CFP Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition Confernce (1/31/2023; Providence, RI 6/7-9/2022)

Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition: (Non)Normative Identities, Forms, and Writings

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Alessandro Cabiati / Brown University

contact email:
normandtransgression@brown.edu


source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/11/04/norm-and-transgression-in-the-fairy-tale-tradition-nonnormative-identities-forms-and

Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition: (Non)Normative Identities, Forms, and Writings

Brown University, 7-9 June 2023

Conference Organisers: Alessandro Cabiati (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Brown University) and Lewis Seifert (Brown University)



Keynote Speakers

Maria Tatar (Harvard University)

Anne E. Duggan (Wayne State University)

Laura Tosi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

Cristina Bacchilega (University of Hawai’i-Mānoa)



From Perrault’s representation of female disobedience in ‘Bluebeard’ to Little Red Riding Hood’s disregard of her mother’s prohibition of wandering in the forest, transgression is a key theme in fairy tales. The act of transgression is typically used as a vehicle for a moral and/or educational message which seeks to punish the transgressor and reward ‘good’ behaviour that is compliant with societal norms and values. But with the evolution of the literary fairy tale as a genre, transgression has taken many other forms and significations that go well beyond acts of disobedience or the infringement of society’s rules and expectations. Rewritings of fairy tales, including the efforts by late 19th-century Decadent writers to subvert traditional happy endings and moral meanings or postmodern feminist adaptations that challenge the patriarchal structure embedded in those fairy tales, put into question the very notions of transgression and normativity in the fairy-tale world.

It could easily be argued, moreover, that transgression of accepted cultural norms has defined the literary fairy tale as a genre ever since its development in late 17th-century France. Physical deformity and monsters, such as ogres, witches, and other villains, populate the fairy-tale universe; violent and homicidal acts are commonly represented; and transgressive relationships and comportments abound, including, for instance, the numerous tales classified as ‘unnatural love’ in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index of folktales. In spite of the evident moralistic and allegorical meanings of fairy tales, and of the supposed acceptance of its illogical and ‘marvellous’ world as normative by the reader, the latter cannot but acknowledge the transgressive presence of topics such as cannibalism and anthropophagy in many of the tales. Recently, scholarly works in the emerging field of Queer Fairy-Tale Studies have underlined the ‘transgressive’ quality of certain traditional tales that do not conform to a heteronormative paradigm.

What can then be considered as normative, and what as transgressive, in a fairy tale? We invite proposals for papers that broadly address the above question(s), and which more narrowly consider, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• The laws of fairy land and the fairy world; breaking the law and committing crimes; investigations and trials; sentencing, punishments, and ‘fairy’ prisons; eye for an eye and the ‘poetic justice’ of fairy tales.
• The subversion of the categories of good and evil, and related notions of reward and punishment; the rejection of happy endings and ‘happily ever after’, and of moral messages and educational aims.
• Social and cultural taboos in fairy tales; prohibitions and interdictions; forbidden practices and illicit desires.
• Transgressions of the ‘once upon a time’ formula and of fairy-tale settings; fairy tales set in modern and contemporary times; the presence of science and technology in the fairy world and the intermingling of fairy tale, fantasy, and science fiction.
• Transgressions and violations of the human body; illness and physical deformity; amalgamation and equivalence of the human and the animal; posthuman figures.
• Gender rules and laws; princesses and laws of succession; adventurous heroines and rescued princes; ruling queens.
• Nonnormative identities; cross-dressing; gender fluidity; marvellous sexual metamorphoses and magical transsexuality; homo- and bisexual desire.
• Racial rules and laws; interracial relationships and marriages.
• Rewritings of traditional tales; poems, novels, and novellas with a fairy-tale plot; postmodern retellings.
• Non-Western fairy-tale traditions; translation of non-Western fairy tales in Western culture and vice versa.
• Adaptation as transgression; adaptation that becomes the norm (the Disney films); adaptation in other media, theatre, cinema, TV, comics; computer games and new technologies.

