' as sex object/femme fatale; Postcolonial approaches; Masculinities Studies; Female/feminist perspectives on Love (and Lawrence Durrell);
§ Pornography, Erotica, Censorship, and Literature;
§ Film and Modern Love;
§ Gay and Lesbian studies and/or Queer Theory.
MODERATORS:
Dr. Shere Hite is an American
born cultural historian, sex educator and feminist, an expert on psycho- sexual
behaviour and gender relations. Her sexological work has focused primarily on
female sexuality. Her books include The Hite Report on Female Sexuality,
The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, Sexual Honesty, by
Women, for Women, and Oedipus Revisited. Her forthcoming books
include Women Loving Women (relationships between women at work and at
home),
Professor Joseph Boone is
Professor of English at the
Proposals
Proposals (2 pages maximum), together with the author's CV, should reach the
Papers
Full texts of accepted presentations must be received by the DSC by
XIV. Modernity
and Modernism in fin-de-siècle Britain
GRAAT one-day conference
The term modernity is used to describe a particular set of historical, cultural, economic and political conditions, and promotes - in opposition to tradition or community - a linear model of time and the abstract apparatus of the State. Modernism refers to the literary and aesthetic representations of, and responses to, those same historical conditions. Modernity is therefore the historical and cultural condition which makes modernism both necessary and possible. The synergy between the two concepts, however, is often resolved into a contradiction. Modernism often sits, that is, in a highly ambivalent, critical, subversive, relationship to the process of modernization: except when, through an enduring commitment to innovation, modernity shades back towards - in a new contradiction - the tradition of the modern, or indulges in a scientific or utopian discourse on the future revolution. And here, certain forms of progressive radicalism appear almost indistinguishable from elitist nostalgia.
The organisers invite proposals for twenty-minute
papers on aspects of late-Victorian/Edwardian society which foreground and
explore these tensions. The aim is to
encourage an interdisciplinary approach linking social and intellectual history
with music, architecture, the visual arts, and literature. Colleagues who work on British civilization
may want to consider the many confrontations between the forces of radicalism
and reaction, the ambiguous positions taken up by some intellectuals in the
development and reform of the British State and constitution, the sometimes
paradoxically conservative implications of popular protest and emerging gender
politics; or the many tensions and contradictions inherent in the status of
Britain's empire at this time, expanding, yet fragile, at once an instrument of
social policy innovation and the locus of pride in the favoured race. For colleagues working in literary studies
the aesthetic movement and end-of-century "decadence" also provided a
variety of opportunities to theorise ambivalence and subversion, contradiction
and paradox. The theme also allows those
who may wish to bring together the historical and the literary, to explore
modernity/modernism through a cultural approach.
Please send abstracts by
XV. The inaugural issue of Neo-Victorian Studies
Neo-Victorian Studies is a new peer-reviewed, inter-disciplinary e-journal dedicated to contemporary re-imaginings of the nineteenth century in Literature, the Arts and Humanities. http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/
The editors of Neo-Victorian Studies invite submissions from established and early career researchers and creative artists for the inaugural issue, to be published April-May 2008, on any topic related to the exploration of the nineteenth century from a twentieth/twenty-first century perspective. Contributions on the period's cultural legacies in non-British contexts, e.g. Asian, African, North and South American frameworks, are equally welcome.
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Possible topics include (but are not limited to): * theorising
the neo-Victorian novel *
intertextual / intervisual negotiations with the past * cultural
traumas and practices of commemoration * refracting or
'queering' narratives of nation and empire * tracing
patterns of environmental impact and destruction * the legacies
of nineteenth century sexual politics * the heritage
of Victorian social policy * rewriting
histories of science and medicine * the
biographical imagination *
re-conceptualising children and childhood * the
fascinations of criminality * spectrality,
spiritualism, and the occult * the space of cultural memory / the sense of place |
Submissions may include: * scholarly theoretical/critical articles of 6000-8000 words (plus bibliography) * short creative pieces (any genre) * polemical pieces * interviews * notices of work in progress * reviews of relevant critical/creative publications in the field * (for later issues) critical/creative responses to previous contributions |
Please direct enquiries and send electronic
submissions via email with Word Document attachment to the General Editor Marie-Luise Kohlke at neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk.
