CFP: Literary London 13–14 July 2017

‘Fantastic London: Dream, Speculation and Nightmare’

Hosted by the Institute of English Studies, University of London Joseph Gandy, ‘Bank of England as a Ruin’, 1830, Oil on Canvas, Soane Museum, London 

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Call for Papers (deadline: 1 February 2017)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 are particularly welcome for consideration. Indicative topics and writers who might be addressed:

• Gaslight romance, the urban gothic, London noir, steampunk & speculative poetry
• Future catastrophes, technological dystopias, nightmares of policing & surveillance
• Forms of fictional flight into alternate ontologies of nationhood 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

Please submit all proposals using the links under ‘Conference’ above. If you have any queries, please contact the conference organiser Dr Peter Jones at conference at literarylondon dot org

The conference location is the Institute of English Studies, University of London. For more information about the institute, please go to http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/.