CFP: Crime Fiction: Insiders and Outsiders (Deadline 3rd Feb)

CFP: 5th Captivating Criminality Conference:

Crime Fiction: Insiders and Outsiders

28th – 30th June 2018
Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, UK

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its fifth UK conference. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous four successful conferences, Crime Fiction: Insiders and Outsiders, will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre is able to incorporate both traditional ideas and themes, as well as those from outside mainstream and/or dominant ways of thinking.

Crime fiction narratives continue to gain in both popularity and critical appreciation. This conference will consider the ways in which writers who work within generic cultural and critical boundaries and those who challenge those seeming restrictions, through both form and content, have influenced each other. Crime fiction, in its widest sense, has benefited from challenges from diverse ‘outsiders’ who in turn shift and develop the genre. This was as true in the early days of the genre as it is today and, as such, we welcome submissions from the early modern to the present day.

A key question that this conference will address is the enduring appeal of crime fiction and its ability to incorporate other disciplines such as History, Criminology, Film, TV, Media, and Psychology. From the ‘sensational’ novelists of the 1860s to today’s ‘Domestic Noir’ narratives, crime fiction has proved itself to be open to challenges and development from historical and cultural movements such as, feminism, gender studies, queer politics, post modernism, metafiction, war, and shifting concepts of criminality. In addition, crime fiction is able to respond to and incorporate changes in political and historic world events. With this in mind, we are interested in submissions that approach crime narratives from the earliest days of crime writing until the present day.

This international, interdisciplinary event is organised by Bath Spa University and the Captivating Criminality Network, and we invite scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing, to participate in this conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real crime. Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

• Feminist Sleuths (second wave and beyond)
• The Victorian Lady Detective
• Femininity and the Golden Age
• Masculinities
• Crime and Queer Theory
• Crime and War
• Crime and Gothic
• Gothic Outsiders
• Gothic Disruptions and Disturbances
• The Cozy Crime Novel
• Victims and Perpetrators
• Crime Fiction and Form
• The Prison and Other Institutions
• Madness and Criminality
• Technology
• Film Adaptations
• Post-Communist Crime Fiction
• Crime Fiction in Times of Trauma
• Latin American Crime Fiction and Trauma
• The Psychological
• The Detective, Then and Now
• The Anti-Hero
• True Crime
• Contemporary Crime Fiction
• Victorian Crime Fiction
• Eighteenth-Century Crime
• Early Forms of Crime Writing
• The Golden Age
• Hardboiled Fiction
• Forensics and Detection
• The Body
• Seduction and Sexuality
• The Criminal Analyst
• Others and Otherness
• Landscape
• The Country and the City
• The Media and Detection
• Adaptation and Interpretation
• Justice Versus Punishment
• Lack of Order and Resolution

Please send 200 word proposals to Dr. Fiona Peters and Joanne Ella Parsons (captivatingcriminalitynetwork@gmail.com) by 3rd February 2018. The abstract should include your name, email address, and affiliation, as well as the title of your paper. Please feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Postgraduate students are welcome. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome.

Attendance fees:
Full Fee: £135
Reduced Rate £95

For more information go to International Crime Fiction Association

CFP: Animals in Detective Fiction

Since its origins in the mid nineteenth century, detective fiction has been populated by a huge array of beasts. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed (though not without some debate), with Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), then detective fiction’s very first culprit is an animal. Such beastly instances of criminal violence are among the genre’s most recurrent figurings of the non-human. Accordingly, like Poe’s frenzied ourang-outang on the spree in Paris, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) identifies a murderous aggression as part-and-parcel of animal nature. Detective fiction accommodates gentler and more law-abiding creatures too, however. Wilkie Collins, often thought of as the founder of the British detective novel, depicts the villain Count Fosco in The Woman in White (1859) surrounded by his ‘pretties’, ‘a cockatoo, two canary-birds and a whole family of white mice’, while Koko and Yum Yum, the feline sidekicks of Lillian Jackson Braun’s popular The Cat Who… series from the 1960s show animals living on the right side of the law. Detective fiction is also consistently concerned with the human as animal. From the ‘bloodhound’ Sherlock Holmes to Dashiell Hammett’s ‘wolfish’ Sam Spade, detection involves the development of beastly characteristics. Comparably, the criminal is often imagined as the animal in human form, a sign of the descent back down the evolutionary ladder towards a savage state the founder of criminology Cesare Lombroso identified as ‘criminal atavism’. Though often described as an essentially conservative form, the best examples of detective fiction unsettle rigid binarisms to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of animal violence and victimhood, animal metaphor and the intricate ideological work of ‘animality’.

