Twenty-Five Years of Regeneration: A Pat Barker Symposium

Saturday 15 October 2016, Durham University, 10.30 am – 5.00 pm

Twenty-five years after the publication of Regeneration, we invite proposals for papers on Pat Barker’s formative work of First World War historical fiction, as well as on her wider oeuvre. In 1991 Regeneration focused readers’ attention onto a lesser-visited space of war, the psychiatric hospital, onto challenging narratives of trauma and sexuality, and onto the ideologies of a society struggling to negotiate the effects of a global and industrialised conflict. The conference will be preceded by a public event on 14 October in Durham Cathedral on fiction and World War One, featuring Michael Morpurgo and Pat Barker.

This symposium will centre on discussion of how Barker’s novel, followed by The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995), has tested and shaped perceptions of the First World War. Particularly relevant during the current centenary period are the trilogy’s themes of memory and haunting, which resonate with questions of why the war remains such a prominent part of our culture, and how our views of it have been re-processed and revised. Held in Barker’s home city of Durham, the symposium will also address the portrayals of place in her novels. Initially known for her writing about women in the north east of England, the importance of her settings is undiminished in her later work – from Sarah Lumb’s description of herself as ‘what you’d call Geordie’ in Regeneration to the exploration of London in the Blitz in Barker’s most recent work, Noonday (2015).

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker will be Professor Sharon Monteith (The University of Nottingham), and that our guest Chair will be Dr Anne Whitehead (Newcastle University). Professor Monteith’s Pat Barker (2002) was the first book on the award-winning novelist’s work, which she is updating for a new edition. She co-edited the first collection of critical essays on the writer, Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker, in 2005 and has interviewed Barker on a number of occasions, including publicly at Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, the Nottingham Playhouse and at the Durham Book Festival on more than one occasion. Dr Whitehead, a pioneer in the field of trauma studies, has also interviewed Barker and has published extensively on her novels, for example in her monograph Trauma Fiction (2004).

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers on any of the following topics and on any other relevant areas:

• Changing literary interpretations of the First World War
• The development of the genre of historical fiction
• ‘Bringing the past to life’
• Barker’s themes and settings
• Trauma, hauntings, memory and remembrance
• Class, gender, and sexuality in Barker’s work

Please send abstracts (maximum 250 words) by 31 July 2016
to Professor Simon James: patbarker2016@gmail.com

Our event is supported by the Department of English Studies, Durham University. You can find details of this symposium, as well as other similar activities, by following @READEnglish on Twitter. You can keep up to date with others discussing the symposium by using the hashtag #Barker2016 on Twitter.

Professor Simon J. James, Head of Department, Department of English Studies

The Royal West of England Academy, Queen’s Road, Bristol, BS8 1PX

in association with The University of the West of England, Bristol and the Festival of Ideas

Monday 9 January 2017

Keynote: Sir Christopher Frayling

2017 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Angela Carter, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, renowned for her novels and adaptations of fairy tales. This symposium coincides with the exhibition, Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter (10 December-19 March 2017), hosted by The Royal West of England Academy and curated by Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Fiona Robinson. Carter worked and studied in Bristol for nearly ten years in the 1960s, where she wrote five novels, including The Magic Toyshop. Appropriately this exhibition takes place in Clifton, where she lived and created her first novel, Shadow Dance, set in the city, which forms part of the “Bristol trilogy”.

Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter focuses on the painters who inspired her and historical and contemporary art which can be seen to parallel her writing. Carter had an extraordinarily visual imagination and this is represented in the exhibition through the juxtaposition of images and her words. Carter’s adept story-telling, accompanied by her captivating graphic imagination, bursts out of the restraints of a single discipline. As she once pointed out: “I feel free to loot and rummage in an official past, specifically a literary past, but I like painting and sculptures and the movies and folklore and heresies, too.” Carter’s subversive, political, radical and highly original work has been an important influence on film-makers, writers and artists. This symposium aims to give new insights into the strange worlds of Angela Carter and pay tribute to her visual imagination, as well re-assessing her impact and importance for the twenty-first century.

