International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

For those of you working on Victorian medievalisms, you might be interested in the following panel I’m organizing with Lindsay Reid of NUI Galway, for the ESSE conference next year. It would be great to have a diversity of periods represented, and there is plenty of Victorian material that would be relevant! Feel free to contact me off-list (yuri.cowan@ntnu.no) for more information.

A seminar dedicated to “Anachronism and the Medieval” is planned for the next European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) Conference, to be held from 22-26 August 2016 in Galway, Ireland. The organizers look forward to receiving proposals for papers to be presented in this seminar.

This seminar focuses on anachronism, broadly defined, and its relation to the medieval period. Often understood negatively as a computational fault or disruptive error, anachronism is closely related to archaism, presentism, and para-/pro-chronism, as well as to the notion of the preposterous (in its literal Latin sense of “before-behind”). Contributors to this seminar might reflect on broad issues of temporality or particular instances of anachronism—intentional or unintentional—in relation to medieval literary exemplars, but equally welcomed are contributions that explore anachronicity in conjunction with later (Renaissance to contemporary) engagements with the medieval past and its textual traditions.

According to the ESSE conference website (found at http://www.esse2016.org/): “The seminar format is intended to encourage lively participation on the part of both speakers and members of the audience. For this reason, papers will be orally presented in no longer than 15 minutes rather than read. Reduced versions of the papers will be circulated beforehand among participants.”

Please send proposals of 300 words to both Yuri Cowan (yuri.cowan@ntnu.no) and Lindsay Reid (lindsay.reid@nuigalway.ie) no later than 28 February 2016. Earlier submissions would be appreciated.

Call For Papers: One-Day Conference: Defining and defying the concepts of deviance and degeneration in the British Isles and North America in the 19th century

This one-day conference aims at exploring the definition(s) and contours of deviance and degeneration as it was conceived in the British Isles and North America in the 19th century. PhD students, postgraduate students and junior scholars whose research pertains to the study of deviant groups, whether self-defined or not, are particularly welcome to participate. Speakers will be invited to focus on the processes of definition of the standards of normality – whether religious, social, political, legal, medical or sexual – as well as what those processes entailed for those who were labelled ‘deviants’. The role of scientists, doctors but also political authorities is of considerable interest in this respect, as are the ways in which normative standards were circumvented and challenged.

Although the concepts of abnormality, vice and anomaly, defined as individual violations of the norm, date back to Antiquity, “deviance” and “degeneration” as crucial societal issues were arguably notions born in the early 19th century, when, for the first time, they were conceived as “social pathologies”. They conjure up images of Victorian lunatic asylums, American temperance societies, Irish Magdalene laundries for fallen women, and other institutions or organisations designed to curb and/or reform purportedly deviant tendencies; thereby redressing and redeeming the fallen women and feeble-minded men who yielded to temptation. Cultural, social, medical and penal spheres were tightly intertwined. Sexual deviants could be deemed criminal and imprisoned; convicts could be labelled as insane; while addicts, inebriates, the ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘fallen women’ ran the risk of being hospitalised, incarcerated, or even sterilised. Deviation from the norm prompted fears of degeneration in the context of eugenics, and simply being different could lead to forced ostracism, imprisonment or experimentation. Curing, and failing that, curbing the ‘degenerate’ population became a matter of national concern. Both the British Isles and North America faced this normative wave, which penetrated both popular and scientific discourse. However, despite these common elements, there was considerable variation in the way the issues were debated and the measures implemented, both between the two continents, and within them, revealing contrasting priorities and mentalities.

Topics may include but are not limited to (in no particular order of importance):

·      The border between deviance, immorality, decadence and sin: religious interpretations of deviance and the cult of respectability; 

·      Labelling deviants: who sets the norm? The part played by scientists, political authorities, religious groups, social movements, etc.; 

·      Deviance and disease: psychiatric and medical responses to world alcoholism & addiction, feeble-mindedness & madness; 

·      How were deviants considered to undermine the nation and/or contaminate society? And if so, how could this contagion be prevented?;

·      The scientific approach: physical or mental manifestations of deviance, phrenology, degeneration theory, eugenics, etc.;

·      Deviance and the legal system: were sentencing magistrates, judges and juries influenced by medical definitions of deviance? Did they have their own definitions?;

·      Deviance, gender and crime: prostitution, the Contagious Diseases Acts, refuges for the ‘fallen women’;

·      Sexual deviance: the borderline between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ sexual practices;

·      Political deviance; 

·      Embracing deviance: nonconformists claiming their “difference”;

·      Saving the deviants? Philanthropy and deviance;

·      Institutions of deviance and the links between them: hospitals, asylums, prisons, refuges, reformatories, borstals, etc. 

