CFP: Sights and Frights: Victorian Visual Culture, Horror and the Supernatural (12/16/2013; 6/19/2014)

"Sights and Frights: Victorian Visual Culture, Horror and the Supernatural"
University of Sussex

June 19 2014
Deadline: December 16, 2013

“Sights and Frights” is a one day interdisciplinary conference, aimed at both academics and post-graduate students, whose aim is to explore and interrogate cultural cross-currents between nineteenth-century visual culture, science and social practice, particularly where these concern attitudes to, and instances of, the supernatural and horrific.

The image of Victorian Britain in popular culture is synonymous with discipline, propriety and sentimentality, yet there was also a dark, subversive undercurrent to these mainstream ideals, manifest in such cultural phenomena as Gothic and ghost literature, freak shows, drugs cults and quasi-religious movements such as spiritualism and theosophy.

At the same time, the Victorians were engaged, more than ever before, in attempting to make the invisible world visible to the eye. Improvements in the manufacture of lenses led to the increased circulation of microscopes and telescopes, which, along with the invention of photography, led to a growth in empirical discovery and scientific innovation. The new visual technology of the panorama, diorama and magic lantern also proved to be highly popular forms of entertainment, enabling large numbers of Victorians to witness images, both real and imaginary, never seen before. In particular, the public demonstrated a voracious appetite for visual entertainment relating to ghouls, ghosts and Gothic horrors. Whilst the new ‘magic’ of optical technology appeared to promote scientific claims, it also served to stimulate a belief in the existence of invisible and occult forces.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers from anybody working in this field. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Spiritualism and spirit photography
• Images of demonology and witchcraft
• Parapsychology, the paranormal and the occult (i.e. mesmerism, hypnotism, alchemy, astronomy)
• Death and mourning practices, memento mori, and death masks
• The iconography of ghosts, hauntings and ghost stories
• The Gothic in literature, art, photography, visual and wider culture
• Imaging of supernatural beings such as fairies, vampires etc
• Visual entertainment (magic lanterns, phantasmagoria, panorama/diorama) focusing on supernatural subjects
• The visual presentation of horrific aspects of science and medicine
• Images (photographs, illustrations, art) of opium dens and the drugs underworld
• Violent crime, crime scene photography and the figure of the serial killer

We are fortunate to have two keynote speakers for this event: Dr. Tatiana Kontou of Oxford Brookes University and Professor William Hughes of Bath Spa University.

Please submit proposals of 300 words, along with a short biographical note, by Monday December 16, 2013 to sightsandfrights@gmail.com or use the form on our website sightsandfrights.com. If you have any questions about the Conference, or about a potential proposal, please do not hesitate to contact us by email at the above address.

CFP: Ann Radcliffe at 250 "Gothic and Romantic Imaginations" (11/30/2013; 6/27-29/2014)

Ann Radcliffe at 250: Gothic and Romantic Imaginations

University of Sheffield

June 27-29, 2014

Keynote Speakers: 

Emma Clery (University of Southampton)
Fred Botting (Kingston University)
Jane Stabler (University of St Andrews)

An international conference will be held at the University of Sheffield June 27-29, 2014 to celebrate the 250th birthday of Ann Radcliffe and the launch of a collection of essays upon her work (eds. Townshend and Wright, CUP 2014). Ann Radcliffe at 250: Gothic and Romantic Imaginations, will celebrate the fiction and poetry of the celebrated 'great enchantress'. Besides formal papers and panels, we will also hold roundtables upon the topics of Teaching Ann Radcliffe and Screening Ann Radcliffe.

Paper and panel proposals are welcomed on but not exclusive to the following topics:

• Radcliffe’s novels
• future directions for Radcliffe studies
• Radcliffe’s legacies (a special panel to be convened by the Romantic Heirs early careers network)
• Radcliffe in Europe
• Radcliffe and poetry
• Dramatic adaptations of Ann Radcliffe
• Radcliffe and her contemporaries
• Radcliffe and print culture
• Radcliffe and politics
• Radcliffe and travel
• Radcliffe and visual culture

The roundtable sessions will discuss:

• Teaching Ann Radcliffe
• Screening Ann Radcliffe

In addition to launching this essay collection, there will be further opportunity for participating delegates to publish their work: the organizers have secured no fewer than three special journal issues to celebrate the 250th anniversary: Romanticism (eds. Callaghan, Firth and Merrills); Women’s Writing (eds. Smith and Bennett) and Gothic Studies (eds. Mathison and Smith).

