The European Network for Short Fiction Research was established in 2013 with the aim of fostering and promoting the study of short fiction in European universities and in interaction with short fiction writers. After an inaugural meeting early in 2014, the ENSFR has organized annual conferences as well as sponsored several other study days and events. This website aims to be an interactive platform for sharing research, expertise, ideas and information about short fiction in its diversity of linguistic traditions and forms.
The Edge Hill Prize 2020 for a published short story collection from the UK or Ireland has just been announced. £10,000 will be awarded to the winner in November. The collections are:
KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND CHILDREN
Editors
Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK
and
Todd Martin, Huntington University, USA
Virginia Woolf once remarked that Katherine Mansfield had ‘a kind of childlikeness somewhere which has been much disfigured, but still exists’. This ‘childlikeness’ is indeed a facet of Mansfield’s personality which permeates every aspect of her personal and creative life. It is present in her mature fiction, where some of her most well-known and accomplished stories, such as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, have children as protagonists; it is present in her early poetry, which includes a collection of poems for children intended for publication; it is also present in her juvenilia, where many of the stories she wrote from an early age for school magazines and other publications, feature children. As Tracy Miao notes of her mature fiction, ‘in Mansfield’s modelling of her child artists […] there is more than a simple “childlikeness” […] but a serious thought process on art and the artist’.
Even as an adult, Mansfield’s love of the miniature, her delight in children in general, her fascination with dolls, all feature in her personal writing. Her relationship with John Middleton Murry was characterised by their mutual descriptions of themselves as little children fighting against a corrupt world. Alluding to their innocence, Mansfield once wrote to Murry: ‘My grown up self sees us like two little children who have been turned out into the garden’. Years later, speaking of Murry’s writing, she notes, ‘Take care of yourself – my beloved child with all these wild men about throwing stones and striking’.
Essays which address any aspect of the concept of Mansfield and children will be considered for this volume. Subjects might include (but are not limited to):
• Children in Mansfield’s fiction
• Children in Mansfield’s poetry
• Mansfield’s juvenilia – poetry and /or prose
• Mansfield’s early years
• The ‘childlike’ relationship between Mansfield and Murry
• Mansfield’s pregnancies
• Mansfield’s love of the miniature
• Mansfield and dolls
• The childlike in Mansfield’s personal writing
• Mansfield’s ‘innocent eye’ (John Ruskin)
Please email submissions of c.6000 words, including endnotes, formatted in Word and in MHRA style*, 12 pt. Times New Roman, double line-spaced, with a 100-word abstract + 5 keywords & 50-word biography, to the editorial team at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org
PLEASE NOTE: ALL SUBMISSIONS WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE ENTERED FOR OUR ANNUAL ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION UNLESS AUTHORS INDICATE OTHERWISE.
*An MHRA Style Guide is available on the Katherine Mansfield Society website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/yearbook-katherine-mansfield-studies/
Creative Writing
We welcome creative submissions of poetry, short stories, and creative essays on the general theme of Katherine Mansfield. Please send submissions for consideration, accompanied by a brief (50 words) biography, to kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 31 AUGUST 2020
Vol. 9.2. of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice is out now with articles on A.M. Homes, Thomas Harris, Lydia Davies, Samuel Beckett, Carson McCullers, Anton Chekhov and more. Plus Jonathan Crane reflects on realism in his own fiction. Robert M. Luscher on the American short story cycle, Felicity Skelton on Canadian fiction and Sarah Whitehead on Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture; and Ailsa Cox interviews Lucy Wood, the Cornish-based author of Diving Belles and The Sing of the Shore.
We welcome submissions of articles, book reviews, interviews, reports and translations on any aspect of short-story writing. For more information contact Ailsa Cox at coxa@edgehill.ac.uk.
