CFP: Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel (Sheffield University, 25-27 June 2015). http://elizabethbishopat50.wordpress.com Deadline: 15 December.
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CFP Rural Modernity Volume
Call for Chapter Proposals
Rural Modernity: A Collection of Essays
Deadline for Proposals: December 31, 2014
Edited by Kristin Bluemel, Monmouth University and
Michael McCluskey, University College London
We are seeking 500 word proposals for submissions to a collection of essays devoted to the theoretical and historical elaboration of the concept of rural modernity as it is worked out in literary, artistic, and other cultural objects and movements in early
twentieth-century Britain.
Please email queries to
Kristin Bluemel: kbluemel@monmouth.edu or
Michael McCluskey: michael.mccluskey@ucl.ac.uk
Despite the interwar explosion of books, advertisements, films, paintings, and pictures that depicted rural life, no study to date has looked into representations of the rural across diverse media. Nor has any study considered the relation of rural representation in early- and mid-twentieth-century culture to rural people who, as much or more than urban dwellers, grappled with the forces and effects of modernization and modernity. Rural Modernity aims to bring together essays on literature, arts, crafts, and films to identify the interconnected—at times conflicting—ideas that images of the rural helped to circulate and to open up “rural modernity” as a particularly useful framework for further studies of interwar art and literature, and, more broadly, British culture.
Possible subjects include Writers: H. E. Bates, Adrian Bell, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Thomas Hardy, Winifred Holtby, A. A. Milne, H. J. Massingham, Beverley Nichols, A. G. Street, Flora Thompson, Mary Webb, Francis Brett Young Artists: Evelyn Dunbar, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Thomas Hennell, Laura Knight, Clare Leighton, John Nash, Paul Nash, Samuel Peploe, Gwen Raverat, Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer, Philip Wilson Steer Preoccupations: villages, cottages, country houses, farming, gardening, tourism and motoring, ramblers and anglers, folk dancing, Peacehaven and the Plotlands movement, rural industries and organic communities Media: books, prints, paintings, illustrations, photography, film, and mass print media.
The aims of writers and artists who engaged with ideas of the rural—evocation of lost worlds, celebration of new discoveries, participation in modernist experiments—tell only part of the story, and, while the essays included in Rural Modernity explore these motivations, they also seek to move beyond perceived oppositions between rural and urban/art and craft/modernism and middlebrow. The conception of rural modernity argued for in this collection makes connections within—and between—these distinctions while allowing for the complexity of the idea of “rural modernity” itself. How was it imagined? How was it marketed? Who promoted it and who opposed it? How have social historians and cultural geographers contributed to our understanding of rural modernity, and how can the concept of rural modernity contribute to literary studies, film studies, print culture studies, and art history?
Call for papers
An EMMA conference to be held at
Montpellier 3 University on March 27-28, 2015.
The Humble in 19th, 20th and 21st-Centuries British Literature and Arts
This conference will both expand and renew our work on Ethics of Alterity in 19th, 20th and 21st-Century British Literature and Arts. The relation to the other will be envisaged as a “way of being other” through the category of the humble. Through the double meaning of its etymology, humbleness refers to a social condition and/or a way of being. It can be defined as “being low in rank or station” or as “being aware of one’s own limitations or weaknesses”, i.e., as an awareness of one’s ability to fail.
This conference will be an opportunity to explore the humble as a theme in 19th, 20th and 21st Century British Literature and Arts and as an aesthetic or ethical category. From a neo-Platonist ethics (as defended by Levinas), we shall thus turn to a neo-Aristotelian one (as defended by Nussbaum or Ricoeur, among others), which also implies a form of practice. We propose to address how British literature and art connect with the ideals defended in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries by philosophers, economists, politicians and jurists—from John Stuart Mill’s concept of happiness to the Welfare State and the ethics of care—and we will examine how aesthetics connect with ethics as well as with politics.
The humble may be understood as:
- A form of economic, psychological, religious or aesthetic destitution, poverty, precariousness, dispossession, humility, vulnerability, etc.
- A “form-of-life” (Agamben), a utopia or any other form of reaction to a social status quo.
- A new paradigm for the human, at a time when the sovereignty of the subject has been defeated and the subject has become autonomous, as well as a paradigm for the living.
The humble may be regarded as disenabling or enabling, disempowering or empowering (Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster).