We now invite proposals for papers and panels, with the deadline of November 30, 2013. Please send all abstracts to radcliffeat250@sheffield.ac.uk. Please visit our conference website for details of where to submit your proposals, and further information about the conference itself.

http://radcliffeat250.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/ann-radcliffe-at-250-gothic-and-romantic-imaginations/ 

Organising committee: Angela Wright (Sheffield), Dale Townshend (Stirling); Madeleine Callaghan (Sheffield); Andy Smith (Sheffield); Liam Firth (Sheffield); Fern Merrills (Sheffield); Hamish Mathison (Sheffield); Joe Bray (Sheffield); Mark Bennett (Sheffield); Kate Gadsby-Mace (Sheffield); Lauren Nixon (Sheffield); Kathleen Hudson (Sheffield)

CFP: Gothic Studies Special Issue "The Gothic and Death" (12/1/2013; 3/31/2014)

Advanced by way of various conventions and symbols, memento mori — “Remember that you will die” — is Gothic literature’s greatest cautionary warning.  Although Peter Walmsley has suggested that this reminder to live with death in view is “the peculiar property of the British psyche,” it has required much repeating given what Edward Young identifies in his famous Night Thoughts (1742) as a universal tendency towards death denial:  “All men think all men mortal but themselves.”  Despite Geoffrey Gorer’s claim that death became the new pornography in the 20th century, uses of the Gothic mode continue to register an ongoing fascination with the Death Question that often vacillates, in various imaginative ways, between repression and acknowledgement.

Proposals for individual or collaborative papers are invited on the idea of the Gothic and death, decay, and the afterlife.  The editor is particularly interested in proposals that will theorize the Gothic’s engagement with this fixation trans-historically, trans-nationally, and trans-culturally.  Proposals from diverse theoretical perspectives ranging across different genres and mediums (poetry, fiction, film, graphic novels, etc.) are especially welcome.  Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

• the afterlife and undead afterlives — zombies, angels, vampires, ghosts, etc.
• the corpse — abject, female, anatomized, and otherwise
• danse macabre
• acts/rites of mourning & memorializing — personal and national
• death of the author/reader
• dead women/deadly women
• the sanitization/medicalization of death
• decay and ruin
• live burial; gothic resurrections
• femme fatale/homme fatal
• spiritualism, séances, voodoo, and the Occult
• sex and death
• the aesthetics of death
• death and the visual arts/visual technologies
• Victorian necroculture
• manner of death:  suicide (self murder); homicide; the war dead; mass murder; sudden death; capital punishment (torture, executions, serial killings)
• elegies and epitaphs
• symbolic/figurative death
• death and the double
• death and/by technology
• graveyards and graveyard poetry
• the death drive
• ars moriendi — the “Art of dying,” death/consolation manuals
• the Good death/bad death
• dead children
• wills, funerals, wakes

Please send electronic copies of proposals of approximately 500 words and a 100-word bio by December 1, 2013, to Dr. Carol Margaret Davison, Professor and Head, Department of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing, University of Windsor (cdavison@uwindsor.ca).  Notices of acceptance will follow shortly thereafter with completed essays of approximately 6000 words (including endnotes) due by March 31, 2014.

The official journal of the International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.

For more information on Gothic Studies, including submission guidelines and subscription recommendations, please see the journals website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/journals/gs

To view Gothic Studies online, see here:http://manchester.metapress.com/content/1362-7937  

To sign up to alerts for Gothic Studies, see here: https://manchester.metapress.com/content/122707/toc-alert  

CFP: Gothic Studies "Gothic and Medical Humanities" (10/1/2013)

Proposals are invited for a special issue of Gothic Studies exploring intersections between the Gothic and medical humanities.