This volume will be the first to engage thoroughly with the manifold animal lives in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form. We are interested in essays that investigate the portrayal of animals in the detective fiction of any period and any region. It is anticipated that the volume will include essays that explore the genre’s most celebrated figures (Poe, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon, Hammett, Walter Mosley etc), alongside less well-known authors. We particularly welcome essays which combine questions of genre with attention to broader ethical and political concerns regarding the representation of animals, encompassing relevant theoretical developments in, for example, animal studies, posthumanism and ecocriticism.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

Animals as detectives

Detectives as animals

Animality/criminality/class

Detection, empire and the traffic in animal bodies

Red herrings

Animal victims

Monstrosity

Queer identities

Anthropocene noir

Animal sidekicks

Detective fiction and natural history

Animal clues

Taxonomic mysteries

Animals, animality and discourses of race

Questions of species and questions of gender

Animals as weapons

Bloodhounds/sleuthhounds

Habitats/borderlands/heterotopias

The volume is intended to form part of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, edited by Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John Miller (http://www.palgrave.com/series/palgrave-studies-in-animals-and-literature/PSAAL/).

Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short biographical statement to Ruth Hawthorn (rhawthorn@lincoln.ac.uk) and John Miller (John.Miller@sheffield.ac.uk) by 31^st March 2017. Essays will be commissioned by 1^st May 2017 for delivery in Winter 2017/2018.

CFP: CRIME AND DETECTION IN 18th- AND 19th-CENTURY BRITAIN

The 6th Warsaw Literary Meeting – – – I-DAY WORKSHOP

DATE: 19 May 2017

COORDINATOR: Dr Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko, University of Warsaw

 DEADLINES:

• proposals (about 200 words) – March 1

• complete papers – April 30

• Submissions: warsaw.literature.meeting@gmail.com

• Website: http://wlm-osb.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-6th-wlm-cfp.html

The 19th century is described as the time of sensational crimes, (developing) police detection, and “the ascent of the detective” (Shpayer-Makov); it is also the period when crime and its investigation were offered as entertainment on a mass scale in penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, sensation fiction, and daily papers. However, it is the 18th century that witnessed the beginnings of the attempts at organising official crime prevention (with Henry Fielding, a writer and a London magistrate, as the man behind it), and Victorian detective and sensational fiction have its roots in 18th-century gothic tales and The Newgate Calendar.

We invite scholars working in various disciplines and fields of study to discuss the ways in which they perceive historic and fictional crime and detection across media and centuries.

SUGGESTED TOPICS & THEMES:

• Night Watch, thief-takers, Bow Street Runners,

‘bobbies’ and plainclothes policemen

• The Metropolitan Police and/vs local police forces
• the ways and means of detection
• the ‘gentleman detective’ and the ‘gentleman criminal’
• fictional female detectives’ exploits
• class, gender, and race in detective stories
• crime in London and in the regions; railway crimes; penal colonies
• the spectacle of crime: public executions, crime and detection on stage
• narrating crime in literature and the press
• adapting and appropriating 18th- and 19th- century criminals and detectives

CFP: Captivating Criminality 4

Captivating Criminality 4

Crime Fiction: Detection, Public and Private, Past and Present

29th June – 1st July 2017

Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, UK

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its fourth UK conference. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous three successful conferences, Crime Fiction: Detection, Public and Private, Past and Present will examine what is arguably the very heart of this field of critical study.

Crime fiction narratives continue to gain in both popularity and critical appreciation. This conference will consider the ways in which both the public and private aspects of criminality and detection merge and differ from each other. The police detective, bound by laws of the state (however loosely adhered to) brings a different set of skills and methods of detection than the often maverick private eye. Of course, detection includes the criminals who attempt to avoid capture – the term ‘anti-hero’ can apply to both upholders of the law and to those evading it.

A key question that this conference will address is the enduring appeal of crime fiction and its ability to incorporate other disciplines such as Criminology, Film, and Psychology. From the ‘sensational’ novelists of the 1860s to today’s ‘Domestic Noir’ narratives, crime fiction has proved itself exceptionally proficient in expanding its parameters to encompass changes in the wider culture. With this in mind, we are interested in submissions that approach crime narratives from the earliest days of crime fiction up until the present day.