Food for thought:
-how the humble or a humble voice interacts with a text, how a poetics of the humble may be created,
-how the humble literary genres and arts of the Victorian, Edwardian, Modernist, post-modern or contemporary periods relate to the canonical literary genres or arts,
-how the humble is represented (phenomenal realism, modernist aesthetics, post-humanism, etc.) and what genres or modes the humble privileges,
-the various forms of humble arts, from printmaking to Kitsch or some forms of land art, etc.
The list is not restrictive.
Proposals bearing on the humble as a theme in 19th, 20th and 21st-Century British Literature and Arts and signalling to a poetics of the humble or the epistemological, ethical or political significance of the humble will be considered..
Proposals in English of about 300 words should be sent to Isabelle Brasme (isabellebrasme@gmail.com), Jean-Michel Ganteau (jean-michel.ganteau@univ-montp3.fr) and Christine Reynier (christine.reynier@univ-montp3.fr) by December 15, 2014.
Selected papers will be published in Horizons Anglophones/Present Perfect at the Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée.
http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/present-perfect.html
Call for papers
“Impression(s): 1880-1920”
16th October 2015
University of Burgundy (Dijon, France)
On the occasion of the symposium “Impression(s): 1880-1920” organised by the Image-Texte-Langage research centre (EA 4182) at the University of Burgundy on 16th October 2015, we wish to invite contributions that explore the relationship between art criticism, literary impressionism and printmaking from the late 19th century to the immediate postwar period in Britain.
We invite researchers, librarians, curators and collectors to examine the writings and artwork of art critics and writers who were also professional or amateur printmakers, namely in the fields of lithography, wood-engraving, woodcut, and etching. The symposium aims to discuss intermedial practices, the mutual influence of artistic practice and textual production, as well as the dual meaning of impression as a mode of reception and of expression. Papers should examine impression both as theme and trope in literary texts and art criticism in connection with the material characteristics of media in which writers/artists chose to express themselves. They can also address how the shift from late Victorian aesthetics to modernist experimentation was negotiated in this field.
The time period considered here is framed by the creation of the Society of Painter-Etchers in 1880 and that of the Society of Wood-Engravers in 1920. It spans four decades which saw the advent of photomechanical process and the revival of printmaking as an “original” mode of expression based on the premium granted to individual impression as autographic response and to the trope of the print as imprint on a medium and/or on the mind.
Within this time frame, papers can focus on individual careers—like those of Edward Gordon Craig, Joseph Pennell, Campbell Dodgson, or young Moderns such as C. R. W. Nevinson and Paul Nash. They may also explore trends, groups and societies—from the Vale Group to The Bloomsbury Group, from Arts & Crafts and Aestheticism to modern design.
In parallel with literary texts and art criticism, a variety of publications and related aspects can be examined: lectures given and handbooks produced in art schools and technical schools (such as the Slade, the Central School of Arts & Crafts, and the Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts); reviews published in small magazines such as The Dial or reviews such as The Studio; exhibition and print room catalogues; manifestoes and statements issued by private presses or societies such as the Senefelder Club.
Deadline: please send your proposals (500 words along with a short bio-bibliography) to Sophie Aymes and Bénédicte Coste by the end of December 2014. Note that all papers should be in English. A selection of peer-reviewed articles will be published.
Confirmation: February 2015.
Sophie Aymes (Université de Bourgogne): sophie.aymes@u-bourgogne.fr
Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne): benedicte.coste@u-bourgogne.fr
Making It New: Victorian and Modernist Literature and Periodicals, 1875-1935
A one-day conference, De Montfort University, UK, 28 February 2015
When Thomas Hardy lamented to Virginia Woolf in 1926 that modernist authors had ‘changed everything now’ he reinforced the idea that modernism had wrought a cataclysmic division between itself and its Victorian predecessors. Woolf had specified December 1910 as the point when literature abandoned omniscience for the realism of interiority and the historical consequence has been a linear model where Victorian and modernist literatures are placed consecutively; as generally discrete entities. But Victorian literature was similarly inventive and experimental: the proto-modernism of Emily Brontë, the realism of George Eliot, the Zola-inspired Naturalists including George Moore who segued into Symbolism. Nor was Modernist literature always forward-looking: at the time G. K. Chesterton questioned the ‘originality’ of Futurism and John Middleton Murry argued that modernism was less about textual revolution and more about one’s ability ‘to train hard on a page of Ulysses every day;’ subsequently Tony Pinkney notes D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Victorian realism’ and James Eli Adams recognises a ‘host of continuities between Victorian and modernist literature’.