Prof. Neil Davie (Université Lyon 2) will deliver the keynote speech. 

He is the author of Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860-1918 (Bardwell Press, 2005).  

Submission guidelines

Please send 400-word proposals to alice.bonzom@univ-lyon2.fr and / or irene.delcourt@ens-lyon.fr by November 10th, 2015. The abstract should include a title, name and affiliation of the speaker, and a contact email address. Feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Papers will be a maximum of twenty minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome.

This conference will be hosted on January 14th 2016 in the Université Lyon 2/ENS campus in Lyons, France.

Organising committee:  Alice Bonzom – Irène Delcourt – Mélanie Cournil

Call for papers Vol.3., nº2, Brumal. Revista de Investigación sobre lo Fantástico/ Brumal. Research Journal on the Fantastic (http://revistes.uab.cat/brumal/pages/view/callforpaper): Monographic Section: “Monographic Issue: “The Fantastic in the New Golden Age of Television (1999-2015)” (Alfonso Cuadrado and Rubén Sánchez Trigos, Coords.)

Miscellaneous Section: This Miscellaneous section is open to any type of article on any of the diverse artistic manifestations of the fantastic (narrative, theater, film, comics, painting, photography, video games), whether theoretical, critical, historical or comparative in nature, concerning the fantastic in any language or from any country, from the nineteenth century to the present. Scholars who wish to contribute to either of these two sections should send us their articles by 15 January 2016, registering as authors on our web page. The Guidelines for Submissions may be found on the Submissions section of the web page (http://revistes.uab.cat/brumal .

Dear Colleagues,

Please consider submitting a proposal to NeMLA 2016, held in Hartford, Connecticut, from 3/17-3/20, 2016. (The deadline for submissions is September 30th.) The call for papers is below.

Thanks,

Rebekah Greene and Anna Brecke

*

An ever increasing interest in Victorian popular fiction prompts us to ask why have we in Victorian Studies become so invested in the popular in recent years? How have certain theoretical fields such as gender studies, material culture/thing theory, post-colonial theory, etc. contributed to this rapid increase in interest? What does the popular do for us as scholars that the “canon” does not, or can we still think in terms of canonical and non-canonical texts in Victorian Studies? Is it still possible to think of a standard Victorian canon in a post-Google age when so many previously unavailable texts are now available at the tips of our fingers? How is the inclusion of the popular in the classroom changing Victorian Studies for our students? This roundtable welcomes submissions that address these questions and many more from scholars whose work examines the spectrum of Victorian popular fiction. 

This roundtable welcomes submissions that address these questions and many more from scholars whose work examines the spectrum of Victorian popular fiction. Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page CV to co-chairs Anna Brecke and Rebekah Greene. Submit abstracts online at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15788

Topics might include:

• Sensation fiction (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood, Rhoda Broughton, Charles Reade)
• Adventure fiction (Frederick Marryat, M. P. Shiel, R. M. Ballantyne, Bessie Marchant)
• Speculative fiction (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)
• Spiritualism, Mesmerism, or the Occult (Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marryat, Helena P. Blavatsky, Andrew Lang, Richard Marsh, Marie Corelli)
• Drama and melodrama (George Meredith, Fanny Kemble, Caroline Norton, George Du Maurier, Fanny Stevenson, Lloyd Osborne, Dion Boucicault, Gilbert and Sullivan)
• Satire and parody
• Mystery and Detective fiction (E. W. Hornung, Charles Warren Adams, George W.M. Reynolds)
• New Woman fiction (Amy Levy, Ouida, George Gissing, Mona Caird, Charlotte Mew, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner)
• Sentimental or religious texts (Catherine Gore, members of the Booth Family, George MacDonald, Charlotte Yonge)

CALL FOR PAPERS

PULP STUDIES AREA
Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) National Conference
March 22–25, 201^
Seattle, WA

Deadline for Abstracts is November 1, 2015

Pulp magazines were a series of mostly English-language, predominantly American, magazines printed on rough pulpwood paper. They were often illustrated with highly stylized, full-page cover art and numerous line art illustrations of the fictional content. They were sold for modest sums, and were targeted at (sometimes specialized) readerships of popular literature, such as western and adventure, detective, fantastic (including the evolving genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror), romance, and sports fiction. The first pulp Argosy, began life as the children’s magazine The Golden Argosy, dated Dec 2, 1882 and the last of the “original” pulps was Ranch Romances and Adventures, Nov. 1971.