This international, interdisciplinary event is organised by Bath Spa University and the Captivating Criminality Network, and we invite scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing, as well as interested parties from Criminology, Psychology, Sociology, and Film and Media, to participate in this conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real crime. Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

• The Detective, Then and Now
• The Anti-Hero
• True Crime
• Contemporary Crime Fiction
• Victorian Crime Fiction
• The Golden Age
• Hardboiled Fiction
• Forensics and Detection
• The Body as Evidence (silent witness)
• Crime and Clues
• Dostoevsky and Beyond: The Genealogy of Crime Writing
• Fatal Femininity
• Seduction and Sexuality
• The Criminal Analyst
• Others and Otherness
• Landscape and Identity
• The Country and the City
• The Media and Detection
• Adaptation and Interpretation
• Justice Versus Punishment
• Lack of Order and Resolution

Please send 300 word proposals to Dr. Fiona Peters (f.peters@bathspa.ac.uk) by 13th February 2017. The abstract should include your name, email address, and affiliation, as well as the title of your paper. Please feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Postgraduate students are welcome. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome.

Attendance fees: £155 (£105 students)

CFP:Criminal America: Reading, Studying and Teaching American Crime Fiction

Call for Papers

American Literature Symposium  

“Criminal America:  Reading, Studying and Teaching  American Crime Fiction”

March 3-4 2017

Keynote Speaker: Charles Rzepka, Boston University

ALA symposia provide opportunities for scholars to meet in pleasant settings, present papers, and share ideas and resources. The March 2017 symposium will focus on American crime fiction, ranging from Poe to the present and beyond, and including all varieties of the genre, from hard-boiled to puzzle mysteries, locked rooms to global conspiracies, dime novels to experimental texts. Subjects might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Crime fiction and space
• Representing class, race, and gender
• Periodizing the genre
• Poe’s precursors
• Narrative technique
• Adaptations
• The future of the genre
• Teaching crime fiction
• Literary vs genre fiction

While we welcome individual proposals, panels and roundtable discussions are also encouraged.

Location:

Palmer House Hilton

17 E Monroe St

Chicago, IL 60603

Hotel Rate: The Palmer House Hilton is offering a special rate of $149 (plus tax) per night for a single or double room. This is a great location in the heart of downtown Chicago.

Conference Director: David Schmid, University at Buffalo

 Conference Fee:  $150

Conference fee includes lunch on both days, as well as a Friday evening reception.

Please email all proposals to David Schmid dschmid1234@gmail.com before December 1, 2016

Deadline reminder: Crime Fiction Here and There 3

Crime Fiction Here and There: Time and Space

13-15 September 2016    (deadline for sending abstracts: 31 May 2016)

3rd International Conference

Organised by the Department of English Language Cultures and Literatures at the University of Gdańsk in cooperation with Captivating Criminality Network and Bath Spa University

From the locked room to the mean streets of the metropolis, the concept of space has always played as important role in crime fiction as the concept of time. A lot has been said in recent years about the importance of a specific locale in crime fiction. Both readers and writers like to divide crime novels into certain national and spatial genre variants: Nordic Noir, Tartan Noir, L.A. Noir etc., but are these variants really so different from each other? How does space define a particular formula? Studies on crime fiction and temporality usually refer to Todorov’s well-known chapter in his book The Poetics of Prose entitled “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” in which he argues that crime fiction narratives are structured by a double temporality: the reconstruction of events leading up to the murder and the progress of the detective’s investigation, with both narratives eventually converging at the point of the crime’s solution. However, if one looks at some contemporary crime novels as well as contemporary criticism this model certainly needs to be revised or at least reformulated. Although the construction of time and space in terms of genre conventions has been discussed quite extensively by critics, there still seems to be room for further analyses.

