This postgraduate conference will explore the rituals and ceremonies of literary commemoration from a variety of perspectives, and in various literary periods. Proposals are invited that examine how anniversaries contribute to the ways in which afterlives are remembered, sustained, and given their distinctive shapes.

Plenary Speaker: Professor Adam Piette (University of Sheffield)

Topics which may be covered include, but are not limited to:

1) The literature of celebration: ritual and ceremony, anniversary,
repetition and the cyclical event

2) The literature of commemoration: elegies, epitaphs, and posthumous
publications - our duties to the dead

3) Literary tourism: deathbeds and birthplaces, visiting the past and the
appeal of historical locations, the fashioning of an anniversary

4) Narrating history: making myth, facing reality, and the juxtaposition
of yesterday and today

5) Gothic returns: hauntings, defying death, and the horrific anniversary

6) Navigating loss: negotiating the void left by the departed, coping with
memories and anniversaries

7) Writing for history: the immortality effect, projecting onto future
anniversaries

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers. Please send 250-word
abstracts via email to sm8729@bristol.ac.uk or ae8374@bristol.ac.uk by 26
March 2009.