Organized by the Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria and the Society for the Study of the American Short Story (SSASS)
Gudrun M. Grabher
University of Innsbruck / Austria
James Nagel
University of Georgia / USA
jnagel@uga.edu
The Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and the Society for the Study of the American Short Story (SSASS) invite proposals for papers and presentations at an international symposium to be held in Innsbruck, Austria, October 15-17, 2020. The venue is the Humanities Building of the University of Innsbruck at Innrain 52. Various hotels in Innsbruck within walking distance from the conference venue will offer special conference rates at around € 125,– for double rooms. Breakfast is included in the price. The conference fee is € 160, and it includes two lunches and two receptions. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2020. All attendees must register for the conference by August 1, 2020. Please register online.
CONTRIBUTIONS
In this symposium, we look forward to discussing the American short story from various perspectives and in a variety of contexts. A central focus will be the reconsideration of the history of the genre through the inclusion of new writers from all racial and ethnic groups, the development of innovative types of stories (flash fiction, micro-fiction, and other forms), and the recovery of fiction published in languages other than English. Close readings of stories by any American author are always appropriate as are broad discussions of historical periods and movements. Audiovisual equipment will be available for the symposium.
ORGANIZATION
The symposium is sponsored by the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck and the Society for the Study of the American Short Story. The directors are Gudrun M. Grabher, Chair of the American Studies Department, and James Nagel, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Georgia.
SUBMISSION
In addition to traditional panels, with three 20-minute papers, the symposium will also hold discussion forums, seminar conversations, and roundtable sessions. Fully-formed panels or discussion groups are especially welcome as are sessions organized by author societies. Creative writers are also invited to present work in progress or to discuss the genre of the short story.
Proposals need be only a single page with one paragraph that describes the subject of the paper and another that gives the credentials of the speaker.
Deadline for submissions is June 15, 2020.
For submissions, please go to the conference website and follow the instructions:
https://webapp.uibk.ac.at/ssass2020/
In today’s world, there is ample evidence of the return of borders worldwide; as a material reality, as a concept, and as a way of thinking. Edited by Barbara Korte and Laura Lojo-Rodriguez, Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story focuses on the ways in which the contemporary British short story mirrors, questions and engages with border issues in national and individual life. It discusses the work of wide range writers including Zadie Smith, Anne Enright, Kamila Shamsie, Valda Jackson, Andrea Levy, Sarah Hall, Hanif Kureishi, China Mieville, Daisy Johnson, Jon McGregor and Helen Simpson, and includes a chapter in which Pete Kalu reflects on his own practice as a Black British writer.
Tinakori:
Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society
Editors: Kym Brindle and Karen D’Souza
‘But this is all a dream you see. I want to come home – to come home’
Letter from Mansfield to Murry [18 March 1918]
Home figures as an ambivalent construct in the writing of Katherine Mansfield. This special issue of Tinakori looks to explore issues of space and belonging in Mansfield’s work. We seek proposals exploring the ways in which aspects of identity in Mansfield’s work are articulated by engagement with both material and emotive notions of home. What is the significance of home and conversely homelessness for Mansfield’s creative imagination? Rosemary Marangoly George stresses that ‘fictionality is an intrinsic attribute of home’, suggesting that ‘home is also the imagined location that can be more readily fixed in a mental landscape than in actual geography’. This issue will focus on intersections between desires for home and the social reality and implications and consequences for domestic space for both men and women. In what ways do Mansfield’s stories contextualize debates about issues of identity and space and place? What impact do representations of home have for characters (and readers) in the quest for meaning?
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
· Place and space
· Exile and homelessness
· Travel and home
· Nostalgia for home
· Memories of home
· Imagined homes
· Thresholds
· Family and home
· Mourning and trauma
· Domesticity: pleasures and unhappiness
· Privacy
· Architecture
· Furnishings and ornament
Please e-mail abstracts of 500 words to brindlek@edgehill.ac.uk and dsouzak@edgehill.ac.uk by 12 July 2019
Completed essays of 5,000 -6,000 words (including endnotes) in MHRA format due 1 November 2019.
