Category: Uncategorized

Non-canonical British literature: 1890-1945

Abstracts by 15 April – DEADLINE EXTENDED

Papers due 30 August 2020

This conference is now postponed.  The organisers hope to reschedule in 2021.

From Proletariat to Precariat: Representations of Class and Identity in Working-class writing from the 1930s to the present

Department of English, University of Birmingham

 26^th June 2020

 We invite submissions to an interdisciplinary conference on working -class fiction, to be held at the University of Birmingham in June.

In a recent Guardian article Tim Lott laments the death of the English working-class novel and likewise that of the English working-class literary novelist. He qualifies his pronouncement, by remarking the delineation ‘English’ is used advisedly, for ‘the same is not true of Scotland’. Nevertheless, he may have also appended the modifiers ‘White’ and ‘Male’ before ‘English’ so as to complete the chain of associations traditionally linked to working-class writing. Touching on the subject matter of working-class narratives, Lott notes how ‘stories of “the streets” now tend to come from post-colonial voices that explore ethnic, religious and cultural identities’ where class is unlikely to be the primary concern’. This is unfortunate, for issues of class and individual identity are generally interconnected and overlapping, and ought not be seen as mutually antagonistic. Owing to what Richard Hoggart called ‘experiential wholeness’; the ways lives are shaped by ‘many different orders of things all at once’, working-class fictions frequently offer themselves as resources from which to construct a sense of imaginative solidarity, promoting what Zadie Smith refers to as ‘an extension away from yourself, into other people’ or, to paraphrase Hoggart, they serve to remind us that we are not alone.

This one-day conference will probe beyond the traditional conventions and assumptions of a working-class writing, to clear a space for the exploration of intersections between class, race, gender and politics. We invite proposals for papers of 20 minutes on any aspect of working-class fiction from the 1930s to the present. Topics might include:

• No more hard work, no more work? AI and The Universal wage;
• Shame and Respectability;
• Working-class women writers;
• From Colliery to Call-Centre: The changing face of the workplace;
• Identity politics (race, gender, class);
• Working-Class Cinema: Documentary Cinema and Film;
• Austerity fiction;
• The Domestic Scene;
• We also welcome papers from creative writers and artists engaging with working-class issues.

Submissions from postgraduates and early-career researchers are particularly welcome. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to: RCH554@student.bham.ac.uk by 30th April 2020. Please also include a brief biography, and indicate whether you would consider chairing a panel.

Katherine Mansfield on the French Riviera

Menton, France

24–25 September 2020

THIS CONFERENCE IS STILL GOING AHEAD AS PLANNED (03/04/2020)

• An international symposium organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society, celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship
• Hosted by the Town Hall of Menton, and supported by the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship
• The Symposium will feature a keynote panel of prestigious New Zealand authors, all former Mansfield Menton Fellows
• http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/menton-2020/ 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

The New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) spent all her adult life in Europe, of which approximately three years in total were spent in France, where she later died. For much of this time she was on the French Riviera, firstly in Bandol and subsequently in Menton during the spring of 1920, and then staying at the Villa Isola Bella from September 1920 to May 1921.

Both Bandol and Menton proved fertile ground for Mansfield’s creativity. During two sojourns in Bandol (1916 and 1918), she completed ‘The Aloe’ and wrote ‘Je ne parle pas français’, ‘Sun and Moon’, and ‘Bliss’.  The time she spent at the Villa Isola Bella in Menton resulted in ‘The Singing Lesson’, ‘The Young Girl’, ‘The Stranger’, ‘Miss Brill’, ‘Poison’, ‘The Lady’s Maid’, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, and ‘Life of Ma Parker’.

Mansfield’s life in the south of France also engendered comments in her notebooks and diaries, as well as in her letters. For example, near the end of a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, written from Menton, she wrote,  ‘You will find ISOLA BELLA in poker work on my heart’. Domestic issues, friendships, visitors from England, descriptions of the Mediterranean, all feature in her personal writing. On her first visit to Menton, staying with her cousin Connie Beauchamp, she wrote to Murry: ‘Oh, could I bring the flowers, the air  the whole heavenly climate as well: this darling little town, these mountains – It is simply a small jewel’. In January 1922, high up in the snowy Swiss Alps, she wrote in her new diary: ‘I love, I long for the fertile earth. How I have longed for the S. of France this year!’

