International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

The Victorian Period in Twenty-First Century Children’s Literature:

Representations and Revisions, Adaptations and Appropriations

A significant aim of contemporary literature for young people is to provide a window into a variety of historical periods and cultural milieus. Such representations of the past have educational, creative, and political resonances, reflecting both on historical periods and contemporary values. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, we seem to have reached a critical mass of works for children that engage the Victorian period in particular.

Perhaps the most visible form that this trend has taken is Neo-Victorianism, a literary and cultural phenomenon that has shaped contemporary fiction for children and young adults through the general prevalence and popularity of Neo-Victorian series such as the Enola Holmes novels and the Gemma Doyle trilogy. A recent special issue on the child in Neo-Victorian Studies also indicates that the critical discussion inspired by this genre has specific implications for studies of youth culture.

However, Victorian influences and impulses extend beyond works that can be categorized as Neo-Victorian. Historical fiction and timeslip fantasy set in the Victorian period interact with the past through placing the modern reader in the position of the nineteenth-century child, while steampunk fiction imagines alternate histories and technologies that emerge from the nexus of Victorian culture. Contemporary texts also engage Victorian fiction through adaptations and retellings: films such as Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Disney’s Treasure Planet (2002) reconfigure the iconic works of Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson for a twenty-first century audience, as do intertextual retellings such as April Lindner’s Catherine and Cara Lockwood’s Wuthering High, both young adult novels that update and revise the narrative of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

This proposed volume seeks essays that analyze how twenty-first century texts for young audiences across a variety of media–including print, film, television, and digital formats–interact with Victorian literature and culture. What do such works reveal about contemporary understandings or assumptions regarding Victorian values and sensibilities? What has made the Victorian era such a productive and inspiring space for so many authors and young audiences of the twenty-first century? What is lost and what might be gained by reframing a text for Victorian adults for a contemporary audience of young people?

 Topics may include but are not limited to

▪       the Victorian text as intertext in contemporary literature

▪       neo-Victorian literature

▪       steampunk fiction

▪       representations of the Victorian past in time-slip fantasy and/or ghost stories

▪       contemporary retellings of iconic Victorian stories

▪       the portrayal of the Victorian period in contemporary nonfiction

▪       film adaptations of Victorian literature

▪       representations of Victorian cultural icons (Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin,  Jack the Ripper)

▪       Victorian sensibilities and aesthetics as influences on contemporary fiction

▪       historical fiction set in the Victorian period

We are currently seeking a book contract for this volume. Submit a 500-word abstract, along with a working bibliography and a brief, up-to-date CV by August 1, 2014 to Sara K. Day and Sonya Sawyer Fritz at Vic21Collection@gmail.com. Completed essays of 5000-7000 words will be due by March 1, 2015.

46th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 30-May 3, 2015
Toronto, Ontario
Host: Ryerson University

Hotel: The Fairmont Royal York

Session Title: Spectral Uprisings as Imperialist Critique: Rethinking the Anglo-Indian Gothic

Session Chair: Melissa Edmundson Makala

Session Description:
This panel invites submissions that examine and reevaluate the supernatural literature that arose out of the British Raj. Exploring this area allows us to ask larger questions, such as: What is the place of Anglo-Indian Gothic within the broader genre of Imperial Gothic? Can postcolonial theory be used to interpret the colonial Indian Gothic? How is ghostly activity a form of native rebellion that reflects very real fears behind these fictional tales? How were writers influenced by the work of Kipling and why has his work dominated the genre for so long? What literary influence have Anglo-Indian women had on this genre?

In particular, this panel aims to explore how the Anglo-Indian Gothic was an important cultural statement on the anxieties that existed between the British colonizers and their native Indian subjects. The genre thus provides an alternative way of looking at the negative effects of imperialism and provides a place for subversive social commentaries disguised within an entertaining Gothic tale. Anglo-Indian Gothic writers offer glimpses into the British imperial world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their ghost stories offer additional insight for modern-day readers about the impact the British colonial presence had on the countries and peoples under the dominion of the Empire at its heights.

Suggested topics for this panel include: ghosts, second sight, madness, disease, violence/crime, dead/undead bodies, cultural anxiety, revenge, colonial children, the occult, reincarnation, curses, haunted dwellings, Gothic representations of the Indian Uprising, the Gothic landscape, Indian writers, reappraisals of Kipling, Anglo-Indian women writers, gender issues, and publication histories of Anglo-Indian Gothic works.

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2014

This year, NeMLA is switching to a user-based system to accept and track abstract submissions. In order to submit an abstract using the button for a CFP entry, you must sign up with NeMLA and log in. Using this new system, you can manage your personal information and review and update your abstract following submission. Interested participants can access the session information and submit abstracts by clicking on the following link:

https://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15256

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.