The Pulp Studies area exists to support the academic study of pulp writers, editors, readers, and culture. It seeks to invigorate research by bringing together scholars from diverse areas including romance, western, science fiction, fantasy, horror, adventure, detective, and more. Finally, the Pulp Studies area seeks to promote the preservation of the pulps through communication with libraries, museums, and collectors. With this in mind, we are calling for papers and panels that discuss the pulps and their legacy.

Possible authors and topics:

• Magazines: Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, Fight Stories, All-Story, Argosy, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spicy Detective, Ranch Romances and Adventures, Oriental Stories/Magic Carpet Magazine, Love Story, Flying Aces, Black Mask, and Unknown, to name a few.
  • Editors and Owners: Street and Smith (Argosy), Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales), Hugo Gernsback (Amazing Stories), Mencken and Nathan (Black Mask), John Campbell (Astounding).
  • Influential Writers: H.P. Lovecraft, A. E. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, and Henry Kuttner. Proposals about contemporary writers in the pulp tradition, such as Joe Lansdale and Michael Chabon are also encouraged. New Weird writers and others, such as China Mieville, whose work is influenced by the pulps, are also of interest.
  • Influences on Pulp Writers: H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, and Jack London were all influences, along with literary and philosophical figures such as Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herbert Spencer.
  • Popular Characters: Conan of Cimmeria; Doc Savage; Solomon Kane; Buck Rogers; Northwest Smith; The Domino Lady; Jiril of Joiry; Zorro; Kull of Atlantis; El Borak; The Shadow; The Spider; Bran Mak Morn; Nick Carter; The Avenger; and Captain Future, among others. Also character types: the femme fatale, the he-man, the trickster, racism and villainy, etc.
  • Artists: Popular artists including Margaret Brundage (Weird Tales), Frank R. Paul (Amazing Stories), Virgil Finlay (Weird Tales), and Edd Cartier (The Shadow, Astounding).
  • Periods: The dime novels; Argosy and the ancestral pulps; Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and the heyday of the pulps; the decline of the pulps in the 50s and 60s; pulps in the age of the Internet.
  • Theme and Styles: Masculinity, femininity, and sexuality in the pulps; the savage as hero, the woman as hero, the trickster as hero, colonialism in the pulps, racism and “yellow peril,” Modernism in the pulps, etc.
  • Film and Television: Possible topics could include film interpretations such as Conan the Barbarian, pulp-inspired television such as Amazing Stories, and new work based in the “pulp aesthetic” such as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
• Comics: Comic book incarnations of pulp magazines and series; “new weird” reinventions of the pulps such as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Watchmen; comic adaptations of old pulp series such as The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage and others.
• Cyberculture: Cyberpulps such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and pulp-influenced games such as the Age of Conan MMORPG or the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

These are but suggestions for potential panels and presentations. Proposals on other topics are welcome. For general information on the Pulp Studies area, please visit our website: http://pulpstudies.weebly.com/

How to Submit Proposals: Proposals must be submitted through the official PCA conference website: http://ncp.pcaaca.org/

Please send all inquiries to:

Justin Everett, PhD
Director of Writing Programs
University of the Sciences in Philadelphia
600 S. 43rd St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104
j.everet@usp.edu

Jeffrey H. Shanks, RPA
Southeast Archeological Center
2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive
Johnson Building, Suite 120
Tallahassee, FL 32310
jeffrey_shanks@nps.gov

Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar. Friday 12th June 2015, Birmingham City University.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Christian Frost (BCU), Victorian Gothic Architecture (exact title tbc)

The next Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar, hosted by Birmingham City University, will explore the theme of Victorian Gothic. We seek papers that address this theme from various disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives, and explore the impact of Gothic in any field. Topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:

·         Gothic art, architecture, literature

·         Ideas of monstrosity/ the other

·         Gothic spaces and tourism

·         Medievalism and views of the ancient past

·         Ideas of haunting

·         Victorian Gothic in popular culture

·         Gothic and (pseudo-)science

·         The question of categorisation/genre

·         Neo-Victorianism and Gothic

Please send ideas for papers of 20 minutes length to Serena Trowbridge at serena.trowbridge@bcu.ac.uk by Tuesday 5 May 2015.

