Monday, December 29, 2014

Madame Frankenstein Preview

Image Comics has posted the first 7 pages of the recent comic book series Madame Frankenstein online. Details at http://imagecomics.tumblr.com/post/106534692041/jazz-age-glamour-and-gothic-horror-in-madame. The series presents the resurrection of a 1920s-era woman as a monster and will be available in a collected edition come March 2015.

CFP Poe Studies Association Panels at the ALA (1/15/15; ALA Boston 5/21-24/15)

Poe Studies Association Panels at the ALA

CFP: “Rethinking Poe’s Sublime: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 175 years later”; A Poe Studies Association panel at the 26th Annual American Literature Conference in Boston, MA (May 2015)

Poe abandoned his proposed Tales of the Folio Club sometime after 1835, but still wanted to issue a collected edition of his prose fiction. Dropping the literary club motif, he combined the original tales with additional items from the Southern Literary Messenger. This new collection of 25 stories became Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). What choices informed Poe’s decisions about what to include? To what extent does the term “grotesque”—especially as it relates to Poe’s notions of the sublime—function as a defining characteristic of the two volumes’ contents? Papers are invited on specific tales as well as on Poe’s discussions of the sublime and/or the grotesque in his reviews, miscellaneous writings, and poetic treatises. Other related topics are welcome as well.

To submit a proposal, send a title and an abstract of no more than 350 words to: William Engel (wengel@sewanee.edu); in the subject line, put “PSA panel 2015.” The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2015 (panelists will be notified shortly thereafter).


CFP: “Teaching Poe and Popular Culture,” a Poe Studies Association panel at the 26th Annual American Literature Conference in Boston, MA (May 21-24, 2015)

Few American writers have enjoyed the posthumous popularity of Poe, whose works inspire adaptations in various genres such as film and graphic novel while lunchboxes and bobblehead figures commemorate the man himself. Such popularity is a boon for teachers of Poe, who can use movies, comic books, and online videos to help students make sense of a nineteenth-century writer whose stories and poems might seem, at first glance, peculiar and puzzling. Contemporary creative reinterpretations of Poe’s writings also provide insight into how we remove Poe from his antebellum milieu and refashion him to suit our tastes. Studying Poe’s nineteenth-century career, students can discern how popular trends shaped his work, for the example of Poe reveals many ways that writers respond to and shape mass culture. The Poe Studies Association solicits proposals for this pedagogical panel. Possible topics include Poe and contemporary Gothicism; The Raven and Poe biography; Poe’s influence on filmmakers such as Corman and Burton; Poe as rock-and-roll icon; popular images of Poe’s body; nineteenth-century sensation fiction and Poe; Poe and death in antebellum popular culture; Stephen Foster, Poe, and the popular lyric in the nineteenth-century. Other related topics are, of course, welcome.

To submit a proposal, send a title and an abstract of no more than 350 words to Travis Montgomery at tdmontgomery2@fhsu.edu. The subject line should read “PSA panel 2015.” The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2015.


CFP Evil Kids in Children’s Literature (1/15/15; ALA Boston 5/21-24/15)

CALL FOR PAPERS
Children’s Literature Society
American Literature Association
26th Annual Conference
May 21-24, 2015
The Westin Copley Place
10 Huntington Avenue
Boston MA 02116-5798

Nobody Understands Me. Evil Kids in Children’s Literature

Do researchers understand evil kid characters? In children’s literature, the evil kid school
of thought changes with history. Authors write the Puritan notion of the sinful kid school,
the Lockean ignorant but educable kid, and the Romantic idealized innocent virtuous
redeeming somewhat helpless kid. Modern, Postmodern, and New Sincerity “evil” kids
range from bullies to baby vampires to misunderstood villains like Gregory Maguire’s
character Elphaba from his book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the
West (1995).

This panel examines evil children in literature. Are we seeing an increase in such
representations in contemporary children’s literature? Are independent rational thinkers
with agency represented as evil? Do evil children have more freedom to color outside of
the lines? Are actions evil, not people? Has the idea of evil changed in children’s
literature?

