Conference Call for Papers

Revision, Re-evaluation, Rediscovery… 

‘Re’ words in British Women’s Writing between 1930 and 1960

A One Day conference at the University of Hull

June 24^th, 2016

Revision; Re-evaluation; Revival; Recovery; Resistance; Retrenchment; Reclamation; Rebellion; Revival; Resignation; Rescue; Revolution, Re-working…
Co-organised by Dr Jane Thomas and Sue Kennedy Department of English

Keynote speakers:
Professor Mary Joannou, Anglia Ruskin, Professor Gill Plain, St Andrews

The period of women’s literary history between 1930 and 1960 is beginning to receive the closer attention of literary scholars, feminists and cultural historians. It is a period characterised in many ways by the prefix ‘re’; emblematic of the recurring need for re-evaluation of women’s writing that occupies an uncertain, liminal place in relation to the canon.

Located in the ‘no-man’s land’ recently labelled ‘intermodernism’ by Kristin Bluemel and others, the work of women writers in the period between 1930 and 1960 has been too easily overlooked in assessments of large movements in literature. Situated after the Women’s Suffrage movement, World War One, and high modernism, it remains distinct from the Auden generation, but precedes the appearance of the ‘kitchen sink’, the ‘sexual revolution’, and the woman’s ‘confessional novel’. The thirty-year time-span nonetheless encompasses the destabilisation of Europe, total war, recovery, reconstruction and reform. Whether and how such experiences influenced, implicitly or explicitly, the creative output of the woman writer is a key question for the conference.

While the range and quality of fiction, drama and poetry by British women is attracting more extensive scholarly attention, there is also a growing appreciative audience of what one might call ‘common readers’. It would seem timely now to harvest opinion and analyses of a diverse range of women-authored writing in a broad-based forum. The event will have an interdisciplinary element, welcoming delegates from literary studies, feminist studies, life writing, film, and cultural history, as well as engaging the enthusiastic reader. In addition to celebrating the diversity of women’s writing it is hoped to identify ‘vital figures and cultural forms that disappear in discussions of modernism or postmodernism’ (Bluemel: 6).

We invite abstracts of no more than 250 words for papers of 20 minutes or panels of up to 60 minutes. Please include brief biographical details.
Britwomenwriters30to60@gmail.com
Further details on website: https://britishwomenwriters1930to1960.wordpress.com
Facebook Group: Hull Conference on British Women Writers 1930 to 1960
Twitter: @britwmwriters

In addition to ideas inspired by the ‘re’ words, the following may provide starting points:

• Single author or comparative accounts
• Relationship to realism, modernism, intermodernism, postmodernism, and other ‘–isms’
• The problem of the popular
• Film and other adaptations
• Gender and sexuality
• Women writing genres (Lesbian pulp fiction, Crime, Science fictions, Children’s)
• Women poets
• Transgression and Transformation
• The personal and the political
• Social class, Race
• ‘The Battle of the Brows
• Nostalgia, Memory, Trauma
• ‘Battlegrounds’ of the domestic novel
• Romance
• The ‘Condition of England’
• Humour
• The Hull Connection, e.g. Stevie Smith, Winifred Holtby.  (City of Culture 2017)

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Mary Joannou. Anglia Ruskin University
http://www.anglia.ac.uk/arts-law-and-social-sciences/department-of-english-and-media/our-staff/mary-joannou
Professor Gill Plain. University of St Andrews
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/staff/plain/

Please e-mail with any queries/clarification
Contact email: britwomenwriters30to60@gmail.com
British Women Writers 1930 – 1960 Website

Closing date for submissions: March 15th, 2016