Family Fictions
Generations and Genealogies in European Culture

15- 17. 05. 2025, KU Leuven

Keynotes:
Prof. Stefan Willer (Humboldt University)
Prof. David Amigoni (Keele University)
Dr. Jennie Bristow (Canterbury Christ Church University)

Contemporary culture is obsessed with generational identities. Everywhere, individuals are categorized under sweeping labels according to their age cohorts. At the same time, a fixation with mapping out origins flourishes, sustained by the expansion of platforms offering ancestral family tracing. While they seem paradoxical, both trends are in fact interdependent, each requiring a generational ‘other’ for their construction (Weigel; Erll). In contemporary literature too, a concern with generations and genealogies can be traced. The 2022 Noble prize winning author Annie Ernaux extensively explores generational markers and family history in her fiction. Three of the six novels shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize trace a family across generations: Paul Harding’s This Other Eden , Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting and Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You. And the same holds true for Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and Damon Galgut’s The Promise, the winners of 2019 and 2021, respectively. In the Netherlands, Lisa Weeda’s Aleksandra, which tells the story of a woman in search of her grandmother’s legacy, was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize 2022 and won the Bronzen Uil. In German literature, no less than eight of Deutscher Buchpreis winners of the last twenty years explored the tension between family history and generational identities, including Inger-Maria Mahlke’s Archipel (2018), Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft (2019), and Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022).
Obsession with generations and family histories is, however, not an exclusively contemporary phenomenon. Genealogies can be found in Greek myth, the Bible and medieval manuscripts as a means of constructing and consolidating power relations. The concept of generations, only, emerged in the late-nineteenth century and gained momentum in the 1920s and 30s with Karl Mannheim’s Das Problem der Generationen (1928). Late 19th and early 20th-century literature saw the spread of multigenerational novels such as Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Luigi Pirandello I vecchi e i giovani and Virginia Woolf’s The Years. Until recently, literary scholarship has primarily investigated portrayals of family as an expression of a historical period (Gilmartin; Nelson; Flint; Berman; Corbett). Research has also revealed the subversive turn of fictional family histories, that often appear as narratives of decline, trauma, suppressed secrets and revolt against the determinism of familial ties (Newman; Binion; Toblin; Assmann). However, the multi-generational format has also been transformed within feminist matrilineal narratives (Cosslett; Gillis; Muller; Stoppino) as well as within postcolonial fiction to provide new “frames of reference” for “uprooted peoples” (Glissant). Recently, Ato Quayson coined the term genealogical accounting for diasporic narratives that try to recover erased family lineages. Furthermore, as the recent emergence of term Generationenroman demonstrates, the contemporary cultural preoccupation with generations has also instigated a shift in perspective within literary scholarship. The term describes a broad literary genre that is not only defined by a constellation of characters from three or more generations within the same family and a narrated time that spans several decades, but also by the conflicts that arise from each generation’s proclaimed/assigned identity (Neuschäfer; Reulecke; Eichenberg; Grugger et. al.).
This conference investigates how family dynamics are imagined in generational fiction: as a generational construct, an oppressive determinant, or a means for emancipation. We invite contributions from the humanities and social sciences offering critical insights and reflections on how generations, genealogies and family structure are imagined, theorized and disseminated within both fictional and non-fictional narratives.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Generations in fiction and theory
- Genealogies in fiction and theory
- Multigenerational novels
- Family sagas and chronicles
- Gender and generation
-Matrilinearity
- Transnational genealogies
- Genetics
-Determinism and the family
-Diasporic families
-Material inheritance
-Generations and life writing
-Generations and biofiction
-Generations and historical fiction
-Families in period dramas
-Public and private history in fiction
-Portrayals of Aging
-Non-biological family ties

Conference information:
The Family Fictions conference is organized by the Literary Department at the University of Leuven and will be held in Leuven, Belgium. The exact location will be communicated later on. Please send an abstract of 300 words with a short biographical note (100 words max.) to fatima.borrmann@kuleuven.be by 15.01.2025. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Please submit your proposal in Word-format. Registration fees apply.

References:
Assmann, A. Generationsidentitäten und Vorurteilsstrukturen in der neuen deutschen Erinnerungsliteratur. Vol. 117. Picus Verlag, 2012.
Berman, A. The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2022.
Binion, R. “Fiction as Social Fantasy: Furope’s Domestic Crisis of 1879-1914”, Journal of
Corbett, M. J. Family likeness: Sex, marriage, and incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Cornell University Press, 2011.
Cosslett, T. “Feminism, matrilinealism, and the ‘house of women’in contemporary women's fiction”, Journal of Gender Studies 5(1), 1996, 7-17.
Eichenberg, A. Familie-Ich-Nation. Göttingen, 2009.
Erll, A. “Generation in literary history: Three constellations of generationality, genealogy, and memory”, New Literary History, 45(3), 2014, 385-409.
Flint, Christopher. Family fictions: narrative and domestic relations in Britain, 1688-1798. Stanford University
Galli, M. & S. Costagli. (ed.). Chronotopoi. München, 2010, 7–20.
Generationenroman. Berlin: Epubli, 2013.
Gillis, S. & R. Munford. “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism." Women's History Review 13(2), 2004, 165-182.
Gilmartin, S. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy. Vol. 18. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Glissant, E. Caribbean Discourse. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: UP Virginia, 1999.
Grugger, H. (et. al.). Der Generationenroman, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021.
Muller, N. “Feminism’s Family Drama: Female genealogies, Feminist Historiography, and Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women”. Feminist Theory, 18(1), 2017, 17-34.
Nelson, C. Family Ties in Victorian England. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2007.
Neuschäfer, M. Das bedingte Selbst. Familie, Identität und Geschichte im zeitgenössischen
Newman, D. “Plot Counter Plot: Genetics and Generic Strain in the Modernist Novel of Formation”, Intervalla, 4, 2016, 30-69.
Quayson, A. “Postcolonialism and the Diasporic Imaginary.” A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 139–159.
Reulecke, J. (ed.). Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert. Oldenbourg, München, 2003.
Stoppino, E. Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the Orlando Furioso. Fordham UP, 2012.
Tobin, P. D. Time and the novel: the genealogical imperative. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Weigel, S. “‘Generation’ as a Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945”. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory. 77 (4), 2002, 264–77.