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Katherine Mansfield and Children: Call for Papers

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

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Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 9.2 and call for papers.

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.

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International Symposium: The American Short Story Old and New

International Symposium: The American Short Story: Old and New, October 15-17, 2020

Organized by the Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria and  the Society for the Study of the American Short Story (SSASS) 

The American Short Story: Old and New
October 15-17, 2020

goldenesdachl 
Photo: Robin Peer
CONFERENCE DIRECTORS

Gudrun M. Grabher
University of Innsbruck / Austria

gudrun.m.grabher@uibk.ac.at

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/

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Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story

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.

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CFP – 60th SAES Congress. University of Tours. 4 – 6 June 2020 “RenaissanceS”

Call for papers for the joint workshop organised by the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) and The Journal of the Short Story in English:

Even as literature and the arts of the 20th century were setting new horizons for creation, they often engaged in an inventive dialogue with the Renaissance period. From the end of the 19th century to the early 21st century, the period has offered a rich reservoir of texts, historical subjects, interrogations and experiences that have been rewritten across the centuries to constitute part of the organic fabric of literature and the arts.

The influence of the Renaissance has taken many forms, from direct intertextual references to less identifiable traces. In most cases however, the Renaissance has, as expected, been read as the founding moment of our humanist model, as well as the matrix of an individualism that has been endlessly reassessed without being radically disqualified. This explains the return of modernist and contemporary writers to a period that works as an allegorical mirror for current interrogations. Virginia Woolf sets the early moments of her historical fantasy, Orlando (1928) during the Elizabethan period, to better ground her exploration of identity fashioning in an age that was both foundational of individualism and already harboured dissenting views of what constitutes selfhood. Lytton Strachey also understood the extraordinary potential of the period which he reinvented in Elizabeth and Essex (also published in 1928). Today, the Renaissance has enjoyed a renewal of interest, both in the field of historical fiction (see Peter Ackroyd’s fantasised reinvention of Renaissance occultism in The house of Doctor Dee [1993], or Jeanette Winterson’s own take on Renaissance expansionism in Sexing the Cherry [1989]), popular culture, life-writing as well as more experimental artistic forms (see Martin Crimp and George Benjamin’s reappropriation of Marlowe’s Edward II, in their latest collaboration, the opera Lessons in Love and Violence [2018]).

On the other side of the Atlantic, the term Renaissance has been used to describe books released by major authors in the middle of the 19th century, a period during which the short story established itself through magazine publications. Major authors produced work they felt inferior to their longer endeavors but some of them started reflecting, as Poe famously did, on the art of the short story, writing almost exclusively short forms (poems and short stories). This “Renaissance” is closely related to the renewal of American letters, to the exploration of the American space and the American psyche. Critics then located a “lesser” Renaissance in the 1920s, in the cultural boom that followed WWI. There again, the short story imposed itself with such writers as Cather, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Toomer or Boyle, who were influenced by the emerging modernist movement developing in Europe. For some short story writers, Europe also appears as the locus for renaissance—Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Edith Wharton, and later John Cheever and Elizabeth Spencer all spent time in the Old World and made their characters reflect on their identity.

“RenaissanceS” can thus refer to experiment both in form and content. The term should be read as a metaphor for aesthetic renewal and reinvention. The short-story and 20th and 21st century English literature have often revisited past forms in order to self-reflexively explore the mecanisms of fiction-making and the ideological economy of representation. One should however distinguish between the revival of past forms and parody, although parody may constitute one of the chosen instruments of aesthetic revival. The renaissance of pastoral poetry in the 20th century, as well as that of gothic fiction, or of utopian writing in feminist fiction, testify to the creative potential of looking back in order to invent the literature to come and to critically embrace the present.

The workshop organised jointly by the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) and by the Journal of the Short Story in English welcomes proposals that will address the category of the “RenaissanceS” from an intertextual perspective as well as contributions exploring the history and critical rationale of aesthetic renaissance. Contributors may also turn to the philosophical and theoretical legacy of the Renaissance, whether it be in the form of a critical humanism — for instance in the permanence of dystopian fiction since the 1940s —, or in the deconstruction of travel or discovery narratives. Choosing to revive past forms or subjects is thus more than playful. It allows modern and contemporary art and literature to fathom their own historical and epistemological determinisms and to historicize their own situation as regards their legacy as well as their future.