In the fifty years since 1970, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship has celebrated the connection between New Zealand’s most iconic writer and the town of Menton, allowing a New Zealand writer to live and write for three months or more in the town which Mansfield loved so much. Previous recipients include C. K. Stead, Margaret Scott, Paula Morris, Carl Nixon, Kate Camp, Anna Jackson, Mandy Hager, Greg McGee, Justin Paton, Chris Price, Ken Duncum, Damien Wilkins, Jenny Pattrick, Stuart Hoar, Dame Fiona Kidman, Ian Wedde and other prestigious writers such as Bill Manhire, Janet Frame, Witi Ihimaera, Elizabeth Knox, Lloyd Jones, Roger Hall, Marilyn Duckworth, Michael King and Allen Curnow.

This two-day symposium will celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Fellowship in 2020. Suggested topics for papers might include (but are not limited to)

• The influence of the south of France on Mansfield
• Mansfield, travel and France
• Mansfield’s French legacy
• The French reception of Mansfield’s works
• Translating Mansfield
• France and the French as sources for Mansfield’s imagination
• Teaching and studying Mansfield in France today
• The influence of French literature on Mansfield
• Analysis of any of the stories Mansfield wrote in the south of France
• The legacy of Mansfield in New Zealand writing today

 NB: All other topics relating to Mansfield will be considered.

Abstracts of 200 words, together with a 50-word bio-sketch, should be sent to the conference organiser:

Dr Gerri Kimber (University of Northampton, UK) at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org

Submission deadline: 31 March 2020

NB:  This event is proving very popular and abstracts are already coming in, ahead of the deadline of 31 March. If you know you will be submitting an abstract, please do think about securing your accommodation soon. The week of events scheduled to celebrate this 50th anniversary of the Katherine Mansfield-Menton Fellowship, of which our symposium is just a part, means that Menton is going to be very busy. Aside from hotels, there is also AirBnB etc.  The venue, provided free of charge by the Mairie in Menton, is the same as in 2009 – the spectacular Villa Maria Serena. For images please go to

Fourth international conference at The University of Hull Friday 12^th June 2020

Co-organised by Dr Sue Kennedy and Professor Jane Thomas

This conference aims to rekindle the energy unleashed at the inaugural conference on British Women’s Writing 1930 to 1960: Revision, Revival, Rediscovery in 2016 at Hull University that was taken forward in conferences at Chichester University in 2017 and 2018. The fourth conference seeks to gather more research and discussion from scholars of women’s literature of this period and to continue the re-evaluation of women’s writing occupying a liminal place in ‘the canon’ of British literature as taught by the academy.

The conference will also launch the publication of Liverpool University Press’s essay collection British Women Writers 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves, that arose from the first conference, edited by Sue Kennedy and Jane Thomas.

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/52606/

This fourth conference in the series offers speakers and audience a forum to give new life to readings of more  works by neglected women authors. We offer a space to consider the problems lamented by Kristin Bluemel and Phyllis Lassner in the first issue of the journal Feminist Modernist Studies in 2017 that are still faced by scholars of early and mid-twentieth-century writing by and about women that is ‘not modernist in terms of style, politics or coterie’ in the face of the preferences of publishers and academic institutions for research on topics admitted to a modernist canon.

The emphasis on the work of neglected women writers celebrates their non-canonical and middlebrow status; works that Elizabeth Maslen describes as among the ‘texts which we neglect to our very great loss’, of which there remain too many.

A distinguishing feature of these conferences has been the interest of an increasingly appreciative section of the reading public in women’s writing of this period, aided by the steadfast work of recovery performed by publishing houses, notably Virago, Persephone and most recently, Handheld Press and cultural commentators and journalists like Lucy Scholes.