Please send an abstract of around 300 words for a 20-minute paper, along with a biographical note and your affiliation, to normandtransgression@brown.edu by 31 January 2023. Outcomes will be communicated by 28 February 2023. For regular updates on the conference, please visit the conference website.

We plan to produce a Special Issue or an Edited Volume including a selection of papers presented at the conference.

The conference is planned as an in-person event, but contingency plans are in place to hold the conference online should it become necessary due to the changing nature of the pandemic.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101025123.



Last updated January 16, 2023

CFP Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic (1/31/2023; Magdeburg, Germany 4/29-5/1/2023)

Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Inklings Society for Literature and Aesthetics

contact email:
carsten.kullmann@ovgu.de

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/10/05/defying-death-immortality-and-rebirth-in-the-fantastic

In fantasy and science fiction, death, immortality and rebirth are topics that feature frequently, elucidating that the loss of life and the questions of how it might be prevented or reversed are at the centre of human concern. These questions also constitute an essential focal point of the works of the Oxford Inklings, particularly Tolkien and Lewis. They created places of immortality, such as Valinor, also known as the undying lands in Tolkien’s legendarium, or Aslan’s Country in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, wrote about the struggles of immortal beings amongst mortals in the fight of good versus evil, and frequently introduced ideas of resurrection or rebirth (the White Tree of Gondor, Gandalf the White, Aslan, the multitude of worlds in The Magician’s Nephew) and the neither living nor dead (The Nazgul, The (un-)Dead Men of Dunharrow) in their works.

Yet, the Oxford Inklings were by far not the only ones concerned with such themes. An interest in ancient belief systems, alchemy, theosophy, and science informed a broader literary fascination with immortality and rebirth, particularly in 19th and early 20th century fantasy and science fiction, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Ring of Thoth” being prime examples.

Issues of life and death, immortality and rebirth remained a persistent concern in the later 20th century, especially in the aftermath of the two world wars, and continue to fascinate us in the 21st century. In the fantastical imagination, texts in all media, such as The Sandman, Good Omens, The Expanse, A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, Hologrammatica, Altered Carbon, or the Maddaddam Trilogy, to name just a few examples, all explore the idea of what a world might look like in which human and/or non-human beings experience immortality, or versions of it, thereby addressing questions of what constitutes the human soul, individuality, and the significance of existence beyond a single lifetime.

2023 marks the anniversary of the death of J. R.R. Tolkien (50) and C.S. Lewis (60) as well as the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the German Inklings-Society. We take these anniversaries as a cue to discuss the intersection of death, rebirth, and immortality in our symposium.

We invite contributions investigating how these topics are represented in the mode of the fantastic beyond the limitations of realism, including but not limited to the following possible topics: 

• death as a character
• psychopomps
• (dis)advantages of immortality
• the pursuit of immortality
• art and immortality
• elixirs of life
• life-extending instruments and measures
• metaphorical or literal rebirth
• rebirth as new beginning or redemption
• afterlives and underworlds
• ethical, philosophical and religious perspectives
• circle(s) of life
• (ab)use of power
• new perspectives on death, immortality, and rebirth in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s works in particular

Please send proposals (300–500 words, either in German or English) as well as a short bio to carsten.kullmann@ovgu.de or maria.fleischhack@uni-leipzig.de. Please use the subject line “Inklings Symposium 2023”. The deadline is 31 January 2023. Presentations at the symposium should be 20 minutes long and a selection of them will be published in the Inklings Yearbook.

Location: Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg

Date: 29 April to 1 May 2023

Travel Allowance: There will be a small allowance available to speakers for accommodation and travel expenses.

Organisers: Carsten Kullmann, M.A. (Magdeburg) and Dr. Maria Fleischhack (Leipzig)


Last updated October 10, 2022

CFP Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s Conference (1/31/2023; online 3/24-25/2023)

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Indiana University Department of English

contact email:
iugradconference@gmail.com


source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/11/03/deadline-extended-strange-things-alternatives-imaginaries-and-otherworlds


Call for Papers

Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s

20th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

Department of English, Indiana University, Bloomington

Dates: Friday March 24th – Saturday March 25th, 2023



We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for Indiana University’s 20th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference, hosted by the Department of English. This conference will be held virtually on Friday March 24th and Saturday March 25th. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Christy Tidwell, whose recent work includes the co-edited anthology Fear & Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, and a co-edited special issue of Science Fiction Film & Television on creature features and the environment.

