Author: modernistudies

Call for Papers

20th Century Women’s Writing and the Capital(s) of Recuperation

ACLA Annual Conference March 20-23rd, 2014 at New York University

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser’s often-cited sentiment unfortunately resonates as strongly today as it did in 1968. In this seminar, we hope to split open and illuminate alternate modes of access to the worlds of capital in order to rethink its human, cultural and political investments in twentieth century women’s literature. While capitals elicit fantasies of a cosmopolitan ethos predicated upon inclusivity and community, we want to trouble this narrative’s simplicity by questioning why women writers of the twentieth century more often than not lacked the cultural purchase to navigate cosmopolitan capitals around the world. We ask how this exclusion was renegotiated and represented in disparate texts. Instead of engaging in debates that can only ever aspire to equality, we want to understand more clearly how exclusion constitutes capital, and, more importantly, how women writers renegotiate and capitalize upon this exclusion.

We hope this line of questioning will invite papers about underexplored women’s literature and underrepresented women writers so that we might also reflect upon the enterprise of recuperation. Can we recuperate previously lost, buried, and out of print texts by women writers of the twentieth century without assimilating differences into a literary history that privileges white, heteronormative patriarchy? How do conditions of literary production and material, social, and cultural contexts inform our understanding of these texts’ vitality? Ultimately, what are we capitalizing upon when we recuperate women writers?

To submit an abstract, please visit the conference website and choose “propose a paper” or click here. You will be prompted to choose a seminar title when you submit your abstract. Be sure to choose “20th Century Women’s Writing and the Capital(s) of Recuperation.”

Abstract Deadline: November 1, 2013

Feel free to email me (sarahcornish@gmail.com or sarah.cornish@unco.edu) or Peter Murray (pmurray24@fordham.edu) with any questions.

Reading Animals

An International English Studies Conference

School of English, University of Sheffield, UK

17–20 July, 2014

Abstract deadline: 19 December, 2013.

CFP below

Reading Animals CFP Published

The Country House in Britain, 1914-2014
Newcastle University, Friday 6th – Sunday 8th June 2014
Conference Organisers: Faye Keegan and Barbara Williams
http://www.countryhouseconference.wordpress.com
Supported by the Newcastle University Gender Research Group

Keynote Speakers: Deborah Cartmell, Christine Geraghty, Ellie Jones and Alison Light

From Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011), the country house has had a strong presence in British culture of the past decade. This is the culmination of a century’s interest in the spaces and places of the country house, an interest that burgeoned following the break-up of the great estates around the First World War. In texts ranging from P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle Saga to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazlet Chronicles, and in television series such as ITV ‘s Brideshead Revsited (1981) and Downton Abbey (2010), British culture continues to return to the country house setting in both popular and high culture. Since the rise of the British heritage film in the 1980s and the proliferation of Austen adaptations in the 1990s the country house has played an equally important role in British cinema and continues to gain currency as a national icon. This preoccupation with the country house is fuelled by institutions such as the National Trust and English Heritage, as well as through documentary programmes such as BBC1’s The Edwardian Country House (2002), Channel 4’s Country House Rescue (2008) and Julian Fellowes’s Great Houses on ITV (2013). Often overshadowed by the country house in other centuries such as the seventeenth-century country house poem or the nineteenth-century country house novel, studies of the twentieth and twenty-first century country house are scarce.

This three-day interdisciplinary conference will trace the representation of the country house in British literature and film between 1914 and 2014. The conference will explore how space, class and gender operate in the wealth of filmic and literary texts which have been concerned with the country house throughout the last century, as well as considering how it functions in documentaries, historical monographs and reality television. We invite 300-word abstracts (for 20-minute papers) on any topic relating to the country house; possible topics might include, but are by no means restricted to:

Historical Fictions
The Downton Effect
The Modernist Country House
The Country House Abroad
The Middlebrow and Prize Culture
Costumes and Design
Cycles of Pride and Prejudice
Adaptation
Murder in the Country House
Haunted Homes and the Gothic
The Wartime Country House
Period Drama
Servants and Servitude
Class and the National Trust
Toy Soldiers and the Dolls House
Romance Fiction

Abstracts should be submitted via email to countryhouseconf@ncl.ac.uk by 1 November 2013; successful applicants will be notified by 2014. Send any queries to the above email.

Call for papers: Europe

Keynote speaker: ‘Proust and Wagner on the Beach’, John Coyle (University of Glasgow)

The Scottish Network of Modernist Studies will be holding a one-day symposium entitled ‘Europe’ at the University of Glasgow on 19 October 2013. Proposals are invited from academics and post-graduates for 20-minute presentations addressing: the role and rise of modernism in Europe; the influence of European writers on modernism and modern Anglophone writers; the locations of modernism; and the international or transnational character of modernism, amongst other topics.

This one-day event will also include a general meeting of SNoMS to discuss and plan future events. (There will be a small charge to cover the costs of refreshments.)

Proposals for papers should be sent to Matthew Creasy via email (matthew.creasy@glasgow.ac.uk) by Friday 6 September 2013.