Fourteenth International Robert Graves Conference

Robert Graves and Europe: Good-bye to All That / But It Still Goes On

La Caixa, Palma, Mallorca

10-14 July 2018

Organised by the Robert Graves Society with the Fundació Robert Graves

The Robert Graves Society is pleased to announce that the Fourteenth International Robert Graves Conference will be held at La Caixa, Palma, Mallorca, from 10 July to 14 July 2018. The theme of the conference will be ‘Robert Graves and Europe: Good-bye to All That / But It Still Goes On’.

‘If Europe ever became sufficiently civilized to dispense with customs officers and police, which are the external manifestations of international mistrust and dislike...’ This brief aside on what a civilized Europe might look like in future is from a translation by Robert Graves published in 1956. The text Graves translates – George Sand’s Un Hiver à Majorque (Winter in Majorca) – is itself a complex demonstration of cultural misunderstanding across borders, cultures and languages through which Graves as translator proves an entertainingly mischievous travel guide. The conference will explore any aspect of Graves and Europe, from his own life and work in Mallorca, to the relevance of his writing for our European present and future.

Keynote speakers include Fran Brearton, Patrick McGuinness and Michael Schmidt. Robert Graves conferences traditionally embrace the creative in addition to the critical, and the conference will also host musical and literary events to be announced in due course. At the previous Palma conference in 2014 readings were given by, amongst other eminent writers, Ruth Fainlight, David Harsent, Michael Longley, and Sean O’Brien.
 
CALL FOR PAPERS
 
Proposals are invited for papers (20-30 minutes) on relevant topics relating to Graves and/or his contemporaries. These could include but are not limited to:
•        Graves’s European literary and artistic networks
•        Graves and European literatures
•        Displacement and exile / borders and crossings
•        Graves and the Spanish Civil War / the Second World War
•        Graves and Mallorca
•        Graves’s other European places and identities
•        Graves and literary translation
•        Graves and European mythology
•        Graves and the Roman Empire
•        Graves and the First World War in the centenary of the Armistice

Critical responses to recent works on Graves, papers on research in progress, on recently discovered archival material of interest to Graves scholars, on digital collections or on exhibitions of Graves’s work, and on the comparative European engagements of Graves’s contemporaries, are also welcome.

Please send an abstract (max. 250 words) by 31 January 2018 to the conference organiser and President of the Robert Graves Society: 
 
Dr Charles Mundye, FEA
Head of Academic Development
Department of Humanities
Faculty of Development and Society
Sheffield Hallam University
City Campus
Howard Street
Sheffield S1 1WB

E: [log in to unmask]

T: +44 (0)114 225 2059

President, Robert Graves Society
http://www.robertgraves.org

Fellow, English Association
http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association
 
 PARTICIPANTS
The conference is open to all. It will be of interest to academics, teachers, research students, and anyone else who is interested in the life and writings of Robert Graves and his circle. The series of Robert Graves conferences have built up a reputation for their scholarly excellence and their friendly dialogue among participants from a wide variety of backgrounds, both lay and academic, and the Graves family itself.

To register an interest in attending the conference as a non-speaker, please e-mail the Robert Graves Society Treasurer and Secretary Patrick Villa: [log in to unmask]