Only a week left before the deadline for proposals for this conference on Stephen King, Rereading Stephen King: Navigating the Intertextual Labyrinth, Kingston University, 11 November 2017.
In Stephen King’s Gothic (2011) John Sears asserts that rereading King represents ‘an exercise in the extension of repetition, in the act of rereading an oeuvre already deeply structured … by its own engagement in the Gothic habit of rereading … To reread King would be to enter … and perhaps to become lost within, a labyrinth of intra- and intertextual relations, an immense and complex textual space’ (2). Sears’s framing of King’s writing is a critical response to David Punter’s question about the susceptibility of King’s writing to rereading (1996). To celebrate the publication of the inaugural issue of Pennywise Dreadful: The Journal of Stephen King Studies, this one-day symposium will extend critical dialogues concerning the intertextuality that permeates King’s fiction, and the variant ways in which King’s work is both haunted by his literary and cultural heritage, and haunts contemporary configurations of Gothic and horror.
