Month: July 2009

At the ninth biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute (University of Prince Edward Island), we invite you to consider L.M. Montgomery and the matter of nature. In recent years, the matter of nature has been the subject of much contested debate and theoretical innovation across disciplines. While multiple romanticisms have informed L.M. Montgomery’s passionate views of the natural world, her complex descriptions show her writing both of and for nature. This complexity extends as well to the depiction of cultural and gendered mores (domesticity, friendship, faith, community, biological determinism) as both natural and cultural. In all its forms, nature situates binary relationships that are often represented as hierarchical and oppositional: nature and culture; child and adult; animal and human; female and male; emotion and reason; body and mind; traditional and modern; raw and cooked; wild and domestic; rural and urban.

We invite the submission of abstracts that consider these issues in relation to Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, life writing, photographs, and scrapbooks, as well as the range of adapted texts in areas of film, television, theatre, tourism, and online communities. Possible questions include:

• What are the effects of the representations and images of nature that are crafted and circulated in Montgomery’s work?
• How do Mongomery’s narrations of nature shape children and adults within and across cultures?
• How do particular constructions of nature work in fiction, across such differences as gender, race, culture, and class?
• What are the cultural and historical contingencies surrounding nature in Montgomery’s work?
• What does it mean to consider Montgomery as a “green” writer (Doody) or as a proto-ecofeminist (Holmes)?
• What do Montgomery’s provocative readings of nature offer us at a time of environmental crises and ecological preoccupations?
• How does the notion of “nature” impact some of the most central preoccupations in Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, and life writing (the nature of war, of mental illness, of cultural inheritance, of conflict, of same-sex friendships and of heterosexual marriage, of cultural memory, of national ideologies)?

Abstracts should clearly articulate the paper’s argument and demonstrate familiarity with current scholarship in the field (please see http://lmmresearch.org/bibliography for an updated bibliography). For more information, please contact the conference co-chairs directly: Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre (ben@roomofbensown.net) and Dr. Jean Mitchell (mjmitchell@upei.ca). All proposals will be vetted blind and should therefore contain no identifying information.

Please submit one-page abstracts and short biographical sketches by 15 September 2009 to the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s OCS page (http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010).

If you’ve already submitted an abstract for the 2010 Conference, please verify that it has been received by emailing the director at lmmi@upei.ca. All those who were registered through the 2008 OCS page have been made authors and should go to http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/presenter/submit/1 to submit their abstracts. If you were registered, but have forgotten your password, please use the Reset Password link located here: http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/login/lostPassword. If this is your first time using OCS for the L.M. Montgomery Conference, then please register yourself as an author here: http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/user/account?source=&requiresPresenter (make sure to select the “Create account as Author: Able to submit items to the conference” option at the bottom of the registration form).

Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction first appeared in 1984, at a time when the study of children’s literature was just beginning to take off in academic departments. It was a formidable gauntlet, lauded by some, castigated by others, and mistunderstood by many, but it has more than stood the test of time. Twenty-five years on, it is still one of the most quoted books in children’s literature criticism.

To mark this occasion, a special issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly will be devoted to a reconsideration of Rose’s “case.” Papers are invited on any aspect of her thesis, including (but not limited to):

• the theoretical roots of Rose’s “case”
• the work’s overall validity (is children’s fiction utterly impossible, partially possible, or neither of the above?)
• its current relevance (has it been superseded by later theoretical developments, or are her ideas as pertinent as ever?)
• its relevance to other texts (is Peter Pan exemplary or exceptional? can one “apply” Rose’s ideas?)
• does her thesis apply to children’s fiction only, or to other areas of children’s literature and culture (e.g. poetry, drama, non-fiction, film, toys, computer games)?

Please send your papers (which should conform to the usual house-style of ChLAQ, and be between 5000-7000 words in length) to both guest editors, David Rudd (d.rudd@bolton.ac.uk) and Anthony Pavlik (cb2007@boun.edu.tr), by November 1, 2009.

The selected articles will appear in ChLAQ, Fall 2010.

Liverpool John Moores University’s international conference on The Theory and Practice of Working With Children and Young People is taking place from June 23 to 25, 2010 in Liverpool. The five conference themes are:

• Evidence Based Practice
• Growing up in the globalised ‘risk’ society
• Participation
• Higher Education
• Health and Well-Being Participation

The link to the conference website, with further details and the call for papers and posters is http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/HEA/news/wwcypconf/. If you would like any further information on the conference, you can contact us at 0151 231 8175 or email wwcayp-enquiries@ljmu.ac.uk.

Deadlines: 15 November 2009 and 1 February 2010

This proposed collection of essays seeks to address the interplay between nationalism (or nationalisms) and cultural memory in a range of texts for or about young people, including books, periodicals, films, television series, games, tourism sites, websites, and archives. The overall collection will be concerned with the ways in which cultural memory is shaped, contested, forgotten, recovered, and (re)circulated, sometimes in opposition to dominant national narratives, featuring young characters and/or targeting young readers who are often assumed not to possess any prior cultural memory. Submissions that examine the circulation of such texts across national borders are particularly welcomed.

Possible topics include:

• Texts for children and/vs. texts for adults (as well as crossover texts);
• Transnational co-productions or co-publishing ventures;
• Textual transformations (adaptations, translations, abridgments, retellings, parodies, fan/slash fictions, authorized or unauthorized sequels and prequels);
• Depictions of the past and the future (including history/biography, revisionist histories, science fiction and futurism);
• The circulation of colonial and postcolonial discourses (from empire to colony, or from former colony back to empire);
• Depictions of war and conflict, particularly contentious historical and political conflicts;
• The role of food, dress, and festival in the transmission of cultural memory;
• The cultural production of texts, including branding, genre, and assumptions about gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, and nationality;
• Reception of texts, either by critics/scholars or by young people.

The collection of essays will be edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, a Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at the University of Worcester. Deadline for 200-word abstracts and bionote: 15 November 2009. Deadline for 20- to 25-page chapters: 1 February 2010. Please direct abstracts to the editor by e-mail: ben@roomofbensown.net. Authors whose work is selected for inclusion in the volume will be invited to present part of their work in progress at a one-day symposium to be held at the University of Worcester in April 2010. Queries are welcomed at any time.