CALL FOR PAPERS

Fantastic London: Dream, Speculation and Nightmare

Annual Lecture:

Darran Anderson
After London: what apocalyptic visions tell us about the city, from the medieval to the modern

Plenary speakers:

Dr Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck)
Armchair Apocalypse, or, Why Destroying London in Speculative Literature is So Enjoyable?

Prof Rohan McWilliam (Anglia Ruskin)
The Cultural Work of the Victorian West End of London

Proposals are invited for papers, comprised panels, and roundtable sessions, which consider any period or genre of literature about, set in, inspired by, or alluding to central and suburban London and its environs, from the city’s roots in pre-Roman times to its imagined futures. While the main focus of the conference will be on literary texts, we actively encourage interdisciplinary contributions relating to film, architecture, visual arts, topography and theories of urban space. Papers from postgraduate students and early career researchers are particularly welcome for consideration. The following topics and authors are intended to be an indicative but not exhaustive list:

Gaslight romance, the urban gothic, London noir, steampunk & speculative poetry

Future catastrophes, technological dystopias, nightmares of policing & surveillance

Taking flight into alternate geographies of nationhood, citizenship and urban belonging

Architectural caprice, replication and ruin in the development of the built environment

Stories of financial catastrophe, uncertain inheritance and precarious fortune

The search for ontological wholeness in a divided, doubled or allotropic city

The uncanny, arabesque and magical excrescences of the urban everyday

Dramatizing the life of hidden underworlds, anti-worlds & allegorical environments

The Weird: H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Lord Dusany, M. John Harrison

‘Elsewheres’: Doris Lessing, William Morris, J.G. Ballard, Jean Rhys, Anthony Burgess

Urban Gothic: Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens

Underworlds: Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, Michèle Roberts

Make-believe: J.M. Barrie, Cassandra Clare, Philip Reeve, Christina Rossetti, John Clute

***Deadline: March 17th, 2017***

Please submit proposals to http://literarylondon.org/annual-conference

For further information about the conference, please contact Dr Peter Jones at conference@literarylondon.org

For more information about the Literary London Society, please visit our website:
literarylondon.org