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: £180 (£135 if a member of the International Crime Fiction Association)
Reduced Rate (students, ECRs not on a permanent contract/retired): £130 (£95 if a member of the International Crime Fiction Association)

To join the International Crime Fiction Association please email: captivatingcriminalitynetwork@gmail.com

Full Membership: £20 per annum
Reduced Rate Membership £10 per annum