The symposium seeks to create dialogue between practising artists, curators, writers, academics and students from disciplines including the visual arts, literature, history, film and media studies. Proposals for papers are invited to reflect on various aspects of Carter’s work: These might include, but are not limited to:

• Visual imagination and inspiration

• Art, poetry, music, film, journalism, translation, theatre, puppetry

• Japanese culture, sexuality, philosophy, radicalism, feminism

Proposals:

250 word abstracts for 20 minute papers by 1 August 2016
should be emailed to Dr Marie Mulvey-Roberts at marie.mulvey-roberts@uwe.ac.uk and Dr Charlotte Crofts at charlotte.crofts@uwe.ac.uk.

Artists and curators should send proposals directly to Fiona Robinson at info@fionarobinson.com.

Dear all,

Wanted to let you all know about our event on 4 July – The Future of the Humanities at the Tetley, Leeds – with Sarah Churchwell, Eleonora Belfiore and Donald Drakeman. Some of you may have seen it already in other contexts, but please do come if you would like to and also forward to your networks. I’ve asked Leanne to send round the CWWA mailing list.

http://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/news/0616-the-future-of-the-arts-and-humanities-up-for-debate/

Best wishes,

Susan

We’re almost there!!!! In a week’s time the Newcastle Noir 2016 Fringe Events will be underway.

On the Friday evening we’ll be celebrating the official launch of the festival in the company of award-winning writer, Ann Cleeves. Then over the weekend we’ll have an amazing array of local, national and international crime writers speaking about their work. Val McDermid, Sophie Hannah, Mari Hannah Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Gunnar Staalesen are just a few of the authors signed up for Newcastle Noir 2016.

We hope we can entice you along for a criminally fine festival! Click here to see what’s on offer!!!

For tickets, you can book directly online at Eventbrite, you can go to the Lit & Phil in person or you can call them on 0191 232 0192.

All best,

Jacky Collins

Dr Jacky Collins,

Senior Lecturer in Spanish Studies,

Department of Media, Communication and Design

Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences,

Northumbria University,

Lipman Building, Room 222,

Newcastle NE1 8ST.

The Stella Prize 2016 shortlist has been announced.

Congratulations to:

Tegan Bennett Daylight
Peggy Frew
Elizabeth Harrower
Mireille Juchau
Charlotte Wood
Fiona Wright

Literature and Medicine for the 2016 ESSE conference
Galway, 22nd – 26th August (further details at http://www.esse2016.org/)

In her 1930 essay ‘On Being Ill’ Woolf noted how “strange” it was “that illness ha[d] not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” Does Woolf’s comment still hold? A number of scholars have recently explored the symbolic value of illness in literature but how far can or should literature go beyond metaphor in representing the experience of illness? How far does Rita Charon’s concept of ‘narrative medicine’ capture the distinctiveness of literature as an alternative to medical discourse? We invite papers on the interconnections between literature and medical discourse in 20th and 21st century British literature.

Convenors
Dr. Nicolas Pierre Boileau EA853, LERMA
Faculté des lettres, Université d’Aix-Marseille
29 avenue R. Schuman 13161 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 1 France
nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr<mailto:nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr>

Professor Clare Hanson
Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton
Avenue Campus Highfield
 Southampton SO17 1BJ 
United Kingdom
C.Hanson@soton.ac.uk<mailto:C.Hanson@soton.ac.uk>

Deadline for submission of abstracts 31 March 2016

Clare Hanson
Professor of Twentieth Century Literature
School of Humanities: English
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BF
c.hanson@soton.ac.uk
023 8059 2470

A postgraduate symposium, as part of the Gendered Subjects Postgraduate Network and in collaboration with the Gendered Subjects Research Hub, Northumbria University.

May 23rd 2016, Northumbria University.

Keynote speakers:
Dr. Helen Wheatley (University of Warwick)
Dr. Christina Scharff (King’s College London)

The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look. (Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975)

This year marked the 40^th anniversary of Laura Mulvey’s seminal text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Exploring the way in which cinema constructs an interface between active/male and passive/female, Mulvey suggests that the cinematic female body is ‘raw material’: fragmented, constructed and deconstructed, perpetually stylised and ultimately immersed in the eroticism of visual pleasure. Thus, the female is open to be styled accordingly by the (male) spectator’s gaze.