Please direct enquiries to Dr. Melissa Makala: me.makala@gmail.com.

NEMLA 2015 Toronto

Steampunk Femininity: Recasting the Angel in the House

An artistic and literary creative force, especially in graphic novels such as Girl Genius and A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and in young adult novels such as Phillip Reeve’s Larklight (2006) and Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan (2009), Steampunk is an organic development of Victorian fantasy, because it adds a fully realized science fiction component to an already solidified hybrid genre. Importantly, Steampunk has emerged as a strong feminist voice that simultaneously addresses contemporary and current discourses on femininity and masculinity through a retelling of an alternate past that rethinks the function Victorian gender roles. Central to Steampunk’s critique of the British patriarchy and Empire is its consistent creation of intelligent, independent, creative, and powerful female heroines the likes of which we have never seen in Victorian literature. Especially in contemporary Young Adult novels and graphic novels, characters like Mina Harker in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Deryn Sharp in Leviathan, Sophie Hatter in Howl’s Moving Castle and Myrtle and Mrs. Mumby in Larklight extend even Victorians’ critique of empire by subverting woman’s place in the domestic realm and abandoning the image of woman as the ‘angel in the house.’

Area: British, Women’s and Gender Studies

For questions, contact Tali Noimann cnoimann@bmcc.cuny.edy. Please do not email email your submission. Use the link below to submit a 300-word abstract and a short bio.

Link to session submission: https://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15117

Deadline for abstracts Sept. 30, 2014

THE SOCIETY FOR UTOPIAN STUDIES

39th Annual Meeting

Global Work and Play

23-26 October 2014

Delta Montréal

475, Avenue Président Kennedy

Montréal, Canada

http://utopian-studies.org/conference2014

Utopias have nowhere left to hide in an era of global capital and information flows.  Imagining the perfect society means envisioning global as much as, or more than, national or local change.  Labor is transformed as heavy industry relentlessly relocates. Post-industrial refugees chase immaterial wealth flowing across borders that are porous for information and capital, but not for bodies.  Even leisure becomes work when corporations mine Twitter and Facebook for content to monetize, while gamifying daily life.  Under such conditions, visualizing a utopian balance of work and play grows both more difficult and more urgent.

Papers are welcome on all aspects of the utopian tradition, from the earliest utopian visions to the utopian speculations and yearnings of the 21st century, including art, architecture, urban and rural planning, literary utopias, dystopian writings and films, utopian political activism, theories of utopian spaces and ontologies, music, new media, and intentional communities. We especially welcome papers and panels on games, gamers and gamification; utopian and dystopian aspects of globalization; and non-Western utopian traditions.

Additionally, we are introducing a new poster and demonstration track. We invite abstracts for presentations featuring interactive games, apps, digital artifacts, tools, projects, websites, or works in progress with a utopian or dystopian dimension. Those invited to participate will be given a backdrop and table for a poster and/or computer in our exhibition hall. Indie developers and digital humanists are especially welcome.

Abstracts of up to 250 words are due 15 July 2014, and may be for:

   a 15-20 minute paper

   a panel: include a title, designated Chair, an abstract for the panel and for each of 3-4 papers

   an informal roundtable of 3-6 presenters, or a combination of presenters and respondents

   a presentation or performance of a utopian creative work or artifact

   a poster and/or demo

Please use our online form for submissions here.

*All submissions must include 3-5 keywords to assist in forming cohesive panels. The official language of the conference is English.

For information about registration, travel or accommodations, please contact Brian Greenspan, brian.greenspan@carleton.ca

For information about panel topics, assistance finding co-panelists, and other questions about the conference, please contact Peter Sands, sands@uwm.edu

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“I don’t think I am like other people”: Anomalous Embodiment in Young Adult Speculative Fiction.

Editors Sherryl Vint and Mathieu Donner are seeking submissions for a volume of essays on young adult literature entitled Anomalous Embodiment in Young Adult Speculative Fiction.

The large commercial as well as critical successes of such works as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials or Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series have pushed young adult fiction to the forefront of the literary world. However, and though most of these texts themselves engage in one way or another with questions related to the body, and, more precisely, to a body that refuses to conform to social norms as to what a body ‘ought to be’, few academic studies have really explored the relation that young adult fiction entertains with this adolescent ‘abnormal’ body.

In her work on corporeal feminism, Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz suggests that adolescence is not only the period during which the body itself undergoes massive transformation, shifting from childhood to adulthood, but that it is also in this period that ‘the subject feels the greatest discord between the body image and the lived body, between its psychical idealized self-image and its bodily changes’ and that therefore, the ‘philosophical desire to transcend corporeality and its urges may be dated from this period’ (Volatile Bodies 75). Following upon Grosz’s observation, this interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses the relation that young adult fiction weaves between the adolescent body and the ‘norm’, this socially constructed idealized body image which the subject perceives to be in direct conflict with her/his own experience.

