Every year, the Historical Fictions Research Network hosts an international, interdisciplinary online workshop on historical fiction. Calls for papers will be published here. We invite scholars from all over the world to come and join us for this international conversation. We have yet to find a time zone we cannot accommodate, so do join us in December!
2024 Online Workshop
30 November 2024 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT)
15 min talks
Pleasure and / in Historical Fictions
Since the historical novel has come out of its critical closet in the last three decades to become a literary genre which “has come to dominate literary culture” (Wilson 2005: 145), which wins literary prizes (see de Groot 2019: 169) and “is snapped up for film and television” (Wilson 2005: 145), it is no longer considered a mere “‘feminine’ form” (Wallace 2005: 3) used by women to escape from reality.
Instead, the manifold uses to which the historical novel and historical fictions more generally have been put have become a frequent concern of academic inquiry. Historical fictions, it has been pointed out, serve as a means of finding orientation in a world of flux, “constructing continuity, orientation and identity” (Paletschek 2011: 3). They satisfy “the need for emotional and aesthetic experience and for adventure, for a risk-free encounter with what is strange” (ibid.; cf. also Jordanova 2019: ch 7). Moreover, historical fictions offer the opportunity to write marginalized groups back into the past (see e.g. Wallace 2005), and thus to address past wrongs.
In this one-day workshop, we particularly on “Pleasures and / in Historical Fictions” and to explore not only why the public are enthusiastic to consume the past in many popular forms, but also the manyfold pleasures that are described in historical fictions.
A preliminary programme is now available.
You can already register for the event here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/historicalfictionsresearchnetwork/1333139?
Organisers: Series Editors Global Historical Fictions
(https://brill.com/page/hifi)
Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Jerome de Groot, Dorothea Flothow, Siobhan O’Connor, and Stephanie Russo.
Workshop fee: £20 for waged and £10 for unwaged / PhDs.
Historical Fictions Research Network 