 

Corpus to be addressed:

— 20th and 21st century British literature or visual arts

— The genre of the short-story (19th – 21st centuries, GB / US)

 

Proposals for papers in English (300 words, plus critical bibliography,) should be sent to

Catherine Bernard: catherine.bernard@univ-paris-diderot.fr

Gerald Preher: Gerald.PREHER@univ-catholille.fr

by November 2nd.

 

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Programme Short Fiction as Humble Fiction

We are delighted to present the programme for this year’s ENSFR Conference in Montpellier:

Short Fiction as Humble Fiction

An International Conference organised by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) with ENSFR (The European Network for Short Fiction Research)

 

17-18-19 October 2019

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France

Site Saint Charles 2

Auditorium & Salle Kouros

Convenors: Jean-Michel Ganteau & Christine Reynier

 

 

 

Thursday 17 October

9h45-10h15 Welcome

 

Auditorium

10h15 Opening of the Conference

 

10h30 Keynote lecture

Chair: Christine Reynier

Elke D’hoker (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Humbling the Human: Animals in Contemporary Short Fiction

 

11h30 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

12h Parallel panels

 

Ecocritical Echoes (Auditorium)

Chair: Judith Misrahi-Barak

       Xavier Le Brun (University of Angers, France)

Malcolm Lowry’s Humble Hypotyposes in Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961)

       Diane Leblond (University of Lorraine, France)

Organic Connections and Creatures of Compost in Ali Smith’s “The Beholder” (2015) and Daisy

Johnson’s “Starver” (2016): When Humility Reframes the Ambition of Short Fiction

 

Humble Details (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Julián Jiménez Heffernan

       Maxwell Donaldson (University of Aberdeen, UK)

The “Little” Things: An Exploration of the Use of Gesture in J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories

       Etienne Février (University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France)

Humble Ambitions: Steven Milhauser’s Short Fiction

 

13h Lunch Break

 

14h30 Parallel panels

 

Invisibilities 1 (Auditorium)

Chair: Elke D’hoker

       Julián Jiménez Heffernan (University of Córdoba, Spain)

The Humiliating Thing: Infrastructural Storytelling in Henry James’s “Julia Bride”

       Emmanuel Vernadakis (University of Angers, France)

Tourism, Tourists and the Humble in E. M. Forster’s “The Story of the Siren” (1920)

       Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

Haunted Space and the Inescapable Past in May Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories (1923)

       Victoria Margree (University of Brighton, UK)

Imitation and Innovation in the Ghost Stories of Eleanor Scott

 

Humble Women (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Bryony Randall

       Diane Drouin (Sorbonne University, France)

“A ridiculous little accident”: Mina Loy’s Forgotten Short Stories

       Elena Gelasi (University of Cyprus)

The Lonely Voice of Women. The Humblest among the Humble. From Freeman to Simpson

       Ena Panda (University of Delhi, India)

Representation of Alienation in Short Stories Written by Contemporary Francophone Women

Writers of Québec

       Ailsa Cox (Edge Hill University, UK)

An Extremely Private Literary Giant

 

16h15 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

Auditorium

16h45

Short Story Competition

Short Story Readings 1

 by Cormac James, Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Ailsa Cox

 

Jardin d’hiver

18h Cocktail

Friday 18 October

 

10h Auditorium

 

Humble War Stories

Chair: Isabelle Brasme

       Elsa Högberg (Uppsala University, Sweden)

‘Unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world’: Katherine Mansfield’s Cries

       Lisa Feklistova (University of Cambridge, UK)

‘Humble struggles’ —Mundane Routine in the Short Story in the Wake of the Great War

       Lucy Durneen (University of Cambridge, UK)

“Walking back into your besieged life”: War Stories, Humbly Told

 

 

