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From: "Heilmann A." <[log in to unmask]>
Hystorical Fictions: Women, History and Authorship
An International Conference to be held 5th - 7th August 2003
at Gregynog Hall, University of Wales, UK.
This three-day conference seeks to address the nature of the past and
history as it is and has been written by women authors. Recent years have
witnessed a renaissance in women writers using the past in their fiction.
Authors such as Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Stevie Davies,
Patricia Duncker, Phillipa Gregory, Jackie Kay, Fatima Mernissi, Toni
Morrison, Michele Roberts, Rose Tremain, Alice Walker, Sarah Waters and
Christa Wolf actively engage with the past - not only the past as distant from
the present, but also specific pasts, specific periods / cultures and actual
historical figures. If the past is by definition the origin of the present, what
kind of theorised view of history do women authors offer us? Can history, or
the use of history in fiction, be theorised? What is it about history and the
possibilities of (re-)writing it that so appeals to (contemporary) women
writers? Why the use of a particular historical period? What kind of
connections are authors trying to create between the period in which they
write and the period they write about? Does the past merely offer a framing
discourse for these fictions or is there also a deliberate attempt to reclaim
the past? Do various genres deal differently with concepts of the past and its
relationship to the present / future? This conference seeks to explore these
issues and the multiple treatments of the past offered by both historical and
contemporary female authors. Papers on European and world literatures are
welcome.
Keynote speakers: Stevie Davies, Patricia Duncker
Possible themes might include:
- History and gender in the 18th-century Gothic novel
- Women and 19th/early 20th-century utopia
- The future imperfect: contemporary feminist utopia and dystopia
- Rewriting earlier narratives
- Revisiting the Victorians/Edwardians
- Sexing the past
- Intertextualities: history into fiction, fiction as history
- Fictional representations of historical characters
- Herstory: women historians and women's history
- Re/Inventing selves: women and auto/biography
- Ethnicities: writing race into herstory
- Impersonations: men writing the feminine
- Alice through the looking-glass: photography and film
Please email a 250-word abstract by Friday 29 November 2002 to:
[log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], or
[log in to unmask]
Or send to one of the organisers: Ann Heilmann, Mark Llewellyn, Rachel
Sarsfield
Hystorical Fictions Conference
Department of English
University of Wales, Swansea
Singleton Park
Swansea,
United Kingdom
SA2 8PP
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