In 1937, the Indiana General Assembly officially selected the phrase "Crossroads of America" as the state motto. Almost 80 years later, the Netflix show Stranger Things features the fictional town Hawkins, Indiana as a portal that leads us into the "Upside Down," where all those "stranger" things come from, those Others desiring to annihilate us all. And the kids fight back—the familiar mixture of superpower, blood-spatter, and initiation rite. But we ask: what if we can put the war in abeyance, and cohabitate with that mirroring Otherworld and all the creatures flooding from it? What if we can replace the two-way portal with a crossroads, and (re)imagine other ways—both figuratively and literally—of defining our shared worlds? Indeed, are they really that stranger? We in the humanities have always dealt with things that are strange around us, and we enjoy and yes, have fun imagining strange, alternative worlds and different temporalities, spatialities, identities, and subjectivities that come with them. In 2023, we will make Bloomington such a crossroads, a space where not only people but animals, cyborgs, aliens, indeed, "things" come and go. Out of sync with the normative time and space, we will "make it strange."

Relevant topics may include (but are by no means limited to):

• Representations and interrogations of the “other”
• Crossings of time and/or space
• Worldbuilding
• Materiality or materialisms
• Liminality, borders, and/or margins
• Ghosts, monsters, aliens, and all things “strange”
• Narratives and counternarratives
• Collectivity and collaboration
• Critical identity studies
• Genre studies
• Studies of migration, border, and/or diaspora
• Queer modes of composition and interpretation

Proposals might also situate these topics in the context of rhetoric and composition studies. We invite proposals that consider the “strange” world of the classroom, the role of rhetoric in studies of the strange and the other, and more. Papers that bring together critical and creative elements are also encouraged.

We invite proposals for both individual papers and organized panels: Individual scholarly papers and creative works (15-minute presentations; please submit a 250-word abstract)
Panels organized around a thematic topic (three 20-minute papers or four 15-minute papers; please submit a 350-word panel abstract as well as a 100-word abstract for each individual paper on the panel)

Email your submission to iugradconference@gmail.com by January 31, 2023. In your email, please submit your abstract (both in the body of the email and as a Word attachment), along with your name, institutional affiliation, email, and phone number. Please note that both the keynote and the panels will be given synchronously via Zoom.



Lydia Nixon, Conference Chair

AC Carlson, Conference Co-Chair

Jaehoon Lee, CFP Author



Last updated January 10, 2023

CFP Special Issue of Revenant - Dialogues with the Dead (1/31/2023)

Special Issue of Revenant - Dialogues with the Dead

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Revenant Journal

contact email:
Fiona.Snailham@greenwich.ac.uk

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/10/18/special-issue-of-revenant-dialogues-with-the-dead

CALL FOR PAPERS: Dialogues with the Dead

Guest Editors: Dr Anna Maria Barry and Dr Fiona Snailham

Communication with the dead has gripped the Western imagination for centuries - from Odysseus’s journey to the underworld and Saul’s attempt to summon Samuel to the Fox sisters’ nineteenth-century mediumship and the purported appearance of Arthur Conan Doyle at the Royal Albert Hall in 1930… several days after his death! This Anglo-American cultural obsession continues to manifest in films such as The Sixth Sense (1999) and Hereafter (2010), as well as popular television series like the long-running Most Haunted which follows the investigations of ghost hunters. In literature, too, there are many accounts of dialogues with the dead, from Hamlet’s conversations with the ghost of his father to W.T. Stead’s Letters From Julia which were supposedly dictated to the author by the eponymous spirit. Other works have considered the role of the medium, from Robert Browning’s Mr Sludge, “The Medium” (1864) to Alison Hart in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005).

