M. R. James and the Modern Ghost Story
University of Leeds, The Leeds Library
March 28, 2015
Deadline: December 1, 2014

Confirmed Keynotes:
Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Darryl Jones (Trinity College, Dublin)
Helen Grant (Author)

The conference will be followed by a public screening of A Warning to the Curious (1972) and a Q & A session with writer/director, Lawrence Gordon Clark

The ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) are amongst the most influential in the English language. Never out of print, they have been adapted numerous times for stage, screen and other media and their formal and thematic features have come to embody the very model of the traditional English ghost story.

This one-day symposium is the first such event dedicated entirely to M.R. James’s ghost stories. The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers with an interest in James’s fiction in order to assess the significance of his ghost stories from a range of theoretical, literary and historical perspectives.

Although widely read and tremendously influential, James’s fiction has received little academic attention. The aim of this event is to foster further discussion and analysis of these tales and their place in late-Victorian and Edwardian literature and culture.

The organisers would welcome abstracts for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of James’s tales on topics including, but certainly not limited to:
The ‘antiquarian’ flavour of James’s stories
James’s position as a late-Victorian/Edwardian writer
Representations of gender, race and sexuality in the tales
Adaptations of James’s fiction
James’s relationship to the ghost story genre
James and Englishness
The historical contexts of James’s fiction

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to MRJconference@gmail.com by December 1, 2014

Conference website: https://lumi.do/on/mrjconference.wordpress.com/