Gothic studies has long grappled with suffering bodies, and the fragility of human flesh in the grip of medical and legal discourse continues to be manifest in chilling literature and film. The direction of influence goes both ways: Gothic literary elements have arguably influenced medical writing, such as the nineteenth-century clinical case study. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems apt to freshly examine intersections between the two fields.

The closing years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of medical humanities, an interdisciplinary blend of humanities and social science approaches under the dual goals of using arts to enhance medical education and interrogating medical practice and discourse. Analysis of period medical discourse, legal categories and medical technologies can enrich literary criticism in richly contextualising fictional works within medical practices. Such criticism can be seen as extending the drive towards historicised and localised criticism that has characterised much in Gothic studies in recent decades.

Our field offers textual strategies for analysing the processes by which medical discourse, medical processes and globalised biotechnological networks can, at times, do violence to human bodies and minds – both of patient and practitioner. Cultural studies of medicine analyse and unmask this violence. This special issue will explore Gothic representations of the way medical practice controls, classifies and torments the body in the service of healing.

Essays could address any of the following in any period, eighteenth-century to the present:

• Medical discourse as itself Gothic (e.g., metaphors in medical writing; links between case histories and the Gothic tradition), and/or reflections on how specific medical discourses have shaped Gothic literary forms
• Illness narratives and the Gothic (e.g., using Arthur Frank’s ‘chaos narratives’ of helplessness in The Wounded Storyteller ).
• Literary texts about medical processes as torture/torment in specific historical and geographic contexts (including contemporary contexts)
• Doctors or nurses represented in literature as themselves Gothic ‘victims’, constrained by their medical environment
• Genetic testing; organ harvest; genetic engineering; reproductive technologies; limb prostheses; human cloning, and more.

To date the links between Gothic and psychiatric medical discourse have been the most thoroughly explored, so preference will be given to articles exploring other, non-psychiatric medical contexts in the interests of opening up new connections.

Please email 500-word abstract and curriculum vitae to Dr Sara Wasson, s.wasson@napier.ac.uk . Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2013.

The official journal of the International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.

For more information on Gothic Studies , including submission guidelines and subscription recommendations, please see the journals website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showinfo=ip022

To view Gothic Studies online, see here: http://manchester.metapress.com/content/1362-7937

CFP: Surrealism and the Gothic (12/1/2013)

Gothic Studies is seeking to publish a collection of articles examining the connections between Surrealism and the Gothic. Possible topics of discussion could include (but are not limited to):

The influence of Gothic texts on Surrealist writers and artists (e.g., Walpole and André Breton; Poe and the Comte de Lautréamont; Poe and Magritte; James Hogg and André Gide; Matthew Lewis and Antonin Artaud)

•  Surrealist elements in the work of Gothic writers and artists
• The legacy of the Surreal in Gothic films and fictions from 1924 to the present day
• The legacy of the Gothic in Surrealist art and literature
• Romanticism, the Gothic and Surrealism
• More than the sum of their parts: Surrealism and the Gothic
• The Gothic and Surrealism: subcultures or counter-cultures?
• Freud, the Gothic and Surrealism
• De Sade, Surrealism and the Gothic
• The wisdom of madness: insanity in Gothic and Surrealist texts
• Crime as social rebellion in the Gothic and Surrealism
• Women Surrealists and the Gothic
• The function of humour in the Surreal and the Gothic

Please send a 500-word abstract and curriculum vitae to: Professor Avril Horner, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, Kingston KT1 2EE. 

Email: a.horner@kingston.ac.uk. 

Deadline for proposals: 1 December 2013.

The official journal of the International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.

CFP: Gothic Studies Conference (11/1/2011; 3/16-17/2012)

First Annual Studies in Gothic Fiction Conference
March 16-17, 2012
National University, San Diego, CA

As interest in Gothic studies grows exponentially, what is considered Gothic and how we define it continues to evolve. At this conference we will explore not only the origins of the Gothic, but the evolution of the genre.

Papers which explore any aspect of the Gothic in literature, film, and other media are encouraged.

