cfp.english.upenn.edu

Mythic, Magical & Monstrous Women in Contemporary Women’s Writing

A half day symposium at the University of Leicester, Wednesday 20th June 2012

Keynote Speaker: Dr Becky Munford

From Angela Carter’s subversive fairytales in The Bloody Chamber (1979) to Michele Roberts’ monstrous bodies, from Ali Smith’s mythic rewriting in Girl Meets Boy (2007) to A.S. Byatt’s metamorphic monsters, the themes of myth, magic and the monstrous continue to preoccupy contemporary women writers who repeatedly turn to such themes as a means of challenging the frequently distorted images of gender proffered by patriarchal representations of women. This symposium seeks to address why the magical, mythical and the monstrous continue to remain prominent in contemporary women’s writing and explore how such tropes and topics continue to be deployed and reworked by authors to represent women in fiction.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

Magical realism
Revisions of myths, fairytales and folklore
Rewriting stereotypes (hagiography and folklore)
Monstrous women
Retelling oral (hi)storytales
Magic, myth and monsters in genre fiction, short stories and children’s literature
Representations of women as ‘Other’
Ghosts and the Occult (dark side of magic)
Sci-fi

Please submit abstracts of 250 words for 20 minute papers via email to women@pgcwwn.org. Please state ‘Leicester’ in the title of your email. The deadline for proposals is 6 April 2012.