We invite papers on crime fiction in literature, cinema and the new media which will deal with one or more of the following points (the list is by no means exhaustive):

• constructing time and space in crime narrative
• time and space in nation-specific crime writing (e.g. Polish / Scottish / Austrian crime fiction, Nordic noir, etc.)
• place-specific crime writing (e.g. academic mystery, domestic noir, etc.)
• oneiric, imaginary or other alternative worlds in crime writing
• closure and openness in crime fiction (e.g. locked rooms, manor houses, mean streets, prisons and other ‘crime spaces’ )
• gendered spaces in crime fiction
• the detective and the city
• setting as a protagonist?
• noir city
• psychogeography
• across time and space: movement trajectories in crime fiction
• the aesthetics / theory of space: the ‘spatial turn’ in literature and cinema.

 

Please send an abstract and a short biographical note to crimegdansk@gmail.com by 31 May 2016. The abstract should include a title, name and affiliation of the speaker and a contact email address. We welcome proposals from both postgraduate students and established scholars. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes of presentation time and should be delivered in English.

 Conference fee: 400 PLN (100 Euro/ 75 GBP), Students – 350 PLN (80 Euro/65 GBP)

Conference dinner on Wednesday 14th of September (optional): 25 Euro/20 GBP/ 100 PLN

The fee includes a delegate pack, lunches and other refreshments on all 3 days. Please note that it does not include accommodation. The conference dinner on Wednesday is optional and should be booked during the registration. There is going to be an informal conference warming on Monday, the 12^th of September.

For further information, see our conference website https://www.crimegdansk.wordpress.com

For more information on Captivating Criminality Network, see http://www.captivatingcriminalitynetwork.net

 

Organising committee:

Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim

Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish

Maja Wojdyło

 

Conference secretaries: Irina Antonenko, Arco van Ieperen

 

CFP: Crime Fiction Here and There 3

Crime Fiction Here and There: Time and Space

13-15 September 2016

3rd International Conference

Organised by the Department of English Language Cultures and Literatures at the University of Gdańsk in cooperation with Captivating Criminality Network and Bath Spa University

From the locked room to the mean streets of the metropolis, the concept of space has always played as important role in crime fiction as the concept of time. A lot has been said in recent years about the importance of a specific locale in crime fiction. Both readers and writers like to divide crime novels into certain national and spatial genre variants: Nordic Noir, Tartan Noir, L.A. Noir etc., but are these variants really so different from each other? How does space define a particular formula? Studies on crime fiction and temporality usually refer to Todorov’s well-known chapter in his book The Poetics of Prose entitled “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” in which he argues that crime fiction narratives are structured by a double temporality: the reconstruction of events leading up to the murder and the progress of the detective’s investigation, with both narratives eventually converging at the point of the crime’s solution. However, if one looks at some contemporary crime novels as well as contemporary criticism this model certainly needs to be revised or at least reformulated. Although the construction of time and space in terms of genre conventions has been discussed quite extensively by critics, there still seems to be room for further analyses.

       We invite papers on crime fiction in literature, cinema and the new media which will deal with one or more of the following points (the list is by no means exhaustive):

• constructing time and space in crime narrative
• time and space in nation-specific crime writing (e.g. Polish / Scottish / Austrian crime fiction, Nordic noir, etc.)
• place-specific crime writing (e.g. academic mystery, domestic noir, etc.)
• oneiric, imaginary or other alternative worlds in crime writing
• closure and openness in crime fiction (e.g. locked rooms, manor houses, mean streets, prisons and other ‘crime spaces’ )
• gendered spaces in crime fiction
• the detective and the city
• setting as a protagonist?
• noir city
• psychogeography
• across time and space: movement trajectories in crime fiction
• the aesthetics / theory of space: the ‘spatial turn’ in literature and cinema.

Please send an abstract and a short biographical note to crimegdansk@gmail.com by 31 May 2016. The abstract should include a title, name and affiliation of the speaker and a contact email address. We welcome proposals from both postgraduate students and established scholars. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes of presentation time and should be delivered in English.

Conference fee: 400 PLN (100 Euro/ 75 GBP), Students – 350 PLN (80 Euro/65 GBP)

Conference dinner on Wednesday 14th of September (optional): 25 Euro/20 GBP/ 100 PLN

The fee includes a delegate pack, lunches and other refreshments on all 3 days. Please note that it does not include accommodation. The conference dinner on Wednesday is optional and should be booked during the registration. There is going to be an informal conference warming on Monday, the 12^th of September.

