Call for Papers - Captivating Criminality 7: Memory, History and Revaluation

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 15^th 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.

CfP for Captivating Criminality 7: Crime Fiction: Memory, History and Revaluation

CfP for Captivating Criminality 7

7th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association, in association with Bath Spa University

Captivating Criminality 7: Crime Fiction: Memory, History and Revaluation

2-4th July 2020

Newton Park campus, Bath Spa University, Bath UK.

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.

6th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association

Captivating Criminality 6: Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fictions - 12-15 June 2019

G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy

Call for Papers

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its sixth conference, which will be held in Italy. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous five successful conferences, Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fictions will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre incorporates elements of real-life cases and, in turn, influences society by conveying thought-provoking ideas of deviance, criminal activity, investigation and punishment.

Since its inception, the genre has drawn inspiration from sensational crime reports. In early nineteenth-century Britain, for example, Newgate novels largely drew on the biographies of famous bandits, while penny dreadfuls popularized the exploits of criminals and detectives to appeal the taste for horror and transgression of their target audience. In similar ways, notorious cases widely reported in the mid-Victorian press, such as the Road Murder (1860) or the Madeleine Smith trial (1857), exerted a significant influence on the imagination of mid- to late-Victorian novelists, including early practitioners of the sensation genre who laid the premises for the creation of detective fiction. In other cases, criminal actions were triggered by literary texts or turned into appealing fictions by journalists. Suffice it to consider the sensation created by Jack the Ripper’s murders in late-Victorian Britain or the twentieth-century recent cases of murders committed by imitators of criminals and serial killers featured in novels like A ClockWork Orange (1962), The Collector (1963), Rage (1977), and American Psycho (1991). In more recent times, the interaction between reality and other media (TV series, films, computer games, websites, chats, etc.) has raised the question of how crime continues to glamorize perturbing, blood-chilling stories of law-breaking and law-enforcement.

In addition to exploring these complex relations between facts and fictions, the conference will focus on the metamorphoses of crime across media, as well as cultural and critical boundaries. Speakers are invited to explore the crossing of forms and themes, and to ascertain the extent to which canonized definitions suit the extreme volatility of a genre that challenges categorization. From an ideological viewpoint, moreover, crime fiction has proved to be highly metamorphic, as it has been variously used to challenge, reinforce or simply interrogate ideas of ‘law and order’. The enduring appeal of the genre is also due to its openness to historical and cultural movements – such as feminism, gender studies, queer politics, postmodernism – as well as to concepts drawn from specific fields of knowledge, such as sociology and psychology. Similarly relevant to the ‘metamorphoses of crime’ are cultural exchanges among remote areas of the world, which add new perspectives to the genre’s representation of customs and ethnical issues.

Scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing are invited to participate in this conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real crime, from the early modern to the present day. Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

• True Crime, Fictional Crime

• 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

• Eighteenth-Century Crime

• Victorian Crime Fiction

• The Golden Age

• Hardboiled Fiction

• Contemporary Crime Fiction

• Postcolonial Crime and Detection

Plenary speakers will be Eric Peter Sandberg (City University of Hong Kong) and Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna).

Please send 200 word proposals to Professor Mariaconcetta Costantini and Dr Fiona Peters to the following email account: captivatingcriminality6@unich.it by 15th February 2019.

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.

New Edinburgh University Press Journal Crime Fiction Studies.

Call for Papers: Crime Fiction Studies 

Volume 1, Issue 1: Why Crime Fiction Today?

We are delighted to announce the call for papers for the first issue of our brand-new Edinburgh University Press journal Crime Fiction Studies. Arising out of Bath Spa University’s very successful Captivating Criminality conferences, organised by Fiona Peters, and the establishment of the International Crime Fiction Association in 2016, this journal is the first British university press journal focussing on the broad field of crime fiction studies. Crime Fiction Studies will be the newest addition to EUP’s stable of prestigious journals, and two issues will be published both in print and online each year. The inaugural issue will set the agenda for discussion of the most pressing issues in contemporary crime fiction studies, providing space for reflection on the ways in which this hugely popular, rapidly developing, and extremely influential genre – and the field of study itself – is changing in the twenty-first century. In the issues that follow, we will be encouraging exploration of diverse aspects of this increasingly important field of cultural production. As editors we believe that there is a real need for a new journal in this area to encourage high-calibre research, engender debate, and forge new directions in crime fiction studies.

We are thus asking for abstracts for the inaugural issue of Crime Fiction Studies that provide thought-provoking, innovative answers to the question ‘why crime fiction today?’ We expect contributions to be theoretically and critically informed, and to engage with current scholarly debates in the field.

Possible areas of focus for the first issue include, but are not limited to:

• True crime

• Gender and queer studies

• New approaches to historical crime fiction

• Crime fiction and science

• Crime fiction in the digital age

• Fandom and fan culture

• Generic and cultural status of crime fiction

• Crime fiction on screen

• New forms of crime fiction

• Ethnicity and crime fiction

• Re-Imagining classic/historic crime 

• Detectives and detection in the twenty-first century

Abstracts of 400 words are due by 31 January 2019 and finished articles of 7500 words will be due by 1 July 2019. This issue will be published in 2020.