Engaging with this intense interest, our special issue explores depictions of spirit communication across the globe. We are interested in work that explores what is at stake when we claim contact with the other side. How do different cultures afford different levels of respect to deceased voices? How does gender function within these conversations? Does dialogue with the dead influence our perception of authority and to what extent is this reflected in critical responses? How do apparently posthumous conversations reflect the anxieties of the individual acting as conduit, and the time in which they exist? How do we respond to art purportedly created through contact with the dead, and what questions does this raise about the creative process?

Contributing to these discussions, we invite articles, creative pieces, and reviews that address any aspect of dialogues with the spirit world. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

•  Considerations of autobiographical writing by spiritualists and/or mediums – e.g. Elizabeth d’Espérance’s Shadowlands
• Non-fiction accounts of conversations with the spirit world
• How representations of communication with the dead differ across geographic and cultural borders
• Literary and artistic depictions of those who communicate with the dead - for instance: the spiritualist, the shaman, the sangoma
• Art produced through contact with the spirit world - in current practice or by historic practitioners such as Georgiana Houghton, Anna Mary Howitt (later Watts), Emma Kuntz, Florêncio Anton, Augustin Lesage
• Postcolonialism and dialogues with the dead
• Depictions of investigations into spirit communications
• Spiritualism’s influence on the work of writers such as H.D., Sylvia Plath, Rebecca West and Rosamond Lehmann.
• The relationship between spiritualism and genre: modernism, magic realism, the Gothic etc
• Specialist Spiritualist journals and periodicals: The Spiritualist, El Espiritismo, La Revue Spirite, Light
• Automatic writing - in non-fiction and fictional accounts
• Proclamations of contact with the spirits of deceased authors and artists - (e.g) Dickens and the alleged posthumous completion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood

For articles and creative pieces (such as poetry, short stories, flash fiction, videos, artwork and music) please send a 500-word abstract and a short biography by 31st January 2023. Reviews of books, films, games, events, and art related to the dialogues with the dead (800-1,000 words in length) are also welcome. Please send full details of the title and medium you would like to review as soon as possible.



If your abstract is accepted, the full article (maximum 7000 words, including Harvard referencing) and the full creative piece (maximum 5000 words if a written piece) will be due by 31st October 2023.



Further information, including Submission Guidelines, are available at the journal website: www.revenantjournal.com. Enquiries are welcome and, along with all submissions, should be directed to both Dr Anna Maria Barry (anna_maria_barry@hotmail.com) and Dr Fiona Snailham (Fiona.Snailham@greenwich.ac.uk). Please quote ‘Dialogues with the Dead special issue’ in the subject box.





Last updated October 23, 2022

CFP Edited Collection -- Victorians and Videogames (1/31/2023)

Edited Collection -- Victorians and Videogames

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Brooke Cameron (Queen's University) and Lin Young (Mount Royal University)

contact email:
brooke.cameron@queensu.ca

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/12/19/edited-collection-victorians-and-videogames

CFP: edited collection -- Victorians and Videogames

Dr. Lin Young (Mount Royal University) and Dr. Brooke Cameron (Queen’s University) invite proposals for chapters that explore the connections between video games and 19th-Century themes, texts, or aesthetics.

Project Description:

The influence of 19th-Century literature on generations of videogames is long overdue for critical study. Victorians and Videogames will examine the ways in which game/interactive texts interact with 19th-Century genres, aesthetics, and literary themes as a means of engaging, critiquing, or challenging their original contexts. Chapters will be collected under three categories. The first will examine 19th-Century predecessors or precursors to the videogame – texts that anticipate systems of interactivity, user-generated narrative, play or virtual realities, and/or which may be read through the lens of ludology/narratology. The second will consider games that adapt 19th-Century texts or histories as a means of reworking or challenging their original themes and contexts. Finally, the edited collection will consider games that more broadly function as thematic pastiches or aesthetic engagements with 19th-Century genres or themes.