This is an informal event and we do not require full conference-type proposals – and please do not exceed 250 words. You do not have to live or work in the Midlands, but preference may be given to those who do. The programme will be confirmed by Friday 15th May.

Further details can be found on the MIVSS website https://mivssonline.wordpress.com/next-meeting/

Call for papers The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 10:  Social Justice (Redux), edited by Margaret McBride

One thing I admire in Ursula K. LeGuin’s writing is her willingness to publicly examine and change her way of seeing the world and her fiction (as in Tehanu, published almost 20 years after The Earthsea Trilogy or the 1976 “Is Gender Necessary?” followed by the 1989 “Redux” version of that essay). I hope The WisCon Chronicles 10 Social Justice (Redux) authors will have the same attitude, for we seem to bring up problems of social injustice so often.  Mary Anne Mohanraj, who edited The WisCon Chronicles 9,  focused on social justice issues in her introduction, as did several included essays. The fiction and WisCon 39 guest-of-honor speeches by Alaya Dawn Johnson and Kim Stanley Robinson focused on multiple aspects of social justice: environmental collapse, need for reduced population, and climate change; violence against women; racial inequality in publishing and elsewhere; gender issues, including reproductive rights; inequality of income and power; etc. Yet current newspapers or blogs about Ferguson or gay marriage or our own science fiction community show that we must continue to address such issues in fiction and elsewhere (I hope in WisCon Chronicles 10!). The “redux” aspect of the volume might include essays on how terms used in debates about social justice could be problematic.

I am particularly interested in how science fiction is addressing social justice, especially the idea that environmental programs need to include equality for women and minorities. Essays examining the fiction of any past guest of honor at WisCon or Tiptree Award winner or any science fiction that looks at environmental concerns or diversity issues would also be appropriate. 2016 will be the 40th year for WisCon, so personal memories from guests of honor, committee members, and also people new or long-time to WisCon will be considered, even if not linked directly to social justice issues.

Please submit essays, personal remembrances, poetry, short fiction for consideration by September 30, 2015 to mcbride@uoregon.edu.

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film:  Special Issue on Early Film

Early film provides a wealth of information about Victorian performance practices, and Victorian theatre greatly influenced the development of film.  Both points have been well documented by David Mayer, among others, as exciting new work continues to demonstrate.  But there is much more to be learned and said about the reciprocal relationship between early cinema and nineteenth-century performance. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film seeks submissions for a special issue on early film and its antecedents, including optical and narrative forms such as magic lantern shows, panoramas, silent films, and other visual or theatrical illusions.  All approaches to this capacious topic are welcomed (theoretical, technical, archival, historical, or hermeneutic), including considerations of the connections between early film and other arts (theatre, music, visual art, literature) as well as its links to print culture, history, philosophy and politics. 

Essays should be approximately 6,000 to 8,000 words, formatted according to the submission guidelines available on our website:  http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showinfo=ip026.  Submit online by 30 November, 2015 via the Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film ScholarOne website:  http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nctf.  Essays not selected for this special issue will be considered for future issues of NCTF.  Questions may be addressed to one of the NCTF’s four Editors:  Jim Davis, University of Warwick; Janice Norwood, University of Hertfordshire; Patricia Smyth, University of Warwick; Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Louisiana State University.

For nearly half a century, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film has stood at the forefront of research in nineteenth-century performance of all kinds, construing theatre and film comprehensively. The journal welcomes discussion on any topic within the wide variety of theatrical arts that emerged from the Age of Revolution to the advent of sound motion pictures, as well as all ‘pre-cinema’ optical and narrative forms, ‘silent’ motion pictures and illusions. Considering narrative or variety entertainments from all countries and regions, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film embraces not only drama and film but also dance, opera, music hall, circus, fairground entertainment, puppetry and other forms which implicate live audiences (actual, potential or imaginary). The journal regularly publishes essays, book reviews and review essays. Documents in photographic or critical facsimile and in annotated critical editions are also published, providing valuable primary material for the working scholar.

