Academic and cultural life is still persisting, thankfully. The Gothic creative spirit is resisting Gothic times! So, some announcements here on events, conferences, and edited collections.
1. CFP for an edited collection, Dark Tales: Re-evaluating the Short Fiction of Shirley Jackson. Deadline: 6 November 2020.
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a surge in interest in the strange and disturbing worlds created by Shirley Jackson. [. . .] What, then, has happened to invite new interest in Jackson’s work? Alice Vincent has referred to our current ‘strange and fractured’ times as possessing a certain ‘Shirley Jackson energy’. There is also a growing body of academic criticism of Jackson’s work.
2. CFP Theorizing Zombiism 2 Conference: Undead Again, University of Gothenburg, 29 July 2021 – 31 July 2021. Deadline 10 February 2021.
The objective of “Theorizing Zombiism 2: Undead again” is to promote interdisciplinary scholarship on one of the most prevalent, yet critically understudied cultural metaphors in contemporary popular culture, namely zombies and zombiism.
3. CFP 13th Annual Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference: ‘Victorian Inclusion and Exclusion’, Online, with MS Teams, Hosted by the University of Greenwich, London, 14-16th July 2021. Deadline: 28 Febrary 2021.
The Victorian Popular Fiction Association is dedicated to fostering interest in understudied popular writers, literary genres and other cultural forms, and to facilitating the production of publishable research and academic collaborations amongst scholars of the popular.
We invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation on the topic of ‘Victorian Inclusion and Exclusion’ and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture that addresses literal or metaphorical representations of the theme. Inter- and multidisciplinary approaches are welcome, as are papers that address poetry, drama, global literature, non-fiction, visual arts, journalism, historical and social contexts. Papers addressing works from the ‘long Victorian period’ (i.e. before 1837 and after 1901) and on neo-Victorian texts/media are also welcome.
4. Event: ‘Truly It Felt Like Year One’: A Tour of Angela Carter’s 1960s Bristol, Angela Carter Society with Being Human Festival, on line, 14 November 14, 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm.
Angela Carter, one of the twentieth-century’s most acclaimed novelists, came of age as a writer in 1960s Clifton, where she experienced life in post-war Bristol, looking at a horizon bombed-out and derelict, but also booming with reconstruction schemes. On this tour through Clifton and Hotwells, we will revisit the places and counterculture that inspired her writing, in a society undergoing transformation and renewal so profound, that she declared: “Truly, it felt like Year One.”
