>
>UPDATE:
>
>HYSTORICAL FICTIONS:
>Women, History and Authorship
>
>An international conference to be held 5th - 7th August 2003
>at the University of Wales Swansea, UK
>
>This three-day conference seeks to address the nature of the past and
>history as it is and has been written by women authors. Recent years have
>witnessed a renaissance in women writers using the past in their fiction.
>Authors such as Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Stevie Davies,
>Patricia Duncker, Phillipa Gregory, Jackie Kay, Fatima Mernissi, Toni
>Morrison, Michele Roberts, Rose Tremain, Alice Walker, Sarah Waters and
>Christa Wolf actively engage with the past - not only the past as distant
>from the present, but also specific pasts, specific periods / cultures and
>actual historical figures. If the past is by definition the origin of the
>present, what kind of theorised view of history do women authors offer us?
>Can history, or the use of history in fiction, be theorised? What is it
>about history and the possibilities of (re-)writing it that so appeals to
>(contemporary) women writers? Why the use of a particular historical period?
>What kind of connections are authors trying to create between the period in
>which they write and the period they write about? Does the past merely offer
>a framing discourse for these fictions or is there also a deliberate attempt
>to reclaim the past? Do various genres deal differently with concepts of the
>past and its relationship to the present / future?  This conference seeks to
>explore these issues and the multiple treatments of the past offered by both
>historical and contemporary female authors. Papers on European and world
>literatures are welcome.
>
>Keynote speakers: Stevie Davies, Patricia Duncker
>
>Possible themes might include:
>
>*      History and gender in the 18th-century Gothic novel
>*      Women and 19th/early 20th-century utopia
>*      The future imperfect: contemporary feminist utopia and dystopia
>*      Rewriting earlier narratives
>*      Revisiting the Victorians/Edwardians
>*      Sexing the past
>*      Intertextualities: history into fiction, fiction as history
>*      Fictional representations of historical characters
>*      Herstory: women historians and women's history
>*      Re/Inventing selves: women and auto/biography
>*      Ethnicities: writing race into herstory
>*      Impersonations: men writing the feminine
>*      Alice through the looking-glass: photography and film
>
>Please email a 250-word abstract by Friday 29 November 2002
>to: Ann Heilmann:  [log in to unmask], Mark Llewellyn:
>[log in to unmask]
>Or send to the organisers at the following address: Department of English,
>Keir Hardie Building, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea
>SA2 8PP, UK
>
>
--
Stefani Engelstein
Assistant Professor of German
Department of German and Russian Studies
University of Missouri
454 GCB
Columbia, MO  65211
Telephone: (573) 882-9450
Fax: (573) 884-8456
[log in to unmask]