Author: Karla Cotteau

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Call for Papers: ‘Letters and Literature 1500-2025: histories, forms, communities’

5-7 November 2025 (FREE online only conference)

Deadline for submissions, 20 June 2025

Letters have been described in one evocative image as ‘a form in flight’ (Liz Stanley). Seeking to appreciate more fully such descriptions and their importance for literary studies, we aim to bring together in this online event scholars, writers and researchers interested in exploring letters and literature from the sixteenth century to the present day.

This FREE 3-day online international conference’s broad focus is the letter in its material and textual forms, as manifested across literary history­—from the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the golden age of epistolary fiction, Kate Thomas’ ‘postal plots’ of the nineteenth century, and what Maria Löschnigg and Rebekka Schuh have identified as an Epistolary Renaissance in the work of 21st century writers. Participants are encouraged to engage with this theme in ways including but not limited to the following questions/topics:

  • how, where and why do letters feature in literary texts and literary communities?
  • what strategies of narrative, plot, or character do they illustrate and deploy?
  • the role of materiality in literary letters
  • letters as vehicles for exploring writers’ ideas about the public and the private, absence and presence, the global and the local, and/or notions of authenticity and the ‘authentic self’
  • letters and literary reputations
  • letter writing manuals and the development of literary history
  • what counts as a letter in twenty-first century narratives?

Letters have also been described as the ‘epistolary form of gift exchange’ (Stanley). We seek contributions investigating letters as makers and markers of creative communities, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • the role of letters in writers’ networks
  • imagined letters/letters unsent
  • writers’ letters from prison
  • representation or employment of letters in diasporic/migrant epistolary narratives

Creative responses to all these issues are very much welcomed.

And with a keen eye on issues of preservation and representation, we are interested to hear too from those working on the editing of writers’ letters (print and digital), and on letters in the archives.

We welcome individual paper presentations or round table discussions in any of the following formats:

  • Individual paper (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words)
  • Individual lightning talk (7 minutes speaking time/1000 words)
  • Round table panel, up to 5 participants (40 minutes speaking time in total)
  • Creative writing responses or creative/critical responses to conference themes (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words).

To propose a paper, response or panel to present at the conference, please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biography (50 words) to Sara Haslam by 20 June 2025. We welcome proposals from individuals at all stages of their academic careers, including graduate students, and dedicated graduate student panels are anticipated for the event. We will aim to inform you of the outcome of your proposal submission by 30 July 2025. The conference will be FREE to attend, but registration in advance will be required. A Journal Special Issue is a planned outcome.

This conference is organised by colleagues in the Department of English and Creative Writing (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) together with colleagues in Languages and Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies) at The Open University. The conference is supported by OpenARC, The Open University’s Arts Research Centre in the School of Arts and Humanities, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and by the History of Books and Reading (HOBAR), Contemporary Cultures of Writing, Digital Humanities, and Literature and Politics research groups in the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS) at the Open University.

Conference Lead Organiser: Sara Haslam

Programme Committee members: Francesca Benatti; Daria Chernysheva; Delia da Sousa Correa; Rachele De Felice; Jonathan Gibson; Ed Hogan; Peg Katritzky; Lania Knight; Philip Seargeant; Jennifer Shepherd; Emma Sweeney; Shafquat Towheed; Nicola Watson; Anne Wetherilt.

Conference website: https://digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/

Visual 1: Detail from letter, Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, Bath, 12 May 1801. Morgan Library and Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia.
Visual 2: Detail from Reginald Marsh “Unloading the Mail”. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Full scale image available at https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.24950. No known copyright restriction.

 

 

 

 

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Spotlight PhD/ECR Interview Series: Maddie Sinclair, by Ines Gstrein

  1. Why did you choose to work on short fiction in your PhD thesis?

During an MA at Durham University, I became interested in the genre’s marginality in the context of literary production.  I encountered an interesting quote from J.G. Ballard which got me thinking about the hierarchy of genres and the unevenness of literary space. In an introduction to a collection, he describes short stories as the “loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit” (Ballard 2023: 80). My PhD research was inspired by this conceptualization of the short story as a kind of literary loose change in the “treasury of fiction” – a treasury largely dominated by the privileged genre of the novel. It worked to highlight the distinct political affordances of short fictional forms emerging in the twenty-first century.

  1. In your opinion, what is an essential quality for a short story?

I’m certainly not the first person to suggest this, but for me, the best short stories work to defamiliarize reality as we know it. I’m thinking, for example, about Julio Cortázar’s description of the “peculiar” atmosphere of the short form in “Aspects of the Short Story”. For Cortázar, while the novel “progressively accumulates effects upon the reader”, the short story paradoxically illuminates – through its inherent brevity – something “beyond itself” (Cortázar 1980: 8-12). I’m interested in writers who experiment with the short story as a distinct site of surrealist disruption, which potentially illuminates human experience, or catalyzes political thought.

  1. Could you tell me about something you found particularly striking when analysing the twenty-first century short story?

During my PhD research at University of Warwick, I was really struck by the efflorescence of short forms emerging in the twenty-first century which push the aesthetics of brevity to its literary extreme, such as digital fiction and flash fiction. I’m excited to read future research which unpacks the possibilities offered by these experimental subgenres, as they respond to our fragmentary yet hyper-connected modern world.

References

Ballard, J. G. (2023). Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007. United Kingdom: MIT Press.

Cortázar, Julio. (1980).  ‘Some Aspects of the Short Story’, trans. By Aden Hayes, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature Culture and Theory, 38:1, p. 8-18.

Maddie is an Early Career Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick, UK. She has recently completed her Wolfson Foundation funded doctoral research in English and Comparative Literary Studies, which focused on world literature, feminist studies, and the politics of the short story in the twenty-first century.

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Best British Short Stories 2024 edited by Nicholas Royle

Salt Press has recently published Best British Short Stories 2024, edited by Nicholas Royle. It features stories by Alan Beard, Kevin Boniface, Paul Brownsey, Claire Carroll, ECM Cheung, Jonathan Coe, Rosie Garland, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Timothy Jarvis, Cynan Jones, Bhanu Kapil, Sonya Moor, Alison Moore, Gregory Norminton, Nicholas Royle, Cherise Saywell, Kamila Shamsie, Ben Tufnell, Charlotte Turnbull and Cate West.

 

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Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices, by J.R (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corrine Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross

Edinburgh University Press releases Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices, by J.R (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corrine Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross – an engaging and authoritative assessment of the middle period in the career of Alice Munro, and an exciting new model for how criticism can be collectively written.