Keynote speakers will be:

Dr Kate Macdonald, literary historian, writer and director of Handheld Press, a small independent publishing house based in Bath that republishes forgotten fiction and authors from the twentieth century. Recent publishing successes include Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin, Inez Holden’s Blitz Writing and Rose Macaulay’s What Not.

Dr Lucy Scholes, a cultural critic who writes for The Financial Times, The Telegraph, NYR Daily, The New York Times Book Review, Literary Hub and Granta, among other publications, with an emphasis on recovering the work of lost women writers. She writes “Re-Covered”, a monthly column for the Paris Review about out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be, and is the Managing Editor of the literary magazine, The Second Shelf: Rare Books and Words by Women.

Call for papers

We welcome papers that approach a wide range of forms and genres: fiction, poetry, drama, life writing, film, particularly the lesser-known contributions of women writers to what might be seen as ‘untypical’ of female authors, extending and augmenting the excellent contributions to the first three conferences.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words for papers of no more than 20 minutes or panels of 3 associated papers.

Examples might include the following, although other topics are most welcome:

• Writing about war and the aftermath of two world conflicts
• Writing against war; interwar political consciousness
• Domestic fiction; gender, class, families
• Race
• Post-colonial writing
• Queer writing; writing against the norm
• Science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy
• Life writing/autobiography
• Fiction for children
• Historical fiction
• Crime fiction
• Periodicals/magazines
• Poetry
• Drama
• Adaptation for film or stage

https://britishwomenwriters1930to1960.com

Please include a brief personal biography (about 50 words).

Do contact us if you have any questions and for submissions

Closing date for submissions March 17^th 2020

CALL FOR PAPERS
Spatial Modernities: Mapping the Physical and Psychological World Symposium

 Centre for Modern Studies, University of York

16 May 2020

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ian Gregory (Lancaster University)

Since the ‘spatial turn’ in the 1970s, scholars, theorists, scientists, and intellectuals across the globe have been carving out new critical, theoretical, and methodological concepts to expand and redefine the scope of space. Inspired by the fantastic ways that space and modernity interact, scholars have been bringing new experiences and interpretations to understandings of spatial modernity or modern spatiality. The borders of modernities and spatiality blurred and the spark of inspirations flickered.

This poses exciting opportunities and challenges to modern studies: What are ‘spatial modernities’ and how are they developed in and beyond humanities? How do the meanings and implications of space and modern evolve across the global world? How does the physical and psychological modernity respond to these modernities? How do we define, clarify, complicate, and push the debate over the borders forward? How does the map work or fail in the mysterious unfamiliar place?

The principle aim of this symposium is to encourage a robust, diverse, and interdisciplinary conversation on place, space, or map in the modern world. The Cmods postgraduate forum tenth annual symposium invites proposals for 15-minute papers. We wish to push the limits of how we interpret and understand spatial modernity as a categorical term. We encourage physical or material perspectives on architecture, geography, landscape, territory, region, area, and city, discussions on the invisible, imaginative, and psychological worlds, explorations of psychological, psychoanalytical and affective space, and conversations about the roles of maps in the modern era.

As such, we welcome papers from postgraduates and early career researchers working in literature, archaeology, language and linguistics, philosophy, history, music, art, media, geography, and other fields. Some thematic prompts include, but are not limited to:

• physical, metaphorical, embodied ways to explore modernity and space, place, and/or map
• critical and creative approaches to the connection between modernity and space
• time and space in modern studies
  ● spaces and places of the future or fantastical spaces
  ● the commodification of place, space, and/or map
• psychogeography and modernity
• psychological, psychoanalytical and affective space
  ● politics of place, space, or map (territory sovereignty, colonialism, and empire, etc)
• space, place, and/or map & gender, sexuality, religion, race, migration, animal, and environment

We welcome proposals from postgraduates (master and Ph.D. students) and ECRs. Please send an abstract (300-500 words) along with a brief bio (100 words) to (cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk) by 8 March 2020. Queries can be directed to this email address also. We are open to receiving standard presentations and encouraging non-traditional forms of participation. HRC (Humanities Research Centre) has generously funded the travel bursaries of £150 for non-funded PGs (MA or Ph.D.) or precariously employed ECAs who are in need.