In essence, this collection will consider the ways in which embodied, user-driven storytelling can impact new and challenging engagements with the 19th Century in the contemporary world. We welcome submissions from many fields: this includes game studies, literature studies, new media, neo-Victorian studies, history, popular culture scholarship, etc.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Chapter(s) on 19thC predecessors or precursors to the videogame – texts on interactivity, games, virtual realities, etc.
• Oral storytelling traditions and their relationships to game narration (or other elements of games).
• Chapters that examine 19thC texts/games from a ludology or narratology critical perspective (or its debates).
• Strategy games like Victoria or Sid Meier’s Civilization that evoke imageries of Empire, invasion, and colonization.
• The use of gameplay, mechanics, and/or design to engage 19thC themes.
• 19thC aesthetics, fashion, and visual design in games (Fable, Bloodborne, etc.)
• Games set in, or inspired by, countries outside Britain in the 19th Century, such as Great Ace Attorney: Adventures (Capcom).
• Disability and gaming culture in a 19thC context.
• Queering the 19th Century in games.
• Representations of BIPOC in 19th Century game settings.
• Impacts of 19thC texts on specific games (ie, Treasure Island on Monkey Island).
• Point-and-click mysteries and adventure tales (ie, Amnesia).
• Fairy tale adaptations of tales published or first translated in the 19th Century.
• Videogames involving contemporary characters investigating or unearthing 19thC histories.
• Games that utilize genres invented or significantly popularized in the 19th Century (ie, vampire fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, the Gothic, ghost fiction) in historically-conscious or referential ways.
• Games that make significant allusions to 19thC stories, philosophies, or art in modern contexts or alternate universes.
• Games that feature 19thC historical events (ie, Dread Hunger or Inua - A Story in Ice and Time as recreations of the lost Franklin expedition).

Proposals of 400-500 words should be submitted along with a 60-word author biography and one-page cv to both editors (brooke.cameron@queensu.ca & lyoung1@mtroyal.ca) by 31 January 2023.

We will notify applicants of results by 31 March 2023. Following acceptance, final papers should be approximately 6,000-7000 words long and will be due by 01 Sept 2023. Routledge has expressed interest in this collection.




Last updated December 20, 2022

CFP Adapting Horror in Popular Culture (1/24/2023)

Note the impending deadline. 

Adapting Horror in Popular Culture

deadline for submissions:
January 24, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Joseph J. Darowski and John Darowski

contact email:
monsteradaptations@gmail.com


full cfp accessible from this link: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/11/18/adapting-horror-in-popular-culture

CFP for Adapting Horror in Popular Culture

Deadline for Submissions: Jan. 24, 2023

Publisher: McFarland & Company

Contact Email: monsteradaptations@gmail.com

The editors of Adapting Horror in Popular Culture are seeking abstracts for essays that could be included in the upcoming collection. The essays should address the long-running global appeal of the monstrous in popular culture. Each essay will examine the adaptation of a creature, monster, or source of terror into a new medium.

Adaptations inherently transform an audience’s relationship with the original while presenting a version with contemporary relevance. Topics can include fairy tales, folklore, urban legends, or literary monsters from around the world and their adaptation into film, television, animation, radio/podcast, comic books, graphic novels, webtoons, video games, etc.

Essays should focus on stories featuring issues of adaptation and influence theory, evolving cultural contexts, or formalist aspects of telling existing stories in new mediums. Analysis must apply critical theory to explore the form, function, and/or intersectionality of monsters,
adaptation, and culture.

The proposed volume is intended to be scholarly but accessible in tone and approach. Abstracts explaining the focus and approach of the proposed chapter should be accompanied with a CV.

Topics should be limited in scope, focusing on one monster or text. Topics that compare and contrast different adaptations of the same monster within a single medium (e.g. comparing Bernie Wrightson and Junji Ito’s graphic novel versions of Frankenstien) will also be considered.

Completed essays should be approximately 15-20 double-space pages in MLA format.

Abstracts (100-500 words) and CVs should be submitted by January 24, 2023.

Submissions should be sent to Joseph J. Darowski and John Darowski at adaptingmonsters@gmail.com.



Last updated November 27, 2022