Please send abstracts and a biographical statement of 150 words to the editors; Fiona Peters (editor), Eric Sandberg (assistant editor) and Ruth Heholt (assistant editor) using the email address: crimefictionstudies@gmail.com.

6th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association

Captivating Criminality 6: Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fictions 12-15 June 2019

G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy

Call for Papers

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its sixth conference, which will be held in Italy. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous five successful conferences.

Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fictions will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre incorporates elements of real-life cases and, in turn, influences society by conveying thought-provoking ideas of deviance, criminal activity, investigation and punishment.

Since its inception, the genre has drawn inspiration from sensational crime reports. In early nineteenth-century Britain, for example, Newgate novels largely drew on the biographies of famous bandits, while penny dreadfuls popularized the exploits of criminals and detectives to appeal the taste for horror and transgression of their target audience. In similar ways, notorious cases widely reported in the mid-Victorian press, such as the Road Murder (1860) or the Madeleine Smith trial (1857), exerted a significant influence on the imagination of mid- to late-Victorian novelists, including early practitioners of the sensation genre who laid the premises for the creation of detective fiction. In other cases, criminal actions were triggered by literary texts or turned into appealing fictions by journalists. Suffice it to consider the sensation created by Jack the Ripper’s murders in late-Victorian Britain or the twentieth-century recent cases of murders committed by imitators of criminals and serial killers featured in novels like A ClockWork Orange (1962), The Collector (1963), Rage (1977), and American Psycho (1991). In more recent times, the interaction between reality and other media (TV series, films, computer games, websites, chats, etc.) has raised the question of how crime continues to glamorize perturbing, blood-chilling stories of law-breaking and law-enforcement.

In addition to exploring these complex relations between facts and fictions, the conference will focus on the metamorphoses of crime across media, as well as cultural and critical boundaries. Speakers are invited to explore the crossing of forms and themes, and to ascertain the extent to which canonized definitions suit the extreme volatility of a genre that challenges categorization. From an ideological viewpoint, moreover, crime fiction has proved to be highly metamorphic, as it has been variously used to challenge, reinforce or simply interrogate ideas of ‘law and order’.

The enduring appeal of the genre is also due to its openness to historical and cultural movements – such as feminism, gender studies, queer politics, postmodernism – as well as to concepts drawn from specific fields of knowledge, such as sociology and psychology. Similarly relevant to the ‘metamorphoses of crime’ are cultural exchanges among remote areas of the world, which add new perspectives to the genre’s representation of customs and ethnical issues.

Scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing are invited to participate in this conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real crime, from the early modern to the present day.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

•    True Crime, Fictional Crime

•    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

•    Eighteenth-Century Crime

•    Victorian Crime Fiction

•    The Golden Age

•    Hardboiled Fiction

•    Contemporary Crime Fiction

•    Postcolonial Crime and Detection

Plenary speakers will be Eric Peter Sandberg (City University of Hong Kong) and Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna).  Please send 200 word proposals to Professor Mariaconcetta Costantini and Dr Fiona Peters to the following email account:

captivatingcriminality6@unich.it  by 15th February 2019.

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.

The fees are currently being decided; however they will not be more than any previous CC conference, and might be less. We will send details of these asap. There will be a reduction for students.

TRAVEL AND CONFERENCE VENUE INFORMATION

G. d’ Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara is located in Abruzzo, Central Italy. One part of the campus is in Chieti on the Abruzzo hills. The other part, which will be the main venue of the conference, is in Pescara. The Pescara campus, which is near the city center, is very close to the Adriatic coast and the pinewood celebrated by poet Gabriele D’Annunzio in his verse.

Pescara is the biggest city in the region of Abruzzo, and it boasts a vibrant cultural life, with an important jazz festival (Pescara Jazz Festival), a national literary festival (Festival delle Letterature dell'Adriatico), and an international film festival and competition (Flaiano Film Festival and International Awards).

The city has a small airport with direct connections to London Stansted, which might be a useful option for those of you travelling from the UK (Ryanair flight). There are also some Ryanair flights from other European cities).

Anyone planning to travel from British and Continental cities can consider taking a flight to Rome and then take a bus to Pescara (we advise against travelling by train, since the connections are complicated and it takes longer than the bus).

You can check timetables and prices on the following website (for connections from either Fiumicino or Ciampino airports):

https://booking.prontobusitalia.it/public/ricerca.jsf?lang=en

https://www.flixbus.co.uk/ or on the website http://www.dicarlobus.it/ (only for buses departing from Fiumicino)

More detailed information about travel and details on hotels in Pescara will be provided later.

 

Call for Papers: Captivating Criminality 5

Crime Fiction: Insiders and Outsiders

28th – 30th June 2018 - Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, UK

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

•    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