Call for Papers: 2019 academic program

‘HistoryRepeats’

HistoricalNovel Society Australasia 2019 Conference

25-27October 2019, Rydalmere Campus, Western Sydney University.

AcademicStream: Sunday 27 October

On the final day of the HNSA conference, we will bring together postgraduates, academics, and other interested scholars to consider the complexities of the genre of historical fiction and its readership. What counts as an historical novel is increasingly up for grabs: in terms of period (what counts as ‘the past’—and how past is past?), and the porosity of the boundaries of genre (viz. how historical is historical fantasy?).

Our aim is both to celebrate historical fiction andcritique its moment—the genre’s renaissance. Does our sobering present (anddire future) make the imagined past more inviting; a retreat ‘into the far off,the period, the unfamiliar, the allegoric’ that eschews the ‘messiness of thepresent’ (Delia Falconer).

Is Hilary Mantel’s jibe, that some writers and readersprefer, ‘Ducking the tough issues in favour of writing about frocks’ fair? Ordo the ‘tough issues’—the ongoing inheritances of colonial invasion and rule;of genocide; of institutionalised slavery; of political and economic domination;of institutional, legal and cultural policing of gender and sexuality—sit atthe very heart of the literary historical novel? Is the determination to engagewith them behind the rise of a new literary genre: the ‘recent historicalnovel’ (novels set in the later 1970s through to 9/11 and on to the second Iraqwar)?

When A.S. Byatt observed the ‘interesting path to be explored along the connections between modern historical novels and the popular genres that tell stories about secrecy’ (Byatt 2001: 57) and the shared compulsion of historian and historical novelists to get the ‘foot in the door, to get behind the façade… to penetrate into the inner room’ (Richard Cobb quoted in Byatt, 2001), she’s pointing toward the unruliness of the genre, its potential for a stealthy unpacking of the baggage of history.

Weinvite abstracts for panel sessions and/or for individual papers that explorethe current moment of the historical novel, its critical flourishing, and thethematic preoccupations of the genre. Possible topics orsub-fields include but are not restricted to the following:

• Therepresentation of incarceration/institutional life
• Theboundaries of genre/s
• Genderand genre
• Classand genre
• Raceand genre
• Nostalgiaand escape
• Narrativesof colonisation and decolonisation
• Placeand the past (particularly Parramatta and Western Sydney regions)
• Fameand infamy
• Readercultures and readership
• Biographicalfictions
• Novelsof prehistory
• Genreand form (including short stories and verse).

Abstractsof 350 words, along with a 50-word bio (in email body or in doc.x), can be sentto Kelly Gardiner K.Gardiner@latrobe.edu.au  by 30 June, 2019. 

You will be notified in August if your paper is accepted. People whose papers are accepted will receive a free ticket for the Sunday of the conference.

Contributionsfrom postgraduates are particularly welcome.

References

Byatt, Antonia S.(2001) ‘Forefathers’, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays.London: Vintage.

Falconer, Delia (2006) ‘Historical Novels’,Eureka Street, July, http://www. eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=1298

Mantel, Hilary (2009,17 Oct) ‘Booker Winner Hilary Mantel on Dealingwith History in Fiction’, TheGuardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/17/hilary-mantel-author-booker