cfp.english.upenn.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS: Shane Meadows day event, University of East Anglia, April 2010 (date and venue to follow)

Since the attention-grabbing short film Smalltime (1996) and his debut feature TwentyFourSeven (1997), director Shane Meadows has emerged as arguably the most distinctive young filmmaker in contemporary British cinema. Following the critical and commercial success of This is England (2007) - soon to be developed into a TV series by Channel Four - Meadows has continued his project of providing the forgotten communities and anonymous spaces of provincial England with a singular cinematic voice. Having attracted only limited scholarly attention thus far, the time is ripe for a comprehensive overview of Meadows’ oeuvre.

We seek original 20 minute papers for an event devoted to Meadows’ output and his place within contemporary British film and television, and we plan to publish selected papers as an edited collection.

Topics could include (but are certainly not limited to):

- Representations of gender (particularly masculinity, but also the possible marginalisation of women in Meadows’ films)
- Class and marginal communities/lifestyles
- Race / ethnicity
- Meadows and auteurism
- Regionalism / parochialism
- English-ness / British-ness
- Fatherhood as structuring motif in Meadows’ work
- Comedy and the function of humour in Meadows’ oeuvre (comparisons with class-based/regional humour of Peter Kay and Shameless, for example)
- Meadows’ films and their relationship to the social-realist tradition
- Representations of the family
- Meadows’ short films
- Meadows’ TV work, including the Shane’s World series for Channel 4
- Acting / performance / improvisation in Meadows’ films (e.g. professional vs. non-professional performers)
- Representation of children / youth
- Nostalgia / the 1980s
- Dialogue / dialect
- Depictions of urban and rural landscape
- Meadows and genre
- Critical / popular reception of Meadows’ work
- Meadows’ ‘independence’ and his relationship to contemporary British cinema / association with Warp records / funding
- Music in Meadows’ films
- Meadows’ use of digital technology / DIY aesthetic / filmmaking practice
- His influences and intertexts

Please send 300-word abstracts to Sarah Godfrey (s.godfrey@uea.ac.uk) by 31 January 2010.