11h30 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

12h Keynote lecture

Chair : Jean-Michel Ganteau

Ann-Marie Einhaus (Northumbria University, UK)

Scraps of Paper? First World War Short Fiction and the Ephemeral

 

13h Lunch (Salle Médicis)

 

 

14h30 Parallel panels

 

Migrants and Refugees (Auditorium)

Chair: Emma Liggins

       Judith Misrahi-Barak (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

The Writing of the Refugee: Re-examining ‘bare life’ in Edwidge Danticat’s Short Stories from

‘Children of the Sea’ to ‘Without Inspection’

       Carol Millner (Curtin University, Western Australia)

       Trace: Short Fiction and the Western Australian Migrant Experience

       Laura Gallon (University of Sussex, UK)

Short Stories & Recipes: A Reflection on Food, Gender and Genre

 

Ordinary Lives (Salle Kouros)

Chair : Emmanuel Vernadakis

       Florence Marie (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France)

Dorothy Richardson’s Humble Short Fiction

       Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow, UK)

‘Partly in Prose’: Woolf’s Humble Cutbush

       Mallory Alexandre (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

“My roots go down to the depths of the world”: Virginia Woolf’s Humble Short Fiction

 

16h Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

Auditorium

16h30 Short Story Readings 2

by Jane Alexander, Lucy Durneen, Dan Powell,

Alison Boumid and John David Rutter

 

20h Dinner in town

 

 

Saturday 19 October

 

9h30 Parallel panels

 

Regional and National Identities (Auditorium)

Chair: Ann Marie Einhaus

       Alda Correia (New University, Lisbon, Portugal)

Regionalist Short Fiction as Humble Fiction

       Gérald Préher (UC Lille, France)

Shirley Ann Grau’s “The Empty Night”: The Humble Story Behind a Pulitzer-Prize Winner

       Kritika Chettri (University of North Bengal, India)

The Nepali Short Story and its Humble Conflicts

 

Invisibilities 2 (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Xavier Le Brun

       Leila Haghshenas (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

Humbled Selves in Leonard Woolf’s Short Fiction

       Tina Terradillos (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

Radclyffe Hall’s Short Fiction: A Humble Ethics of the Flawed

        Sylvie Maurel (University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France)

From Minority to Humility: Jean Rhys’s Short Fiction

 

11h Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

11h30 Parallel panels

 

Specific Forms (Auditorium)

Chair: Ailsa Cox

       Ashutosh Bhardwaj (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India)

Conversations between the Story and the Novel: Reflections on the Self and the Other

       Jane Alexander (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Writing chronic illness in short fiction

 

 

Readers (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Sandrine Sorlin

       Amanda Bigler (University of Lille, France)

Empathic Second-Person Narrators in Short Fiction

       Dan Powell (University of Leicester, UK)

The shape of the British Short Story in the Mid-twentieth Century: Developing a Preclosural

Methodology for Writing Short Fiction

       John D. Rutter (University of Central Lancashire, UK)

The Death of the Reader

13h Lunch (Salle Médicis)

 

Tour of Montpellier

Musée Fabre

 

 

Organising Committee

Lynn Blin, Alice Borrego, Charlotte Chassefière, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Laura Lainvae, Xavier Le Brun, Maroua Mannai, Katia Marcellin, Judith Misrahi-Barak, Christine Reynier, Tina Terradillos

https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/

 

 

 

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CFP- The Short Story’s Global Dimensions – ACLA Chicago March 2020

A Seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, March 19-22, 2020. Organizers: Gavin Jones (grjones@stanford.edu) and Mike Collins (michael.collins@kcl.ac.uk).
We welcome proposals for papers on aspects of the short story for the seminar described below. Please send proposals to the Seminar’s organizers by August 30, 2020.
Here is a link to the Seminar on the ACLA conference website

Continue reading “CFP- The Short Story’s Global Dimensions – ACLA Chicago March 2020”

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Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society 

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.

Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society is an official online series, recognised by the British Library and with its own ISSN number: ISSN 2514-6106.
All essays submitted will be double peer-reviewed prior to acceptance.
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Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 9.1

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.