Posts – Page 6

4 December 20244 December 2024

CFP: Placing Katherine Mansfield

Placing Katherine Mansfield
University of Birmingham
1–3 July 2025

Keynote speakers:
Lauren Elkin (‘Mansfield Walking the City’) and Andrew Harrison (‘Mansfield in the Midlands’)
With a special performance from musician Stepha Schweiger

Katherine Mansfield once wrote ‘How hard it is to escape from places […] — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — little rags and shreds of your very life’. Mansfield’s journeys ‘From the other side of the world / From a little island cradled in the giant sea bosom’ indelibly shaped the form and content of her writing, and the places that she visited and in which she settled throughout Europe exerted a lasting influence on her.
The 2025 conference of the Katherine Mansfield Society will re-examine the importance of place in Mansfield’s writings, while also asking: how do we ‘place’ Mansfield today? How do we situate her work in current critical conversations and against new scholarly debates?
Proposals are invited from researchers at all career stages for individual 20-minute presentations.
Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to):
• KM’s association with specific places (Wellington, London, Fontainebleau, etc.
• KM, the city, and metropolitan urban experience
• KM, the countryside, nature, and non-human worlds
• KM, locality, and regional identity
• KM, the Midlands, and D. H. Lawrence
• KM, borders, and boundary-crossing
• KM, houses, and belonging
• KM and suburbia
• KM, travel, and impermanent/temporary residences (hotels, guesthouses, etc.)
• KM and contemporary literary theory and criticism

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, together with a 50-word biographical sketch, should be sent to kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org before 1 February 2025.
All members of the Katherine Mansfield Society will be eligible to pay a reduced conference fee, with significantly reduced rates available to postgraduate members. To become a member of the society, please visit https://katherinemansfieldsociety.org/join-the-kms/

27 November 202429 November 2024

Edge Hill Prize Shortlist Announced

The shortlisted titles for the Edge Hill Prize 2024 for a published collection from Britain and Ireland are as follows:

Forgetting is How we Survive by David Frankel (Salt)

After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape)

Encounters with Everyday Madness by Charlie Hill (Roman Books)

Monstrous Longing by Abi Hynes (Dahlia Publishing)

Parables, Fables, Nightmares by Malachi McIntosh (The Emma Press)

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by CD Rose (Melville House Publishing)

A new £1,000 Debut Collection Award will also be presented to one of the shortlisted authors to celebrate the best new voices in short story writing, and a £500 prize will be awarded for the best entry from an Edge Hill University postgraduate creative writing student.

The winner will be announced in February 2025 at an award ceremony in London. More details of judges and news about the prize are on its website.

21 October 2024

ENSFR Reading Group

The ENSFR reading group

The ENSFR reading group aims to provide a digital space for early career researchers and postgraduate students to come together and discuss classic and new short fiction. The reading group is co-coordinated by Maddie Sinclair (University of Warwick), Paul Knowles (University of Manchester) and Ines Gstrein (University of Innsbruck).

The group usually meets once per month during term time on Zoom. The link to the meeting room is circulated in advance via a mailing list, together with the set reading for the next meeting. For each meeting, there is a short story to read. There are also some questions to guide our reading and get the discussion started.

New members are always welcome! To sign up for the reading group, please send an email to the contact email address of the reading group: ensfrreadinggroup[at]gmail.com

18 October 202412 December 2024

CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 15 December 2024

Painting by Julia Himmelstein, “3 a.m”, from her Portland exhibit Bodies of Water

Blue Short Stories

Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)

Guest editors : Bénédicte Meillon, Université d’Angers, and Frédérique Spill, Université Jules Vernes Picardie

Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of the ocean, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. Following the recent “blue turn” in the humanities and ecocriticism, which seeks to remedy the rampant “ocean deficit disorder” diagnosed by Dan Brayton and to draw our attention beyond “green,” land-based issues to “blue” ones, the call for papers for this volume arises from the awareness that blue short stories deserve more attention that they have been getting. This special issue of the JSSE will consequently focus on blue short stories, i.e. short stories dealing with marine matters and, more largely, aquatic and terraqueous beings and places in ways that depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to explore short stories that help us venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge, and that may thus promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life. Continue reading “CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 15 December 2024”