Please include academic rank and affiliation and AV requests
Please send abstracts or proposals (around 250 words) by Thursday, January 15, 2015 to
Dorothy Clark (Dorothy.g.clark@csun.edu), Linda Salem (Linda.salem@yahoo.com)

CFP Gods and Monsters: Historicizing Ritual, Public Memory, and the Religious Imagination conference (2/13/15; San Francisco 4/18/15)

Of potential interest:

Gods and Monsters: Historicizing Ritual, Public Memory, and the Religious Imagination
Location: California, United States
Conference Date: 2015-04-25
Date Submitted: 2014-10-30
Announcement ID: 217559
https://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=217559

Gods and Monsters:  Historicizing Ritual, Public Memory, and the Religious Imagination
Saturday April 25, 2015 at San Francisco State University

In his seminal essay The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton gave a sage bit of advice to academics who study culture : “When you realize that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.”

The monster is a construct and a projection, always interpreting the moment in which it is created. So too we see constructions of self in cultural phenomena as diverse as comic book heroes, ghost stories, fertility rituals, hagiography-even the villainization of the “other” informs the moment in which it enter public consciousness.

It is in this spirit that the 2015 History Students Association Conference at San Francisco State University is seeking papers that explore the intersection between humanity and its constructs.

How does ritual inform mentality? What can the supernatural tell us about historic truth and memory? How can we interpret stories so as to better understand the storyteller? How does politicization shape religious experience? How does the demonization of the other inform cultural fear? What do the fantastic elements interwoven with oral histories help us to discover about cultural norms?

Cross disciplinary submissions from film studies, literature, religious and ethnic studies, art history, and anthropology are encouraged.

Submission Guidelines: Please submit abstracts of 300 words or less to hsa@mail.sfsu.edu. Please include the title of the submitted paper, your name, affiliated institution, field of study, and contact information. The deadline for submissions is February 13, 2015. If selected, final papers will be due to your panel chair no later than March 20, 2015. Conference will be held Saturday April 18, 2015 at San Francisco State University.

Recent works that resonate with the spirit of the conference include :

Louise White’s monograph published in 2000, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa serves as a cogent example of how tales of the fantastic can be examined and interpreted to allow us to better understand the mentalities of discursive or liminal groups.

Stefan Goeble’s brilliant book on medievalism published in 2007, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940, looks at how elements of medieval chivalric culture were interpreted in war memorials, interpreting iconography to uncover how communal memory functions in the search for historical continuity in the face of such horrific events.

Kelly Boylan
President, History Students Association,
San Francisco State University,
hsa@mail.sfsu.edu.
Email: hsa@mail.sfsu.edu.
Visit the website at http://history.sfsu.edu/content/hsa-2015-conference

CFP The Supernatural Revamped collection (2/1/15)

Sorry to have forgotten about this:

CFP: The Supernatural Revamped (collection of essays)
Posted on October 28, 2014 by Public Information Officer
CFP: The Supernatural Revamped (collection of essays)
http://www.fantastic-arts.org/2014/cfp-the-supernatural-revamped-collection-of-essays/

The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to 21st Century Chic
Editors: Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan, Nova Southeastern University

Project Overview
Editors Brodman and Doan are seeking original essays for their third of a series of books on legends and images of the supernatural in film, literature and lore from early to modern times and from peoples and cultures around the world. Their first two volumes, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), finalist for a prestigious Bram Stoker book award, dealt exclusively with the vampire legend. This volume is more inclusive, with emphasis placed on the evolution of a broad spectrum of timeworn images of the supernatural into their more modern—even chic—forms.

Each chapter in the collection will focus on one of the following categories of supernaturals:
1. Revenants (vampires, ghosts, zombies, etc.)
2. Demons and Angels
3. Shape Shifters
4. Earthbound Supernaturals (trolls, dwarves, yetis, chupacabras, etc.)
5. Fairy Folk (elves, fairies, leprechauns, etc.)

Abstract Due Dates
Preference will be given to abstracts received before February 1, 2015. Late submissions will be accepted until April 1, 2015. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words.
Final manuscripts of 3,000-4,000 words should be submitted in Chicago Style.
Contact us and send abstracts to: brodman@nova.edu or doan@nova.edu