Please consult the submission guidelines,
prior to submission. To be considered for the inaugural issue, submissions must
be received no later than
XVI. Artistry
and Industry: Representations of Creative Labour in Literature and the Visual
Arts c. 1830-1900
Keynote speakers include Elizabeth Prettejohn
(Professor of History of Art,
Its focus will be on artistic ‘industry’ in a
variety of forms including, but not limited to, the nature of artistic work as
conceptualised by writers and artists, artistry as a profession, and art as
commodity.
Drawing together contributors from Literature, Art
History, History, Drama and beyond, Artistry and Industry will also examine the
connections and the separations between those artistic milieux regarded as
high-culture (painting, sculpture, literature) and those classed as
‘art-industry’ - such as pottery-painting, art needlework or engraving – or
even hack-work (such as Grub-Street writing).
We seek insights not only into the production,
dissemination and consumption of particular texts or objets d’art, but into the
myths and images developing around such figures as The Painter, The Lady
Novelist, The Man of the Theatre, The Craftswoman, The
Poet, The Illustrator and The Muse. We invite abstracts (up to 300 words) from
across the arts and humanities for 15-20 minute papers. Please submit
abstracts, including your name as you would like it to appear, institutional
affiliation, and email address by
Conference organizers: Dr Sunie Fletcher, Dr Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi, Sally Anne Huxtable, Dr Patricia Zakreski.
XVII. Crime
Cultures
Confirmed
keynote speakers: Elisabeth Bronfen, Linden Peach, Nicole Rafter, Renata
Salecl, Mark Seltzer
Notions
of criminality, pathology and deviance are increasingly central to our
understanding of culture. From stalkers to serial killers, terrorists to ‘school shooters’,
violent crime seems one of the key symptoms of our age. Not
surprisingly, the academic study of crime fiction has been undergoing a resurgence in the 21st Century. Crime fiction is now
established as something approaching a core subject on literature curricula, as
well as an expanding, exciting field of research. This expansion, however, also
means that the generic approach which has traditionally governed academic
approaches to crime fiction now seems too constrained.
The
organizers of ‘Crime Cultures’ invite papers and panels which both incorporate
and extend beyond established crime texts and genres, exploring more broadly
the intersection between crime and culture. Contributors are encouraged to
consider the significance of crime in books and films not usually considered
‘crime fiction’, to re-assess canonical crime texts, to analyse how culture
‘constructs’ crime and criminals, or to examine how culture produces, shapes,
appropriates or mimics criminal behaviour.
Possible
topics may include, but are not limited to: figures of crime (iconic
investigators and criminals, real or fictional); figuring crime (how notions of
crime are used to understand culture); crime histories; theories of crime; the
‘aesthetics’ of crime; shifting demarcations of crime; symptomatic contemporary
crimes (e.g. stalking, terrorism, gun massacre); postcolonial crime; political
crimes and assassinations; ‘True Crime’; war crimes; gun culture.
Proposals
(200-300 words) for 20-minute presentations are welcome from scholars of any
discipline and should be submitted electronically to the conference organizers
Dr Bran Nicol, Dr Patricia Pulham,
and Dr Eugene McNulty, by Friday 29th February 2008 via the conference
e-mail address: crimecultures@port.ac.uk
A registration form will become available at about the same time. Please note AV requirements and indicate if
you would like the abstract to be considered for inclusion in the
post-conference publications.
Contact
details:
Bran
Nicol, Senior Lecturer in English Literature,
E-mail: Bran.Nicol@port.ac.uk
MARCH
XVIII. 1st Anarchist
Studies Network Conference
www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk
Call for Workshop Convenors
Building on the success of a number of subject specific conferences over the last two years, the PSA Anarchist Studies Network is planning a full, independent conference for September 2008. The conference is open, organised primarily through workshops to allow themes to emerge from submissions. Our aims are to facilitate communication, stimulate the development of networks, and develop understandings of anarchism. The conference is open to everyone with an interest in anarchist studies and participants are encouraged to present work in progress as well as more finished contributions.