Much scholarship has worked to expand the position and portrayal of the female body within media (Watson and Smith, 2002) and, most recently, Helen Wheatley argued that ‘Mulvey’s account of the intensity of the spectorial engagement with the filmic image needs to be adapted, not abandoned, when it comes to thinking about our erotic engagement with televisual spectacle’. (Helen Wheatley, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Television’, 2015)

Both examples explore the ways in which the contemporary female works to manipulate Mulvey’s initial conceptualisation of the female body as framed by the notion of to-be-looked-at-ness and furthermore, lessened the control of the male gaze. Instead, the female’s relationship with her body and subjectivity has become diverse and self-reflexive. As Watson and Smith argue, contemporary ‘women artists working in multiple media have used the bits and pieces, the excesses and debris […] in order to materialise self-referential displays’. In this sense, the female appears in various positions and in a constant process of construction and (re)construction through multi-faceted mediums.

This symposium seeks to explore the portrayal of the female (over an interdisciplinary terrain – be it art, screen, or page) as makers of her own self-display in a way that transforms the spectorial gaze and disrupts the notion of the female as a standardised or ‘perfect’ product. Instead, the utilisation of ‘bits’ and ‘pieces’ of media disrupts how femininities are visualised. Moreover, the focus will be on the way in which the female is both manipulated and manipulates the media landscape so as to force the modern spectator to (re)imagine femininities in contemporary culture.

Topics may include yet are not limited to the thematic list below:

• Visualising and (re)imagining femininities in contemporary literature, fine art, performance, and on screen.

• Female manipulation of space through new technological mediums.

• Grrrls and g[urls]: subverting girlhood in new forms of social media.

• Non-normative femininities.

• Ageing femininities and visualising nostalgia.

• Adaptations.

A 250-word abstract for 20-minute papers and poster presentations, including a brief autobiographical statement, should be submitted togirlsonfilm.unn@gmail.com by February 28th 2016.

Review: ‘Legacies and Lifespans: Contemporary Women’s Writing in the 21st Century’ by Dr Rosie White

‘Legacies and Lifespans: Contemporary Women’s Writing in the 21^st Century’, The 10^th Anniversary Conference of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, University of Brighton, 17 October 2015

This conference offered a timely reflection upon work on contemporary women’s writing. It was particularly apt because this is a moment when a whole generation of feminist scholars are approaching retirement or have already retired. The conference panels and plenaries featured diverse voices from older and younger generations including several voices from international contexts – Australia, Canada, the Indian subcontinent, Europe, Egypt, Saudi Arabia – reflecting upon the ‘legacies and lifespans’ of the CWWA over the last decade.

The tone was set by a pre-conference paper on Friday 16^th October at the University of Brighton’s Falmer campus where Professor Mary Eagleton gave a political reading of discourses of ‘chance and choice’ in fiction by women about young women and social mobility. Her paper moved through the 1950s and 1960s (Margaret Drabble and AS Byatt) to the impact of second wave feminisms in the 1970s (Janice Galloway and Andrea Levy), and then Zadie Smith’s NW(2012) and Ella Hickson’s 2009 play Precious Little Talent. She concluded with reference to Lauren Berlant’s‘depressive realism’ and the use of fantasy as a means of imagining a better world while acknowledging the exigencies of our lived realities. This account of the changing political landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was both stirring and provocative; a consideration of how we live now.

The opening keynote on Saturday morning was equally reflective as Professor Patricia Duncker (University of Manchester) took the delegates on a lively tour of her academic and creative writing careers, speaking about the development of her latest novel, Sophie and the Sibyl (2015) which features George Eliot struggling to write Middlemarch. During the lunch break both Professor Eagleton and Paulina Palmer were honoured by the Association, the CWWA essay prize was launched, and Professor Eagleton and Emma Parker launched the latest volume of the Palgrave History of British Women’s Writing: 1970 to the Present.

Panel sessions covered apparently disparate work – dementia in contemporary detective fiction, Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical writings and Alison Bechdel’s graphic novels – yet somehow seemed to draw upon similar debates and questions about lived experience and the processes of writing and reading. Three panels during the day focused specifically on ‘Legacies and lifespans’ and others developed new contributions to dystopian fictions, postcolonial writings, and a range of emerging areas of scholarship.

