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 09. 02.2025 [EXTENDED DEADLINE]. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Please submit your proposal in Word-format. Registration fees apply.