Topics which could be explored include:

• Origins of the Gothic
• Commercialization of the Gothic
• Trade Gothic
• Romanticism and the Gothic
• Victorian Gothic
• Domestic Gothic
• Continental Gothic
• Gothic in the media
• Gothic spaces
• Neo-Gothic
• The Goth culture
• Selling the Gothic
• Gothic Film

Abstracts (350 words max.) for 20 minute papers may be submitted to Colin Marlaire: cmarlaire@nu.edu until November 1st, 2011. Early submission of proposals is encouraged.


For information on the journal, Studies in Gothic Fiction, visit http://www.zittaw.com/. 

CFP: Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations (5/15/2011; 4/12-14/2012)

Bram Stoker Centenary Conference 2012: 
Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations
Derwent Building, University of Hull and Whitby, North Yorkshire
Organised by the University of Hull
12-14 April 2012


Keynote Speakers: Prof Sir Christopher Frayling, Professor Clive Bloom, Professor Luke Gibbons, and a special presentation by Professor Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker

"My revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries and time is on my side." (Dracula, 1897)

Count Dracula's declaration from Bram Stoker's iconic 1897 vampire novel is, in many ways, descriptive of the Gothic genre. Like the shape-shifting Transylvanian Count, the Gothic encompasses and has manifested itself in many forms since its emergence in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Its revenge has just begun. It has spread over centuries and time is on its side.

When Stoker wrote Dracula the genre was well over a hundred years old but the novel marks a key moment in the evolution of the Gothic - the text harks back to early Gothic's preoccupation with the supernatural, decayed aristocracy and incarceration in gloomy castles in foreign locales. Dracula speaks to its own time but also transforms the genre - a revitalization that continues to sustain the Gothic today.

On the eve of the centenary of Stoker's death, which occurred in April 1912, the University of Hull's Department of English and School of Arts and New Media, in association with the Centre for Victorian Studies, will host a three-day international conference, Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations. The conference will take place at the Hull Campus of the University and in Whitby.

In Dracula Mina describes Whitby as a "lovely place" but it soon becomes a site of horror, when Dracula lands from the Demeter in the form of a dog to make his first appearance on English soil. At Whitby Abbey, Lucy becomes the Count's first English vampire bride.

The conference is interested in the iconic significance of Stoker's vampire novel and seeks to reappraise Stoker's work within its fin-de-siècle cultural climate.  It is also interested in exploring the broader context of the changing nature of Gothic productions from the late eighteenth century to the present. Using Dracula as a key point in the evolution of the genre, it seeks to explore the novel's Gothic predecessors and influences, and the manner in which Stoker's work renewed the Gothic for future generations.

How do the Gothic's early themes of despotic rulers and fathers, grim prophecies, supernatural embodiments, incarceration, labyrinthine passages and corridors, threatened females, and sexual deviancy transform in subsequent cultural outputs from novels, theatre, films, television and computer games? How has the Gothic in its modern manifestations and variations sustained itself into a fourth century?

"At once escapist and conformist," Clive Bloom argues, "the Gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction: erotic, violent, perverse, bizarre and obsessionally connected with contemporary fears." How does the new Gothic of the twenty-first century engage in fantasy and fear?

The organising committee welcomes abstracts of 250-300 words for a 20 minute paper. Please send your abstract by email to Dr Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK (c.wynne@hull.ac.uk) by 15 May 2011.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to, the following areas:

• Stoker's work in its social, political and cultural context
• The development of the Gothic from Otranto to the twenty-first century
• Stoker's influence on the genre
• Irish and British Gothic
• Gothic theatre and drama
• Gothic visualities
• Gothic technologies
• Gothic bodies
• Gothic monstrosities
• Gothic sexualities
• Gothic psychologies
• Gothic narratives
• Gothic Intertextualities
• Gothic places and spaces
• Hauntings and spectrality
• Criminality and the Gothic
• Science and the Gothic
• Reincarnations of Dracula
• Vampirism and the 'Young Vampires' of the twenty-first century
• Anti-Gothic, Gothic Parody, Comic Gothic

Conference website: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/scarborough/conferences/bram-stoker.aspx