This conference aims to suture the ‘divide’ between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ literature, to explore the ways in which they dovetailed and overlapped, shared ideals and textual practice. We seek papers exploring novels, poetry, periodicals, little modernist magazines and other textual ephemera. Papers might include, but are not limited to:
• the reconsideration/ reconfiguration of the terms ‘Victorian’ and ‘modernist’
• Victorian prose, poetry, and plays which develop and anticipate some of the key components of ‘modernist’ writing
• modernist texts that deliberately reuse and capitalise on themes and forms developed during the Victorian period
• the manifestation of Victorian sub-genres (e.g. Realism, Naturalism, the Sensation Novel) in a modernist context
• the ways in which modernist periodicals bear the hallmarks of Victorian periodicals and Victorian periodicals anticipate modernism
• authors whose output spans both periods e.g. Thomas Hardy, George Moore, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells
The organisers hope to begin a conversation in this conference that will result in the publication of a collection of essays. To this end, we have been in discussion with Ashgate and delegates may want to consider their conference paper proposal as the beginning of a longer work for publication.
Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted by 5 January 2015 to:
Louise Kane, louise.kane@dmu.ac.uk
Deborah Mutch, dmutch@dmu.ac.uk
Kaleidoscope, Durham’s postgraduate interdisciplinary journal, is organising a symposium at Durham Castle on the 4th of December 2014
A key feature of Kaleidoscope is that it embodies and connects diverse subject areas in a single publication, whether in the Arts and Humanities, the Sciences, or the Social Sciences. This symposium is an excellent opportunity to communicate concepts and ideas to those in other fields.
The symposium is on the theme of ‘Emergence’. Suggestions include, but are not limited to:
- Emergency, Tipping Points and Fragility
- Emergence of Genre
- Emergent Technology and Systems
- Emergence, Novelty and Creativity
- Emergent Organisations, Orders, Structures and Patterns
- Emergence and Evolution
More information on possible approaches can be found at:
www.dur.ac.uk/ias/themes/emergence
For this one-day symposium, we are seeking papers from postgraduate students. We welcome material of individual or collaborative work for presentations of 15 to 20 minutes. Lunch and refreshments provided.
Please send abstracts (max. 300 words) before 1st November 2014 to editor.kaleidoscope@durham.ac.uk.
Kaleidoscope will encourage and support speakers to submit articles developed from their presentations for publication in the next issue of the journal.
Enquiries should be sent to editor.kaleidoscope@durham.ac.uk
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JournalKaleidoscope
Twitter: @Kaleidoscope_J
Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Blooms Berries’
An international conference organized by the Katherine Mansfield Society, to be held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA
28–30 May 2015
Keynote Address:
Professor Sydney Janet Kaplan
University of Washington
In his eagerness to establish Katherine Mansfield’s place among her peers, John Middleton Murry sometimes published work that she herself would have rejected. Likewise, the extent of his culling of her letters and notebooks glossed over Mansfield’s complex personality and relationships, elements of her life that provide a context for better understanding her fiction. This ‘Mansfield Myth’ made her appear out of touch with the social and cultural upheaval of her time.
Having generally been relegated to the fringe of literary modernism during her lifetime, especially among the influential ‘Blooms Berries’, as Mansfield referred to them in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell on 15 August 1917, she nevertheless worked her way into enviable positions of prestige in some key literary magazines, and had become well known as a writer by the end of her life. It is as a member of the social fringe, though, that Mansfield becomes the most intriguing. As Sydney Janet Kaplan demonstrates in her seminal book, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, Mansfield brings a different perspective –– and, like Virginia Woolf, provides a corrective – to the dominant, male-centered version of modernism. Likewise, as a colonial, Mansfield remained free of the traditions that haunted most of the Bloomsbury group, including their ‘anxiety of influence’. In this, Mansfield demonstrated herself as more ‘modern’ than some of her contemporaries; having less ‘tradition’ to overcome, she was able to adopt a style that was unselfconscious of influence. The focus of this conference will therefore allow us to place her more firmly within the literary context of her time.
Suggested topics for papers might include:
- Mansfield and the ‘Blooms Berries’, focusing on her personal and/or professional relationships with particular members of the Bloomsbury group.
