‘The Child of the Century’: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media
Edge Hill University, UK, May 13-14, 2016: deadline for proposals extended to January 31st 2016.
Writing in 1936, Elizabeth Bowen said: ‘The short story is a young art; as we now know it, it is the child of this century. Poetic tautness and clarity are so essential to it that it may be said to stand at the edge of prose; in its use of action it is nearer to drama than to the novel. The cinema, itself busy with a technique, is of the same generation; in the last thirty years the two arts have been accelerating together.’
The child of the 20th century is still growing and developing in the 21st century, alongside an equally rapid acceleration in new media. Through discussions, presentations and performances, this conference will explore the generic affinities between short fiction and other art forms; intermedial transformations; and migrations of the form. This includes the impact of changing technologies on its writing and transmission, historically and at the present moment. Proposals are welcome from both critics and practitioners.
Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
Short fiction as electronic literature; hypertext, twitter fiction and interactive short fiction
The short story, print and magazine culture
Short fiction and film
Short fiction and theatre
Short fiction and the visual arts, e.g. painting, photography, illustration
Short fiction and music
Short fiction and poetry
Graphic fiction
Short fiction in performance
Adaptation and hybridity
Short fiction authors working across media
Technology and form in short fiction
Short fiction, radio and podcast
New forms of transmission
Short fiction and social media
Digital research in short fiction
300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent to coxa@edgehill.ac.uk no later than midnight on the 31st of January 2016. Contributors should also send a short biographical note indicating institutional affiliation. It is envisaged that conference proceedings will be published as a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=196/
Edge Hill University is located in North West England, within easy reach of Liverpool. http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/.