Our Website:  https://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/postgraduate-forum/#tab-2     

Our twitter: Countervoices( @cmodspgforum1) https://twitter.com/cmodspgforum1

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/countervoice/

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ian Gregory

Professor Ian Gregory is a geographer, historian and director of Lancaster Digital Humanities Hub. He is a geographer by training and has spent much of his career working applying Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to historical research, a field that has become known as Historical GIS. As a result of the growth of Digital Humanities, he has become particularly interested in using GIS with texts as well as the more traditional quantitative sources. Further information and publications could be checked here https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/gregoryi/ . He has been involved in a number of projects that are concerned with what has become known as ‘Spatial Humanities’, a field that is concerned with using geographical technologies to better understand the geographies of our history and culture. Projects he has been involved in include:

• Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places (ERC funded)
• Geospatial Innovations in the Digital Humanities: A deep map of the English Lake District (the Leverhulme Trust)
• Great War Lancaster: Streets of Mourning and Community Memory (Heritage Lottery Fund)
• Reassembling the Republic of Letters (COST)
• Troubled Geographies: Two centuries of religious division in Ireland (funded by the AHRC/ESRC’s Religion & Society programme)
• Mapping the Lakes (British Academy funded)

Women Writers and Social/Political Activism
A special issue of Women: A Cultural Review

Call for Abstracts
Guest Editors: Lise Shapiro Sanders and Carey Snyder
Deadline for Submissions: August 1, 2020

The early twentieth century abounded with movements that reshaped women’s lives—including those for women’s suffrage, peace, birth control, and better working conditions, among others. Women writers addressed these issues not only in socially and politically engaged journalism, but also in feminist manifestoes, poetry, fiction, and drama. This special issue explores the relationship between women’s writing and social and political activism, from the 1890s to the 1940s. The collection will be comprised of a series of case studies, with a focus on non-canonical and ephemeral archival materials. In framing this focus, we are particularly interested in genres and forms of writing that are on the periphery of, if not totally excluded from, the purview of literary studies. Responding to recent calls for more scholarship on women writers in the period, this collection seeks to recover the place of social and political activism in shaping women writers’ relationships to modernity. With close attention to genre and literary form, our collection foregrounds neglected archival material by activist women, thus enriching our understanding of women’s contributions to early twentieth-century literary and cultural history.

Prospective contributors are invited to submit a 500-word abstract and a brief bio to Lise Shapiro Sanders (lsanders@hampshire.edu) and Carey Snyder (snyderc3@ohio.edu) by August 1, 2020. Selected contributors will be invited to submit full articles by May 1, 2021. Acceptance and publication in the special issue will be subject to review by the journals’ editors and external peer reviewers.

The next London Modernism Seminar will the place on Saturday 8 February, 11.00-13.00 at King’s College London, Room S0.12 in the Strand Building.

The theme of the seminar is Science and we’re delighted to have Cleo Hanaway-Oakley and Rachel Murray as our speakers. More details about their talks can be found below. Everyone is welcome to attend and there is no need to pre-book a place.

You can find directions to the venue here:https://www.kcl.ac.uk/visit/strand-building

Abstracts:

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, ‘a most curious look towards the red light’: Colour Blindness across the Victorian-Modernist Divide

In 1891 Thomas H. Bickerton, a leading ophthalmologist, declared: ‘COLOUR-BLINDNESS has now passed from the category of ailments denominated interesting, and is recognized as a visual infirmity the importance of which cannot be over’. Indeed, during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, non-normative colour vision acted as a keystone in discussions on economics, public safety, employment, medicine, philosophy, anthropology, and genetics.

