The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genre
A one day research conference in association with the Centre for Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, exploring the weird literary tradition and the many facets of weird writing.Keynotes: S.T. Joshi / Professor Roger Luckhurst / more TBA
Friday 8th November 2013 / Senate House, London
Until recently weird fiction, if acknowledged at all, was usually considered to be a marginal mode in the already lowly Gothic tradition - less a genre than a particular affect. In the last ten years, however, it has come to be regarded as a separate and distinct form with an increasingly important role to play in the theory of popular genre. The debate has broadened its scope to perceive and explore connections with discourses, literary traditions and cultures not previously associated with the Weird. This call for papers invites contributions that engage with weird fiction in its various aspects, including, but not limited to, the following topics and authors:
- The weird cosmic horror tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and his ‘Weird Tales’ contemporaries
- The recent New Weird advocated by China Miéville and others
- The evolution of the Weird
- The global Weird - weird fiction in translation
- Genre theory and fugitive forms
- Modernism and the Weird
- Weird Philosophy and Weird Theory
We would be delighted to receive abstracts on any aspect of weird fiction from the long nineteenth century, including, but certainly not limited to, the weird fiction of Poe, Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, M.R. James, William Hope Hodgson and Ambrose Bierce.
Please send 250 word abstracts for 20 minute papers, together with a brief biography, to theweirdconference@gmail.com by 1st August 2013.
Thursday 7th November 2013 (evening event): weird fiction reading (details TBC)
Follow ‘The Weird’ on Twitter: @WeirdConference
This conference is supported by the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck School of Arts, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London.