7th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association, in association with Bath Spa University on the 2-4th July 2020 at Newton Park campus, Bath Spa University, Bath UK.
Professor Mary Evans. Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, UK.
Professor Evans is the author of various studies of feminism and feminist writers. Her most recent work ( with Sarah Moore and Hazel Johnstone ) is a study of detective fiction ( Detecting the Modern ) and the theme of that book, of how detective fiction locates the central dynamics of the contemporary world, arises from her continuing interest in the ways in which we learn and acquire our social identities. She also wrote the seminal text, The Imagination of Evil: Crime Fiction and the Modern World.
Professor Thomas Leitch, Professor of English at The University of Delaware. USA.
Professor Leitch teaches undergraduate courses in cinema and graduate courses in literary and cultural theory. His most recent books are The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies and The History of American Literature of Film, both on adaptation. His credentials in crime fiction include three books he wrote or co-edited on Alfred Hitchcock and a book on Perry Mason and Crime Films, which was shortlisted for an Edgar in 2003.
Dr Andrew Pepper, Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. -
Andrew Pepper is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016) and co-editor of Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (2016) and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2020). He has also written a series of detective novels set in 19th Britain and Ireland, all published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Call for Papers
The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its seventh conference, which will be held in Bath, UK. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous six successful conferences, Memory, History and Revaluation, will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre necessarily incorporates elements of the past – the past in general and its own past, both in terms of its own generic developments and also in respect of true crime and historical events. The CfP will thus offer opportunities for delegates to engage in discussions that are relevant to both past and present crime writing.
As Tzvetan Todorov argued in “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” crime fiction in many of its various sub-forms has a special relationship with the past. In classic forms of detective fiction, the central event around which the narrative is organized – the murder – occurs in pre-narrated time, and the actual narrative of the investigation is little more than a form of narrative archaeology, an excavation of a mysterious past event than is only accessible through reconstruction in the present. But this relationship between crime fiction and the past goes beyond narrative structure. The central characters of crime writing – its investigative figures – and frequently represented as haunted by their memories, living out their lives in the shadow of past traumas. More broadly, crime writing is frequently described as exhibiting a nostalgic orientation towards the past, and this longing for the restoration of an imagined prelapsarian Golden Age is part of the reason it has been association with social and political conservatism. On the other hand, there is a strong tradition of radical crime fiction that looks to the past not for comfort and stability, but in order to challenge historical myths and collective memories of unity, order, and security. Val McDermid argues that ‘…crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.’ Thus, crime fiction has been used to challenge, subvert and interrogate the legal and cultural status quo. Crime fiction’s relationship with the past is thus inherently complex, and represents a fascinating, and underexplored, focus for critical work.
Papers presented at Captivating Criminality 7 will thus examine changing notions of criminality, punishment, deviance and policing, drawing on the multiple threads that have fed into the genre since its inception. Speakers are invited to embrace interdisciplinarity, exploring the crossing of forms and themes, and to investigate and challenge claims that Crime Fiction is a fixed genre. Abstracts dealing with crime fiction past and present, true crime narratives, television and film studies, and other forms of new media such as blogs, computer games, websites and podcasts are welcome, as are papers adopting a range of theoretical, sociological and historical approaches.
Topics may include but are not restricted to:
True Crime
Gender and the Past
Crime Fiction in the age of #me too
Crime Fiction from traumatised nations
Crime Fiction and Landscape
Revisionist Crime Fiction
Crime Fiction and contemporary debates
Crime Reports and the Press
Real and Imagined Deviance
Adaptation and Interpretation
Crime Fiction and Form
Generic Crossings
Crime and Gothic
The Detective, Then and Now
The Anti-Hero
Geographies of Crime
Real and Symbolic Boundaries
Ethnicity and Cultural Diversity
The Ideology of Law and Order: Tradition and Innovation
Gender and Crime
Women and Crime: Victims and Perpetrators
Crime and Queer Theory
Film Adaptations
TV series
Technology
The Media and Detection
Sociology of Crime
The Psychological
Early Forms of Crime Writing
Victorian Crime Fiction
The Golden Age
Hardboiled Fiction
Contemporary Crime Fiction
Postcolonial Crime and Detection
Please send 200 word proposals to Professor Fiona Peters, Dr Ruth Heholt and Dr Eric Sandberg, to captivatingcriminality7@gmail.com by 15th February 2020.
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.
Conference Fees: The fee for CC7 will be 155 pounds sterling, with a discounted fee of 105 pounds sterling for students.
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