This collection will thus be centred on the representation, both positive and negative, of such body or bodies. From the vampiric and lycanthropic bodies of Twilight and Teen Wolf to the ‘harvested’ bodies of Neal Shusterman’s novel Unwind, YA fiction entertains a complex relation to the adolescent body. Often singularized as ‘abnormal’, this body comes to symbolise the violence of a hegemonic and normative medical discourse which constitutes itself around an ideal of ‘normality’. However, and more than a simple condemnation or interrogation of the problematic dominant representation of the corporeal within young adult fiction, this collection also proposes to explore how such texts can present a foray into new alternative territories. As such, the collection proposes a focus on what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s label the anomalous body, or embodiment re-articulated not necessarily as the presumption of an inside and an outside of normality, but rather as ‘a position or set of positions in relation to a multiplicity’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 244), one which interrogates and challenges the setting of such a boundary by positioning itself at the threshold of normativity.

We are particularly looking for contributions on works which either (1) interrogate, problematize the dominant discourse on normative embodiment present in YA fiction, (2) emphasize, by a play on repetition or any other means, the limitations of the traditional discourse on the ‘abnormal’ or ‘disabled’ body, and signal the inherent violence of such normative paradigms, and/or (3) propose an alternative approach to the anomalous body. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

·       (Re-)Articulating disability;

·       The adolescent as ‘abnormally’ embodied;

·       Transcending gender and the sexuated body;

·       Medical norms and the violence of ‘normative’ embodiment;

·       Bodies and prosthetic technologies, or the posthuman boundary;

·       Genetics, Diseases and medication, or transforming the body from the inside;

·       Cognitive readings of the body, or how do we read body difference;

·       Embodied subjectivities, anomalous/abnormal consciousness;

We invite proposals (approximately 500 words) for 8’000-10’000-word chapters by Monday 15th September. Abstract submissions should be included in a Word document and sent to Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint@ucr.edu) and Mathieu Donner (Mathieu.Donner@nottingham.ac.uk). Please remember to include name, affiliation, academic title and email address. Postgraduate and early-careers researchers are encouraged to participate.

In November 2014, the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association will be holding its 25th Anniversary Conference in Baltimore, MD.  We are inviting all academics who live and work in the Mid-Atlantic Region (or anyone interested in a trip to Baltimore) to consider submitting an abstract for the conference.  The Science Fiction and Fantasy area is encouraging scholars who are interested in the genre (or its related areas in Victorian Literature, particularly in reference to Steampunk, or the relationship of medieval literature to fantasy, for example) to submit a proposal.  Our call for papers is reproduced below.  Please feel free to share with your colleagues and your graduate students.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Leigha McReynolds and Marilyn Stern

Area Co-chairs

Call for Papers MAPACA 2014

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY AREA

The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) invites academics, graduate and undergraduate students, independent scholars, and artists to submit papers for the annual conference, to be held in Baltimore, November 6-8, 2014. Those interested in presenting at the conference are invited to submit a proposal or panel by June 15, 2014. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words long. Include a brief bio with your proposal. Single papers, as well as 3- or 4-person panels and roundtables, are encouraged. All proposals should be submitted via the online system at www.mapaca.net, where you can also find more information on our organization and our conference.

Science Fiction and Fantasy welcomes papers/presentations in any critical, theoretical, or (inter)disciplinary approach to any topic related to SF/F: art; literature; radio; film; television; video, role-playing, and multi-player online games. Though not an exhaustive list, potential presenters may wish to consider the following:

Ø  Gender and Sexuality

Ø  Race and Otherness

Ø  Class and Hierarchies

Ø  Utopia/Dystopia

Ø  Mythology and Quest Narratives

Ø  Creatures and Aliens

Ø  Science and Magic

Ø  Reading Other Worlds

Ø  Language and Rhetoric

Ø  Genre: Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Dark Fantasy, Steampunk, etc.

Ø  Fans and Fandom/Community Building

Ø  Textual Analysis

Ø  Sociological or Psychological Readings

Ø  Archival Research/History

Ø  Technology: Textual and Literal

Ø  Online Identity Construction

Ø  Fairy Tales

Ø  Paranormal Romance

Ø  Young Adult Literature

Ø  Tolkien (literature and film)

Area Chairs:

Marilyn Stern                             Leigha McReynolds

sternm@wit.edu                        lhm@gwmail.gwu.edu

Visit www.mapaca.net for a full list of areas.

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Leigha McReynolds
Conference Organizer, NASSR 2014
Co-chair Science Fiction and Fantasy Division, MAPACA
PhD Candidate in English
The George Washington University