After lunch Jane Anger – one of the co-founders of Silver Moon Bookshop in London – gave a moving presentation on women’s publishing past and present. This could not help but be a form of elegy for the radical presses and booksellers of the Second Wave, such as London’s Sisterwrite Bookshop, which closed in 1993. There was also an acknowledgement of feminist voices which are now visible online, such as The Bookseller blog, On Noticing, as well as radical outlets such as Gay’s the Word which survive in the face of Amazon’s domination of the market.

The subsequent roundtable featured academics just beginning their careers as well as established figures; Emily Blewitt (Cardiff University), Poonam Gunaseelan (The School of Oriental and African Studies), Professor Lucie Armitt (University of Lincoln), Sneja Gunew (University of British Columbia) and Professor Duncker were invited by Susan Watkins to give their view of current issues and trends in the field before opening the debate up to the floor. Exciting work in Young Adult fiction was noted, as was the removal of ‘Women’ from many curricula in favour of the more anodyne ‘Gender’. The lack of funding for projects on women’s writing was raised, as was the disappearance of courses in feminist theory.

In her closing keynote, ‘Unspeakable Seas: Flooding, Climate Change and Kate Mosse’s The Taxidermist’s Daughter(2014)’, Professor Armitt addressed sustainability and space, arguing that climate change and the encroachment of the sea upon the British coastline has become an area ripe for twenty-first-century literary Gothic exploration. This was a lively and enlivening gathering, bringing together generations of feminist academics. While some of the discussion looked back to a Second Wave that is now the subject of major research projects at the British Library, there was also a sense of hope for a future populated by a new generation of scholars who are navigating the complex waters of this profession in the 21^st century with evident skill.

Thanks to colleagues at the Centre for Learning and Teaching and Centre 21 at the University of Brighton who helped to organize the event.

You can find out more about the CWWA here: http://www.the-cwwa.org/

Read an account of how the association was set up here: http://www.the-cwwa.org/about/mary-eagleton-on-the-first-five-years-2005-10/

About Dr Rosie White:
Rosie White is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Theory and Popular Culture at Northumbria University, UK.Her research interests include the novels of Michele Roberts, violent women in popular fiction, film and television, and representations of women spies in popular culture.Her book, Violent Femmes: Women as Spies in Popular Culture was published by Routledge in 2008 and she is currently developing a monograph on women and television comedy for IB Tauris.For more details see: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/w/rosie-white/

Call for Papers

One-day symposium, 4 March 2016

The Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies University of Amsterdam

Ever since the turn of the twenty-first century, literary and cultural returns to earlier periods have become increasingly frequent and visible. Novels on past eras dominate the shortlists of literary prizes and the number of historical films and TV series has exploded. The popularity of Hilary Mantel’s books about Henry VIII’s court, the success of TV series like Sherlock and The Americans and of graphic novel series like Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are cases in point. Many of these works, however, seem to relate to the past in ways that are different from earlier historical novels and films. According to Elodie Rousselot, editor of the recent collection Exoticizing the Past in Neo-Historical Fiction (2014), literary contributions to this trend belong to a new subgenre of contemporary historical fiction, the ‘neo-historical novel’. Even though it is set in the past, ‘neo-historical’ fiction aims to discuss and mediate the concerns and occupations of our current age. In establishing overt connections to the present day, these works display an awareness of their own constructedness and open ways for a critical reflection on exoticizing approaches to the past. For this one-day symposium, we invite contributions that take up the challenge to think about the continuities and specificities of contemporary (neo)historical fiction and explore it as a literary and cultural phenomenon.

Keynote speakers:
Dr Elodie Rousselot (University of Portsmouth)
Prof Dr Elisabeth Wesseling (Maastricht University)

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:
• the neo-historical imagination as a literary movement and/or broader cultural phenomenon (literature, film, TV, art, adaptations, etc.)
• comparisons between (re)constructions of different historical periods (neoVictorian, neo-Gothic, neo-Tudor, neo-medieval, neo-Golden Age, neoWWI/WWII, alternate history, etc.)
• theoretical and conceptual approaches to neo-historical fiction (postmodernism and post-postmodernism, mashup, cultural memory, affect, postcolonialism, posthumanism, utopia/dystopia, etc.)
• connections within and across national and linguistic borders and communities; world literature and cosmopolitan memory

Please submit abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers in English, together with a short biography, to Daný van Dam at vandamhd@cardiff.ac.uk by 18 December 2015.