This call is for workshop convenors to propose themes, ideas, and topics for discussion, which can then be developed over the coming months. We invite proposals from activists, organisers, researchers, popular educators, students - indeed anyone desiring to participate in this on-going conversation. In the best anarchist tradition, the event will be defined by the participants. What would you like to see happen? What kind of discussions do you think are important? Would you like to organise a workshop or contribute in other ways?
The design of workshops and other sessions are the preserve of their convenors in discussion with the conference organisers. The aim is to allow convenors the fullest opportunity to tailor sessions to the specific needs of their subject area, the session and its participants, and to create a convivial environment in which to present and debate ideas. Panels can vary from two to twelve papers or presentations over one to four workshop-sessions in any given subject area relevant to anarchist studies broadly defined.
Submission Notes:
THEMED WORKSHOP PANELS & FACILITATED DISCUSSIONS
At this stage we are simply looking for workshop or panel convenors. If you would like to organise a session at the conference, please submit a brief description of the panel (300-500 words), including the name and contact details of the facilitator/convenor.
Panel proposals will be posted on the ASN website after the expiry of the deadline as a resource for individuals and groups to orient themselves.
We will accept unsolicited paper abstracts and forward them to appropriate convenors where possible. However you are encouraged to respond to convenors' individual calls for papers in the first instance. Please therefore refer to the ASN website regularly.
DEADLINE:
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTS
Proposals toward evening entertainments, artistic interventions, etc very welcome!
CONTACT for submissions, proposals, registration and further details: Ruth Kinna (r.e.kinna@lboro.ac.uk) or Dave Berry (d.g.berry@lboro.ac.uk)
XIX. A
special issue of Life Writing (volume 6, number 1 - April 2009 )
Edited by Jo Gill,
Submissions of articles (8000
words max) and shorter reflections (up to 2000 words) are invited for a special
issue of the journal Life Writing on the theme of ‘Poetry and
Autobiography’.
This special issue will examine
some of the assumptions about, and crossovers between, the discrete disciplines
of life writing and poetry. While poetry, as a genre which is persistently
exercised by questions about language, form, subjectivity, authority, truth,
and reference, shares much common ground with life writing, the relationship
between the two genres is rarely interrogated. In addition, so-called
‘personal’ poetry is infrequently read with an attentiveness
to the kinds of questions about authenticity and representation with which
prose life writing is often (and productively) met.
Contributions to this special
issue of Life Writing will ask what, if anything, is distinctive about
autobiographical poetry; what are the conventions and practices which attach to
the form and shape the ways in which it is read? What does it demand of its
practitioners and what does it offer to its readers? How useful are current
theories of life writing – predicated as they often are on a study of prose
narrative – to the study of the poetic text? How, if at all, might
scholars of poetry and autobiography begin to bridge the gaps that separate the
two disciplines in existing critical discourses? Is it necessary to rethink
dominant interpretative frameworks in the light of the insights offered by
poetry?
We invite papers which consider
the complicated relationship between the two genres, and which address the
hypothesis that poetry might have something valid to contribute to the theory
and practice of life writing. Likewise, we are keen to see scholarship that
asks how theories of life writing might help to expose and understand the
complexity of the poetic ‘I’.
In common with the Aims and Scope
of the journal, we are interested in work that incorporates an
interdisciplinary perspective and we welcome submissions which broaden the
geographical focus of life writing beyond the US, Canada, Australia, and
Europe.
Work submitted to the Articles
section should follow the journal’s usual style guidelines (see http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14484528.asp).
Work submitted to the Reflections section carries critically informed personal
narrative linking theory and experience; on this occasion, the journal is happy
to consider poetry in this section. Items in both sections must be original and
unpublished. All submissions undergo an anonymous peer-review process.
Initial enquiries may be addressed
to j.r.gill@ex.ac.uk or m.j.waters@newcastle.ac.uk.