For further information, see our conference website https://www.crimegdansk.wordpress.com

For more information on Captivating Criminality Network, see http://www.captivatingcriminalitynetwork.net

 

Organising committee:

Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim

Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish

Maja Wojdyło

 

Conference secretaries: Irina Antonenko, Arco van Ieperen

 

ESSE 2016: 21st-Century Female Crime Fiction CFP

ESSE 2016: GALWAY, 22–26 AUGUST

21st-Century Female Crime Fiction

PAPER PROPOSALS

Deadline of submission: February 28, 2016

 www.esse2016.org

Co-convenors:

• Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria: wolfgang.goertschacher@sbg.ac.at
• Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish, University of Gdańsk, Poland: agnieszka.sienkiewicz@ug.edu.pl

Crime fiction has been one of the most prolific literary genres for over a century. One subgenre that has really taken off since the early 1980s is female crime fiction. The proliferation of female writing in this area, complete with female sleuths, ranges across styles such as ‘cosy’, ‘hard-boiled’, ‘forensic’, and ‘humanist’. As early as 1987 Sisters in Crime, an organisation that has 3,600 members in 48 chapters worldwide, was founded with the mission ‘to combat discrimination against women in the mystery field’. Today the situation seems to have only slightly changed. This seminar aims to survey the crime scene and question protagonists, victims, and suspects, but also to suggest future developments and lines of investigation.

Deadline reminder: Captivating Criminality 3

Call for Papers

Captivating Criminality 3:

Crime Fiction, Felony, Fear and Forensics

23 – 25^th June 2016, Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, UK

______________________________

The third Captivating Criminality conference will build upon and develop ideas and themes from the first two, Captivating Criminality: Crime Fiction, Darkness and Desire, and Captivating Criminality 2: Crime Fiction, Traditions and Transgression, which took place at Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court campus in 2014 and 2015. This conference will be organised by Bath Spa University and the Captivating Criminality Network: _______________________________

Keynote Speakers

to be announced

____________________________________

Crime Fiction has always been concerned with forensics and draws upon a rich history of the use of forensics in solving crime dating back to a Chinese handbook for coroners called The Washing Away of Wrongs (1247). These days, when we think of forensics the first things that come to mind may well be the cutting-edge of forensic science, often laboratory based and brought to public attention through popular television programmes such as CSI or Silent Witness. However, forensics has been central both to crime fiction and to gathering evidence in ‘real life’ crime: from the first ‘clues’ used in the emerging literary genre of crime fiction to the recognition that even DNA is not always 100% reliable, forensics is utilised in most of the texts that we would, however loosely, term crime fiction. Felony, having committed a serious crime, is often detected by a combination of forensics and fear; the fear of the felon who attempts to leave no trace. Sometimes a murderer ‘gets away with it,’ such as Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Ripliad; other times the felon can be wrongly convicted for a crime, or convicted for a crime different from the one they actually did commit, such as Dr.Bickleigh in Francis Iles’s Malice Aforethought. The intersections between felony, fear and forensics will be explored at this conference, and Bath Spa University and the Captivating Criminality Network invite scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing to attend this international, interdisciplinary conference about these key elements of crime fiction and real crime. Proposals may be based around, but are not restricted to:

• Forensics, then and now.
• The Gothic: fear and terror.
• True crime.
• The dissected body.
• The body as evidence (silent witnesses).
• Crime and clues.
• Bodily traces.
• The role of the profiler.
• The role of the forensic scientist.
• Seduction and sexuality.
• The criminal analyst.
• Poisons
• Crime professionals as criminals (e.g. dexter morgan, blood splatter expert).
• Fear and self-punishment.
• Lack of order and resolution.
• Crime and cultural memory.
• The felon and the forensic.
• Changing cultural definitions of ‘the felon’ and its implications.
• The felon as public spectacle.
• Women as perpetrators of violent crime.
• Maternity and murder.
• Body farms.

Please send 400 word abstracts to Dr Fiona Peters (f.peters@bathspa.ac.uk) by February 1^st 2016. Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a contact email address.* Feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. We welcome proposals from postgraduates. Panel suggestions are also welcomed. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Delegates will be notified by the end of April.

Attendance fees: £145 (£95 students).

* Please note that these details will be distributed in the conference pack on the first day of the conference.

[Reminder] CFP:Murder: Moral Panic, Mythos, Modernity

The deadline for this conferences has been extended until the 5th of June so you’ve got a last chance to get your abstracts in.

CFP:Murder: Moral Panic, Mythos, Modernity.