cfp.english.upenn.edu

The Condemned Playground:
Aldous Huxley and his Contemporaries
Balliol College, Oxford University
8-11 September 2013

Scheduled to coincide with the centenary of Aldous Huxley’s arrival at Balliol College as an undergraduate, this major international conference seeks both to reassess his diverse oeuvre, and to bring new attention to a constellation of writers whose work developed in dialogue with literary modernism. The conference, which incorporates the Fifth Annual International Aldous Huxley Symposium, will look broadly at Huxley’s engagements with fellow British and American writers and with some of the key movements of his time.

More specifically, contributors to the conference may wish to (re)consider relationships between such novelists, poets and thinkers as Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, T.S. Eliot, William Gerhardie, Graham Greene, W.H. Auden, F. Scott Fitzgerald, W.B. Yeats, George Orwell, Henry Green, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym, Ottoline Morrell and J.G. Ballard.

We also invite reappraisals of the role of Oxford in the age of Huxley and papers that examine the ways in which his contemporaries responded to the great historical shifts and crises that marked his writing life (1916-1963).

We are hoping, above all, for papers on Huxley and his contemporaries that take off in new directions. Papers which follow the work of these writers beyond the Second World War, across media and continents, or even just across Oxfordshire, are particularly welcome.

Please send your proposed titles for a 15 minute paper, together with a 250 word abstract, to huxleyconference@gmail.com by 10th January 2012.