Please submit completed articles by e-mail attachment to both of the above
addresses, or by post to:
Jo Gill,
Department of English,
Mel Waters, School of English
Literature, Language and Linguistics,
Deadline for submissions:
APRIL
XX. LIMINAL
LONDON
|
The
7th Annual Literary London conference will be hosted by the Department of
English, |
|
‘Uxbridge
has cornered the market in liminal architecture’ |
|
KEYNOTE
SPEAKERS & CREATIVE WRITERS T.B.A. |
|
‘When
you get to Beckenham, which is the last parish in Kent, the country begins to
assume a cockney-like appearance; all is artificial, and you no longer feel
any interest in it’ |
|
‘…
what London attracts with the mirage of its work shining across the counties
and the countries, London holds with the glamour of its leisure’ |
|
‘The
motorway towns were built on the frontier between a tired past and a future
without illusions and snobberies’ |
|
The majority of Greater London consists of areas
like Uxbridge; places which once had an independent existence but have been
relentlessly consumed by the outward sprawl of the city. As we can see from
Cobbett’s observations, even in the first half of the nineteenth century
there was no longer a simple boundary between City and Country but something
of a twilight zone in which nothing was real. While Cobbett bemoaned the
collapse of traditional rural paternalism into the enforced pauperism of wage
labour, the zone enabled new forms of living. For Ford, it was precisely the
persistence of an almost parodic version of the ‘Country’ in the outer zones
which allowed the masses to partake in the cultured leisure pursuits of the
gentry as London and Country seasons merged into one daily commute. Thus was
the trace of true individualism preserved within modern mass society and,
thereby, the possibility of a fulfilling utopian future was kept
tantalisingly open. But the transition was never completed: Ford talked of
romantic suburbanites doomed to ‘an always tragic death’ and while, less than
forty years later, George Orwell thought that he had found ‘the germs of
future England’ along the arterial roads ‘in Slough, Barnet, Dagenham,
Letchworth, Hayes’, this England has not so much appeared as become part of
the landscape of the past. Sinclair talks of West Drayton in this manner as
an historical frontier in which ‘Bicycle shops are a nostalgic recollection
of the days when H.G. Well’s clerks took to the country roads.’ In Ballard’s
Kingdom Come, the implicit utopian nostalgia of the Cross of St George has
become the nostalgia for an English fascism that never was and the outer |
|
Please note that the headline theme of the event
does not exclude other proposals concerning any other aspect relevant to
Literary London themes and contexts, which are most welcome, as are complete
panels (subject to final approval by the conference organizers).
Additionally, while the main focus of the conference will be on literary and
cultural representations of |
|
Originally founded in the 1960s expansion of
Higher Education in Britain, Brunel’s Uxbridge campus lies four miles and
twenty minutes taxi ride from Heathrow Airport, and is a reasonable journey
by underground to central London (King’s Cross and Piccadilly approx. 50
minutes; Waterloo approx. 55 minutes; Kew Gardens and Tower of London approx.
just over an hour – estimated timings Transport for London). Participants
staying longer can avail themselves of various research libraries including
the British Library, |
|
|
|
§
Read literary and cultural texts in their
historical and social context and in relation to theoretical approaches to
the study of the metropolis; §
Explore the relationship of margins, the
central and spaces between; §
Investigate the changing cultural and
historical geography of §
Situate Londoners, the city’s visitors and
their various psychogeographic spaces; §
Consider the social, political, and spiritual
fears, hopes, and perceptions that have inspired representations of §
Trace different traditions of representing §
Celebrate the contribution |
|
This should be an occasion for productive
dialogue between scholars of literary and material culture. Papers on any of
literary, theoretical, narrative and material aspects of |
|
Proposals of approximately 300 word are invited
for 20-minute papers which consider any period or genre of English literature
about, set in, inspired by, or alluding to central and suburban London and
its environs, from the city’s roots in Roman times to the present day. Add a
brief description (where relevant indicating institutional affiliation and
publications in particular) of the proposer, by email only, to both: Nick
Hubble Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk
and Philip Tew Philip.tew@brunel.ac.uk |
|
Note that your subject line must include the
phrase ‘LITERARY LONDON BRUNEL 2008’ since your message will be initially
retrieved and sorted automatically. If you do not do so it may well be lost in
this process. |
|
Deadline for submissions: Notification of early acceptance can be provided
for those requiring institutional funding, particularly in the case of
international scholars. The conference fee will be posted in due course once
the costing has been finalized. There will be discounted rates for
postgraduate students, the retired, and additional
general discounts for those paying in advance (to be announced). |
|
Literary London Web site: www.literarylondon.org The Annual Literary London conference is
mutually supportive of the e-journal of the same name. |
Click for
the main pages of the current issue of THE OSCHOLARS
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