Literary London 6–8 July 2016
‘London and the Globe’
While papers on all areas of literary London are welcomed, to acknowledge this year of Shakespearean celebrations, the conference theme in 2016 will be ‘London and the Globe’. This event will follow the trace of London’s transnational connections through novelistic, dramatic, poetic and other modes of expression. Topics that might be addressed include:
- Geographies of migration, mobility and citizenship in an unsettled city
- The Globe Theatre and new provinces in Shakespearean performance
- London’s landscapes of slavery, expenditure and transportation
- Imagining London apart from its ‘mother tongue’ and the Anglophone canon
- Writing back against metropolitan cultural hegemony and the Imperial mythos
- Intercontinental travel, holidays, grand tours and Londoners away from home
- Refiguring Britishness, race identity and statehood in the light of globalization
- Émigrés, foreign correspondents and the passage of global information
- Trajectories of flight, atlases, shipping logs and Mappae mundi
- Romances of adventure, paradisal islands, itinerancy and exoticism
- Exploring otherness through utopian ‘elsewhere’ and spiritual terra incognitae
- The re-territorialisation of the city through poetic and rhetorical appropriation
- The Neo-colonial refashioning and memorialization of London’s colonial past
- Global trade networks, mercantile capitalism and taking to the Thames
- Foreign conflicts, skirmishes, rebellions and fictions of domestic in/security
Please submit all proposals for 20-minute papers, comprised panels, and roundtable sessions using the links on the right. If you have any queries, please contact the conference organiser Dr Peter Jones at conference at literarylondon dot org
The annual conference of the Literary London Society hears papers, comprised panels, and roundtables that consider every period and 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, geography and theories of urban space. Papers from postgraduate students are particularly welcome for consideration.
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/.
To register for the conference, please go to http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/London-and-the-Globe.