- Mansfield on the Fringe, exploring her relationship with other fringe-members of the Bloomsbury group such as D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, or perhaps the impact her relegation to the fringe had on her personal and/or professional life.
- Mansfield and Style, which could address some of the literary influences of some of the Bloomsbury group on Mansfield or her influence on them.
- Mansfield and Art, focusing on the shared influences the post-impressionists had on both Mansfield and the members of the Bloomsbury group, as well as other cross-fertilizations.
- Mansfield ‘in’ Bloomsbury, exploring how Mansfield has been portrayed in the fiction and letters of the various members.
- Bloomsbury ‘in’ Mansfield, turning the tables to focus on how members of Bloomsbury are portrayed in Mansfield’s fiction and letters.
- Mansfield, herself. We would entertain proposals that focus more specifically on Mansfield; however, priority will be given to those proposals that tie more directly to the conference theme.
What better venue to explore Mansfield’s interrelationships with the members of Bloomsbury than the beautiful Newberry Library in Chicago, the world’s second largest holder of Mansfield’s papers. As part of the conference, Huntington University will sponsor an exhibit of some of the library’s Mansfield holdings. Those interested in staying over on Sunday can arrange to visit the Shedd Aquarium, the Art Institute of Chicago, or the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History.
Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a bio-sketch of 50 words to the conference organizers, Todd Martin, Erika Baldt, and Alex Moffett, to:
Complete panel proposals of three speakers plus a chair, are welcome.
Deadline for abstracts: 30 October 2014
Digital Diversity 2015: Writing | Feminism | Culture
Orlando turns 20
Edmonton, Canada 7-9 May 2015
How have new technologies transformed literary and cultural histories? How do they enable critical practices of scholars working in and outside of digital humanities? Have decades of digital studies enhanced, altered, or muted the project to recover and represent more diverse histories of writers, thinkers, and artists positioned differently by gender, race, ethnicity, sexualities, social class and/or global location? This conference examines the trajectory of feminist digital studies, observing the ways in which varied projects have opened up the objects and methods of literary history and cultural studies. It marks the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Orlando Project, an ongoing experiment in digital methods that produces Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles, from the Beginnings to the Present (orlando.cambridge.org). Alongside pioneering projects such as the Women Writers Project, the Corvey Project, the Dickinson Electronic Archives, the Perdita Project, and the Victorian Women Writers Project, Orlando blazed a new path in the field, bringing together feminist literary studies with emerging methods of digital inquiry. These twenty years have witnessed a revolution in how we research, produce, and circulate knowledge. It is time to reflect upon the impact of the digital turn on engagement with the literary and cultural past.
We welcome presentations that will together reflect on the past, present, and future of digital literary and cultural studies; examine synergies across digital humanities projects; and stimulate exchanges across such fields as literary history, history, art history, cultural studies, and media studies.
Potential topics include:
- Transformations and evaluations of feminist, gender, queer and other recuperative literary studies
- Digital manifestations of critical race studies, transatlantic/transnationalist or local/community-based approaches
- Collaborations between digital humanities specialists and scholars in other fields
- Born-digital critical and creative initiatives in cultural history (journals, blogs, electronic “branch” projects, crowdsourcing, multi-media, and interactive projects)
- Editorial initiatives, digitization and curation of primary texts, representation of manuscripts and the writing process
- Inquiry into texts, networks, and historical processes via visualization and other “distant reading” strategies
- Authorship and collaboration: the work of women and other historically marginalized writers, traditional models of scholarship, and new conditions of digital research and new media
- Sound and sight: sound and visual arts studies in digital environments
- Identities and diversity in new media: born-digital arts in word, sound, and image, in genres including documentaries, blogs, graphic novels, memoirs, hypertexts and e-literature
- Conditions of production: diversity in academia, publishing, library, information science, or programming, past and present
- Cultural and political implications of particular tools or digital modes of presentation
- Pedagogical objectives, practices, environments
- Dissemination, accessibility, and sustainability challenges faced by digital projects
The conference will include paper/panel presentations as well as non-traditional presentation formats. Please submit abstracts (500 words for single paper, poster, or demonstration, and 1500 words for panels of 3 papers or workshops) along with a short CV for each presenter. We are applying for funding to support the participation of students and emerging scholars.