This multifaceted fascination with colour vision is reflected, in various ways, across the literature of the period. Dickens’ and Conrad’s texts engage, albeit indirectly, with debates about shipping and railway accidents – with Conrad also alluding to ‘primitive’ colour vision. Woolf’s and Joyce’s considerations are more abstracted, but they continue some of the earlier discussions surrounding colour vision’s connection to knowledge, language, power, and other senses.
By discussing canonical modernists alongside writers on the margins of modernism, as well as those usually labelled ‘Victorian’, this paper demonstrates how colour vision caught the attention of different writers in different ways. As well as analysing literary texts, I will be drawing upon research conducted as part of my fellowship at the Science Museum, London. Blending object-based research, historical study, and literary analysis, I am starting to investigate the changing cultural status and signification of colour blindness, c. 1860-1940.

Dr Cleo Hanaway-Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the University of Bristol. She is also a Science Museum Research Associate and Membership Secretary for the British Association for Modernist Studies. Her first monograph, ‘James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film’, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. She is currently working on a new book-project provisionally entitled ‘Multifocal Modernism: Literature and Non-normative Vision’.

Rachel Murray, ‘Modernism and the Insect Body’

From the carapaced figures of Wyndham Lewis’s war paintings to the human swarms of D. H. Lawrence’s interwar fiction, modernism teems with entomological imagery. Identifying a shared fascination with the aesthetic possibilities of the insect body, my paper will propose that this order of life can shed new light on modernism’s formal innovations, its engagement with key socio-political concerns, as well as its questioning of the boundaries of the human.

Rachel Murray is a postdoctoral research fellow at Loughborough University. Her book, ‘The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form’, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in April 2020.

On the anniversary of her birth, a panel of experts explore the extraordinary life and writings of Nan Shepherd. Dr Scott Lyall will be joined by Dr Kerri Andrews, Erlend Clouston, Professor Alison Lumsden and Dr Samantha Walton to discuss the significance of Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, her novels and poetry, place in the Scottish Literary Renaissance, and influence on the nature writing of today. There will be readings of Shepherd’s work by actress Sarah Innes, and an audience Q&A. This event is supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Imprints of the New Modernist Editing: Blue & Green: A one-day practical workshop in pochoir printing, led by Jane Hyslop (project Co-Investigator) Edinburgh College of Art, Friday 21st February 2020 

During the modernist period the pochoir printing technique was used extensively in fashion illustration. It offers a unique, liminal space between printing and painting in which artists such as Sonia Delaunay, Man Ray and Max Ernst became interested. Many of them made works associated with or including texts and imagery moved across the page allowing colour to be brought into the textual sphere. 

This workshop will start with a short presentation offering insight into the technique, its history and applications. There will then follow a hands-on workshop enabling participants to gain direct experience of using pochoir, taking its conceptual focus the relationship between image and text in the material form of the book. 

Virginia Woolf’s Blue and Green has been selected as the text which will be investigated offering a rich and evocative range of imagery that can be explored. 

Participants will start by working together tracing imagery, cutting stencils and mixing paints to learn how layers of colour can be applied. They will then have the opportunity to make their own imagery using the pochoir technique to make a series of prints to take away from the event. 

Jane Hyslop is a Lecturer in Painting and Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art. Her work is centred upon print and the artists’ book with recent research into pochoir printing, its history and application in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 

Please note that all expenses for participants, including UK travel, catering, and accommodation if required, will be covered. To apply for this workshop please complete a brief application form by noon on Monday 27th January 2020. Successful applications will be confirmed by Thursday 30th January 2020. 

Contact: imprintsnme [at] gmail.com

Professor Andrew Thacker and Dr Catherine Clay, Co-Directors of a new Periodicals and Print Culture Research Group at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), invite applications for PhD projects in any area of modern periodical studies under NTU’s 2020 PhD Studentship Scheme.

Further information about the scheme is available here. The closing dates is noon on 14^th February 2020, and applications need to be submitted online here. 

For more details about Professor Thacker’s and Dr Clay’s areas of expertise, please see their staff profiles on NTU’s website. If you would like to discuss a proposal before application, please contact Professor Thacker at andrew.thacker@ntu.ac.uk and Dr Clay at catherine.clay@ntu.ac.uk.