Sussex Centre for Folklore,
Fairy Tales and Fantasy

The Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy is currently trying to map researchers, research centres and academic deparments with an interest in folktales, fairy tales and fantasy. In the longer term we’d like to build a stronger network of researchers and organisations in these fields to involve in events, projects and research activities.

If you or your organisation are potentially interested in collaborating with the Centre, or you’d like to nominate another individual or organisation that we should contact – we’d be grateful if you could fill in our short form!

• http://bit.ly/folktales-network

We’re delighted to announce that registration for the Mervyn Peake and the Fantasy Tradition conference is now open! The event will take place on the 15-17th July 2011 at the University of Chichester. You can sign up here:

• http://www.chiuni.ac.uk/conference/mervyn.cfm

You can find out more about the conference here:

• http://mervynpeakeconference2011.blogspot.com/

It should be a really exciting event – and we hope to see many of you in sunny Chichester in July!

The Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy is seeking to appoint a new Administrator to replace Dr Malini Roy. Very many thanks to Malini for continuing to manage the Centre website (from Singapore!) on a voluntary basis after her fixed-term contract officially ended in the summer.

The new (part-time, fixed term) appointment will be based in the University of Chichester, since a large part of their work will be the management of the two conferences the Centre currently plans: the Mervyn Peake Centenary events in 2011, and the Grimms Bicentenary events in 2012. The organization of events on-site in Chichester (lectures, seminars, exhibitions) will also be a priority. The ability to assist in writing funding bids, and in developing a strategy for the Centre, including a Business Plan, would be a distinct advantage.

For further details see: Chichester University Job Vacancies

Ghent University, Belgium 20-21 January 2011

Adaptations have always played an important role in the field of children’s literature. During this symposium, we want to explore the relationship between the status of the source text and the act of adaptation, in general and more specifically in children’s literature.

For more details, please see CFP Never-Ending Stories

This year the curator for the Royal Opera House’s contemporary arts festival will be internationally renowned pianist, composer and auteur Joanna MacGregor.

For the 2010 festival Joanna has taken her inspiration from forests: forests as a place of quiet, reflective beauty, mystery and discovery, as places of fairytale narrative, as well as metaphorical spaces.

For more details, please see Deloitte Ignite 2010

Dr Jacqueline Simpson (see under ‘People’), formerly President of the Folklore Society and editor of its journal Folklore, has been appointed Visiting Professor at the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, University of Chichester. Professor Simpson’s inaugural lecture will be in October, on a date to be announced.

An interdisciplinary research forum and subsequent publication of proceedings (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) based around the currently under-researched notion of the ‘anti-tale’ to be held at the University of Glasgow, 12-13 August 2010.

The anti-fairy tale has long existed as a shadow of the traditional fairy tale genre. First categorized as the ‘antimärchen’ in Andre Jolles’ seminal Einfache Formen (c.1930), the anti-tale was found to be contemporaneous with even the oldest known examples of fairy tale collections. Rarely an outward opposition to the traditional form itself, the anti-tale takes aspects of the fairy tale genre and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirizes elements of them to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. Red Riding Hood may elope with the wolf. Or Bluebeard’s wife is not interested in his secret chamber. Snow White’s stepmother gives her own account of events and Cinderella does not exactly find the prince charming.

For more details and the programme, please see Anti-Tales

CALL FOR PAPERS

‘Mervyn Peake and the Fantasy Tradition: A Centenary Conference’

An international conference hosted by the English & Creative Writing Department, University of Chichester and the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy

15th and 16th July 2011 Chichester, UK

Keynote Speakers include: Joanne Harris | Michael Moorcock | Peter Winnington | Colin Manlove | Farah Mendlesohn | Sebastian Peake

This conference and related events next July to mark the centenary of Peake’s birth include exhibitions of his paintings and illustrations in Chichester (Peake lived in nearby Burpham while writing the Gormenghast books, and is buried there). July 2011 is also the publication date of Titus Awakes, Maeve Gilmore’s conclusion of her husband’s Gormenghast sequence. The conference will celebrate, explore and discuss the many facets of Peake’s rich creativity, including his work as fantasy novelist, children’s writer, playwright, poet, writer of nonsense verse, artist and illustrator (both of his own books and classics such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Hunting of the Snark, the Alice books, Treasure Island and the Grimms’ Household Tales).

Proposals are invited for papers, presentations and panels on any aspect of Peake’s work. We especially welcome proposals relating Peake to the broader traditions of fairy tales, fantasy and children’s literature. Relevant topics might include:

• thematic explorations of Peake’s oeuvre
• textual / linguistic / rhetorical analyses
• issues of genre (e.g. in what sense is Peake’s work ‘fantasy’?)
• issues of race and/or gender and/or class in Peake’s oeuvre
• questions of ‘applicability’ (in Tolkien’s sense)
• the relation of image and text in narrative (both in Peake’s own books and in those he illustrated)
• adaptations of Peake’s work
• Peake’s literary precursors and sources, for example in (Gothic) fantasy, children’s literature and nonsense verse
• Peake’s influence (from Moorcock and Miéville to mannerpunk)
• creative responses to Peake’s work in both literature and the visual arts

It is planned to publish a selection of the conference papers.

Please submit abstracts (max 300 words) for papers not exceeding 20 minutes (with 10 minutes for discussion). For other kinds of presentation, for example creative responses to Peake’s work (both visual and literary), please send a sample, rather than an abstract. All proposals must be received by 14 January 2011.

We prefer to receive proposals by email. Please send your proposal, a brief CV and the submission form (downloadable from the conference website – for link see below) in Word .doc or .rtf format to b.gray@chi.ac.uk (copied to l.sargent@chi.ac.uk). Please include your last name and “MP Fantasy Tradition” in the subject heading of the email and filename of your abstract. Faxes will not normally be accepted. If submitting by regular mail, please send three copies of your proposal and CV to: Professor William Gray, University of Chichester, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 6PE, UK

All proposals will be reviewed by the programme committee with reference to the criteria of relevance, originality and contribution to the conference theme, broadly understood.

For further details, including the proposal submission form, please see the conference website at: Mervyn Peake Conference website

CALL FOR PAPERS ON:

Early Modern Fairy Tales

a panel to be held at the Renaissance Society of America 2011 meeting in Montreal, Canada

We invite papers on any aspect of the development of the literary fairy tale in early modern Italy as well as on the influence exerted by the first Italian tale collections (Straparola and Basile) on other European narrative traditions and cultures.

Topics may include but are not limited to: individual authors, collections, and/or tale types; the relation of the new genre of the fairy tale to canonical genres (novella, mythological fable, et al.); the forms and functions of fairy-tale narration; oral vs.literary traditions.

Please send a 1-page CV and 150-word abstract to Nancy Canepa Nancy.L.Canepa@Dartmouth.EDU and Armando Maggi amaggi@uchicago.edu by May 18, 2010.

Please see an announcement for the Wayland D. Hand Prize for an Outstanding Book on Folklore and History at:

Wayland D. Hand Prize