We welcome proposals for other non-traditional formats. Half- to full-day workshops will be held on the first day of the conference; demonstrations and poster presentations will be embedded in the conference program. Proposals for workshops should provide a description, outline, and proposed schedule indicating the length of time and type of space desired.
The deadline for all submissions is 26 September 2014. Send proposals and CVs by email, to digdiv2015@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @digdiv2015.
CFP: British Society for Literature and Science Tenth Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, 16-18 April 2015
The tenth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at the University of Liverpool, on 16-18 April 2015. Keynote talks will be given by Professor Keith Barnham (Imperial College London), Dr Patricia Fara (University of Cambridge), and Dr Claire Preston (Queen Mary University of London).
The BSLS invites proposals for twenty-minute papers, or panels of three papers, on any subjects within the field of literature and science. In addition, ‘flash talks’ of up to 7 minutes on any topic are invited for a special plenary session. Other formats are also welcomed, but please email your suggestion to the organisers (viabsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk) for consideration, well in advance of the submission deadline.
This year the organisers would particularly welcome proposals addressing the themes of light, optics, vision and colour, and proposals for papers, panels or roundtables on engaging the public with literature and science research. However, the BSLS remains committed to supporting and showcasing work on all aspects of literature – including comparative literature and European and world literatures – and science, medicine and technology.
Proposals of no more than 250 words, together with the name and institutional affiliation of the speaker, and a biographical note of around 50 words, should be sent in the body of messages (not in attachments) to bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk. Proposals for panels should include a separate proposal and biographical note for each paper. The closing date for submissions is Friday 5 December 2014.
The conference fee will be waived for two graduate students in exchange for written reports on the conference, to be published in the BSLS Newsletter. If you are interested in being selected for one of these awards, please mention this when sending in your proposal. To qualify you will need to be registered for a postgraduate degree at the time of the conference.
Accommodation: please note that those attending the conference will need to make their own arrangements for accommodation. Information on local hotels will be made available soon on the forthcoming conference website.
Membership: conference delegates will need to register as members of the BSLS (annual membership: £25 waged/ £10 unwaged). It will be possible to join the BSLS when registering for the conference online.
For further information and updates about the conference, please contact Greg Lynall (bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk). A conference website will be available in due course.
PLEASE NOTE DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 30 SEPTEMBER. POSTGRADUATES PRESENTING A PAPER WILL HAVE ONE NIGHT’S ACCOMMODATION (APPROX 30 EUROS) FUNDED BY THE KMS.
Katherine Mansfield in the Short Story Tradition
International Conference organised by The University of Limerick in conjunction with the Katherine Mansfield Society
INCLUDING
Katherine Mansfield Society Annual Postgraduate Day
21-22 November 2014
Guest Speakers:
Gerri Kimber, Claire Davison-Pégon and
Heather Ingman
Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as one of the most influential short story writers of the twentieth century: her experiments with subject matter, style, theme, setting, handling of subjectivity, and point of view have had a lasting impact on the genre. Like her contemporary James Joyce, Mansfield simplified plot to highlight a moment of revelation, thereby approaching, in Willa Cather’s words, “the major forces of life through comparatively trivial incidents.” A passionate reader and translator of Chekhov, an accomplished musician, a sometime-actress and impersonator with a deep interest in cinema, and a friend and associate of numerous painters and writers, Mansfield brought to the short story form a wide-ranging engagement with the aesthetic movements of her time. As the “little colonial walking in the London garden patch,” moreover, Mansfield exemplifies Edward Said’s contention that “Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.”
We invite proposals for this two-day international conference. The first day of the conference will feature postgraduate scholarship; the second day of the conference is open to all Mansfield scholars. Proposals should address the multiple ways in which Mansfield engaged with and contributed to the short story form. Topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Mansfield and her contemporaries (Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Rhys)
- Mansfield and the modernist short story
- Mansfield and Chekhov
- Mansfield and women writers of the short story
- Mansfield and New Zealand
- Mansfield and the little magazines
- Mansfield’s use of other media (e.g. music, cinema, painting)
- Mansfield and narrative theory
- Mansfield and exilic subjectivity
- Thematic innovations (domesticity; home; food; marriage)
- Mansfield and urban geographies; the flaneuse; travel
Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a bio-sketch of 50 words to the conference
organisers: kmintheshortstorytradition@gmail.com
Deadline for abstracts: 30 SEPTEMBER 2014
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