Call for Proposals: Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) 2016

11/2/15; 3/10-13/15

Theme: Natural and Unnatural Histories

Keynote Speakers: Kate Flint (University of Southern California) and Elaine Freedgood (NYU)

March 10-13, 2016, Renaissance Asheville Hotel, Asheville, NC

incs2016.appstate.edu

Historicism achieved its full flowering in the nineteenth century, when the historical methods of inquiry envisioned by figures such as Vico, Herder, and von Ranke were taken up and transformed in philosophy, art criticism, hermeneutics, philology, the human sciences, and, of course, history itself. By 1831, John Stuart Mill was already declaring historicism the dominant idea of the age. Taking human activity as their central subject, some nineteenth-century historicisms extended Hegel’s distinction between historical processes governed by thought and non-historical processes governed by nature. At the same time, scientists like Lyell and Darwin radically challenged nineteenth-century understandings of history by arguing that nature itself is historical. Powered by fossil fuels, industrialization began to prove this point by profoundly altering global ecologies at a previously unimaginable scale. We seek papers that investigate nineteenth-century histories and natures. How do natures, environments, or ecologies interact with histories at different scales—the local, the national, the transnational, or the planetary? What role does the nineteenth century play in the recent idea of an Anthropocene era? How might nineteenth-century natural histories help us to rethink historicism in the present? What are the risks and promises of presentist approaches to the nineteenth century? Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Narrating history, narrating nature

Ideas of the natural, the unnatural, and/or the supernatural

Nineteenth-century ecologies broadly construed: domestic ecologies, aesthetic ecologies, imperial and postcolonial ecologies, synthetic or technological ecologies

Evolution and extinction

Posthuman histories

History, nature, and/or science in art

Family histories, social histories

Climate change, geosystems, geohistories

Bioregionalisms, transregionalisms, literature and “sustainability”

Queer ecologies/histories

Disability histories/Cripping nature

Life and non-life

Flora, fauna, and fossils

Ecopoetics, Environmental justice

Reporting events/recording nature

Commemorative musical compositions/performances

Biopolitics, biopoetics

Discourses of pollution, toxicity, garbage, waste

Resource imperialism

Political ecologies and economies

Cross-cultural, indigenous, mestizo, subaltern nature writing

Creaturely life, life forms, nonhumans, monstrosity

Landscape aesthetics

Global South studies

Utopian/dystopian, steampunk, or neo-Victorian natures and/or histories

Nineteenth-century histories of philosophy, religion and/or theology

History of science, history of medicine, public health discourses

Natural disasters, cataclysmic events

Sexological, criminological, and/or psychiatric narratives

Resources, capital, economies

Biography and autobiography, case studies, archives

History as genre: history painting, Bildungsroman, epic, historical novel, historical drama, etc.

Deadline: November 2, 2015. Upload proposals and a one-page CV via incs2016.appstate.edu.  For individual papers, send 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual proposals plus a 250-word panel description. Proposals that are interdisciplinary in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are especially welcome. Questions? Contact Jill Ehnenn at incs@appstate.edu

2016 Northeast MLA convention in Hartford, CT (3/17-3/20)

Abstracts are due no later than September 30, 2015, and should be submitted via the NeMLA conference website: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15692 . A description of the session follows below. 

“Medieval European literature played a defining role in the development of modern fantasy fiction, and genre fantasy has already received a great deal of critical attention in the academic study of medievalism. By comparison, the complex relationship of genre science fiction to the Middle Ages has been sorely understudied, and this session will include papers that consider either or both of the topics in its title, that is, on the one hand, the appearance or influence of “the medieval,” broadly conceived, in modern science fiction. Such papers might examine how certain works of SF (re)construct the medieval: fruitful examples would include a text like Frank Herbert’s Dune, where neo-feudalism prevails; time travel novels in which contemporary characters return to an imagined Middle Ages; SF narratives written by medievalists (such as C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy); or space operas that follow romance or folkloric formulae. Alternatively, papers in search of “science fiction in the Middle Ages” might apply to medieval texts concepts central to the academic study of science fiction — Darko Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement,” Fredric Jameson’s theory of utopia, and so on — or examine any set of medieval discourses, impulses, or individual works that might be productively understood as some kind of equivalent to contemporary SF. Examples here might include dream visions in which the narrator traverses the celestial spheres, tales of impossible gadgets, or narratives of alchemical success or folly. Finally, papers that argue from a perspective denying the compatibility of the medieval worldview and the rationalist-empiricist discourse of science fiction would also be welcome. This session will advance our understanding of the place of (proto-)science in medieval fictions, but also attempt to account for the frequent reappearance of the medieval in the distinctly modern science fiction genre, which often takes pride in its modernity and defines itself against pre-Enlightenment epistemologies.”