Latest issue of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice out now, with articles on Alice Munro, and Elizabeth Strout and new collaborative fiction from Rupert Loydell and Amy Lilwall. There is also an interview with Tessa Hadley and a review of new books on editing. Graham Mort’s story, ‘Emporium’ explores the short story as ‘humble’ fiction from a practice-based perspective, introducing the topic ahead of the forthcoming ENSFR conference on this topic.
Katherine Mansfield: Inspirations and Influences Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland 5–7 July 2019
An international conference organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society Hosted by the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow Supported by Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia Trnava University, Slovakia The New Zealand Embassy, Warsaw and the University of Northampton, UK
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Professor Kirsty Gunn University of Dundee, UK
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
This international conference celebrates the diversity of influences which inspired acclaimed New Zealand modernist short story writer, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). From her upbringing in Wellington, New Zealand, her schooling in London, and her return to Europe at the age of nineteen to begin her career as a writer, Mansfield’s short life was inevitably influenced by the people she met, the many places she visited or lived in, paintings she saw, music she played or listened to, trends in literature and the books she read, and the burgeoning film industry which she experienced both as an actor and an eager spectator. For example, the French Decadent and Symbolist movements would both have a lasting influence on Mansfield’s fiction. Indeed, echoes of, for example, the French symbolists, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the Decadents are to be found in much of her prose writing. As Sydney Janet Kaplan argues,
Pater and Symons provided techniques that Mansfield would use later to uncover, at its deepest level, the culturally determined condition of women. By importing symbolist devices into realistic fiction, Mansfield exemplifies how the malebonded nineteenth-century aesthetes became absorbed into the twentieth-century feminist consciousness.
Most modern critics agree that Mansfield’s own unique form of Modernism was not so much derivative of other contemporary writers but was rather a product of her symbiosis of late-nineteenth-century techniques and themes, as outlined above, for the most part introduced through her reading of Symons when her tastes and preferences started to take shape and she began, with the Symbolists and the Decadents as her dominant influences, to write the sort of fiction which was committed to the possibilities of narrative experimentation.
In the years following her death, Mansfield herself would become an inspiration for – and influence on – other writers, including Elizabeth Bowen, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, as well as the Patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society, author Professor Kirsty Gunn. Indeed, one of Mansfield’s early biographers, Ian Gordon, writes, ‘She had the same kind of direct influence on the art of the short story as Joyce had on the novel. After Joyce and Katherine Mansfield neither the novel nor the short story can ever be quite the same again’.
Suggested topics for papers might include (but are not limited to):
• KM and New Zealand • KM and Russia • KM and France • KM and Poland • KM and Bavaria • KM and Switzerland KM and Symbolism • KM and the fin-de-siècle • KM and A. R. Orage • KM and her contemporaries • KM and World War 1 • KM and modernity/the modern • KM and her literary legacy • KM and music • KM and film • KM and fine arts
Abstracts of 200 words, together with a bio-sketch, should be sent to the conference organisers: Dr Janka Kascakova, Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia Dr Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK Dr Władysław Witalisz, Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.
Submission deadline: 1 February 2019.
The winner of the £10,000 Edge Hill Prize for a published short story collection will be announced at an award ceremony in London on Saturday November 3rd. The shortlisted authors are Tessa Hadley, Sarah Hall, Alison MacLeod, Tom Rachman and Leone Ross. There will be readings from all five collections: book your tickets at Waterstones Bookshop, Piccadilly.
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 7.2 and 8.1 & 2 are all available now. 7.2 is a special issue on ‘Haunting in the Short Story’, with articles from the conference held at the University of Angers in 2015. The double issue 8. 1 & 2 contains articles from the ENSFR annual conference held at Edge Hill in 2016 on the theme ‘”Child of the Century”: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media. It also contains an exclusive translation by Lyn Marven of a story by German writer Roman Ehrlich, and an interview with him by Lyn Marven and Andrew Plowright.
9.1, a general issue, is in preparation for early 2019.