Call For Papers
NB final CFP deadline 1 May 2010
You may go all over the States, and … you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow … local custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the nineteenth century – imperia in imperio, foreign things at home.
RLS, ‘The Foreigner at Home’
The sixth biennial Stevenson conference will be held from 8-10 July 2010 at the University of Stirling (scene of the first conference in 2000).
This return to a Scottish starting-point may invite attention to origins and locality, but the restless motion of Stevenson’s writing exerts a different pressure. Our conference theme of ‘Locating Stevenson’ is concerned with charting this motion rather than fixing Stevenson’s co-ordinates; with orientating, rather than merely positioning, his work within the fields of literary genre, period, movement and genealogy, for example, and within debates about nation, tradition, place and identity. This shift from the map to the compass seems suited to the mobility of Stevenson’s own writing and life.
Viewed from another angle, the trope of ‘location’ recalls us to Stevenson’s own attention, as a critic, to the specificity of the reading scene. How does the reader or critic’s locatedness (historical, cultural, rhetorical) condition Stevenson?
These remarks aside, the conference organisers welcome papers responding to the theme of ‘location’ in as wide a sense as possible.
E.g.
– locating Stevenson
culturally
politically
stylistically
linguistically
geographically
with regard to period
with regard to genre
– orientating Stevenson
to Scottish literature
to American writing
to the late Victorians/belle-lettrism
to modernism
to colonial/anti-colonial discourse
to the realism debate
to literary aesthetics
to popular culture
to writing as a profession
300-word proposals for papers of 20-25 minutes on any of the above topics, and suggestions for themed panels, should be sent to scott.hames@stir.ac.uk before 1 March 2010 1 May 2010.
