victorian

Science Fiction Studies is currently soliciting proposals for a July 2018 special issue celebrating the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), a work that forever changed the genre of science fiction. In Frankenstein, Shelley experimented not only with subject matter, new scientific inventions and their many terrifying and horrific possibilities, but also narrative and form. Her use of multiple frame narratives, nested one within another, was a notable shift from the eighteenth-century novels she grew up reading, and her merging of popular culture’s fascination with science and the Gothic broadened the emerging genre of science fiction.

How do literary forms foster, inhibit, or problematize cosmopolitanism? What forms are more likely to travel across national or cultural boundaries? 250-word abstract by 10 March 2017; Jessica R. Valdez (jvaldez@hku.hk) and Nan Zhang (nanzhang@fudan.edu.cn).

Appel à communications / Call for papers (scroll down for English version)

Colloque international, Clermont-Ferrand, 5-7 avril 2018

Université Clermont-Auvergne – CELIS

« Rêve et création littéraire dans Frankenstein et le roman féminin aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles »

This two-day conference, to be held on May 11-12, 2018 at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA), is jointly organized by the International Walter Pater Society and the Clark Library, world-renowned for its holdings of rare and manuscript materials from the period, notably Oscar Wilde, George Egerton, Alfred Douglas, Charles
Ricketts, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, and the fine presses of the fin de siècle. The conference will include workshops in which groups of scholars will carry on exploratory discussions that relate to the Clark’s extensive fin-de siècle collections.

We welcome proposals for either conference papers or workshop contributions.

Steampunk: Then, Now, and Then Again

Bishop Grossteste University, Lincoln

25th – 27th August 2017

‘The past is a kind of future that has already happened.’

Bruce Sterling, Co-author of The Difference Engine