From the 4th to the 6th of May 2017, the KU Leuven department of Literary Studies, the research group MDRN and the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies hosted the third annual conference of the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR). The theme of this bilingual conference was “Short Fiction: Co-texts and Contexts – Le Récit Bref: Co-textes et Contexts”. In plenary lectures, paper presentations, readings and panel debates, we discussed the forms, functions and implications of the different, multi-textual publication contexts have accompanied the modern short story since the 19th century and we explored the many different ways in which short stories interact with these co-texts and contexts in various literary traditions. Plenary speakers were Dean Baldwin and Yvon Houssais. Invited writers were Annelies Verbeke, Alison MacLeod, Thomas Morris and Luca Ricci. A selection of the conference papers will be published in three publications: a special issue of Journal for the Short Story in English, a special issue of Interférences Littéraires and an essay collection The Modern Short Story and the Magazines.
Conference website: https://ensfrleuven2017.wordpress.com/