CFP: One-Day Symposium on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger Narratives(10/14/2013; 12/9/2013)

Challenger Unbound

Department of English, UCL
December 9, 2013

Deadline October 14, 2013

Introduction:
Professor John Sutherland (UCL)

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley)
Professor Michael Saler (UC Davis)
Professor Jeremy Tambling (U of Manchester)

A century has passed since the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. This one-day symposium offers an ideal opportunity to take stock of the Professor Challenger narratives and to reassess what these three novels and two short stories can offer to new generations of scholars, students, and enthusiasts. Potential topics might include:

• The Twentieth-Century Quest Romance.
• Arthur Conan Doyle: Low Modernist.
• Arthur Conan Doyle’s Contribution to Science-Fiction and/or Speculative Fiction
• Modernity and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Popular Fiction.
• Science and the Popular Press, 1912-1930.
• Science as a Public Discourse, 1912-1930.
• Science as State-Craft, 1912-1930.
• Spiritual vs. Material Science.
• Grief, Trauma, Mourning and Science during and after the Great War.
• Twentieth-Century Medievalism/Primitivism.
• Spiritualism, Science and the Great War.
• The Strand Magazine in the Twentieth-Century.
• The Twentieth-Century Afterlife of “Victorian” Ideology/Thought/Literary Forms.
• Weapons of Mass Destruction, 1912-1930.
• Heroism, Chivalry and Masculinity after the Great War.
• Science, Technology and European Competition, 1912-1930.
• The Twentieth-Century Legacy of Arthur Conan Doyle in Europe.
• Machines, Weapons, Products, Commodities.
• Conan Doyle’s Non-Fiction, 1912-1930.
• The Endurance of Professor Challenger in Critical Theory (Deleuze & Guattari, Jon McKenzie etc...).
• Early Treatments of Capitalist/Communist Confrontations in Popular Fiction.

The organizer is soliciting abstracts of 200-300 words or completed articles of 6,000-8,000 words. Any inquiries should be directed to Tom Ue (ue_tom@hotmail.com <mailto:ue_tom@hotmail.com>). Abstracts should be submitted by October 14, 2013.