Segnalo questo interessante CFP:
‘A Fiend in the Furrows’ is a
three-day conference in association with the School of English at Queen’s
University Belfast, exploring British “folk horror” in literature, film,
television, and music. The event will include academic papers, film screenings,
musical performances, and readings.
Supernatural and horrific
aspects of folklore inform the Gothic and weird writings of M.R. James, Arthur
Machen and Algernon Blackwood, where philosophical and religious certainties
are haunted and challenged by the memory of older cultural traditions. Folklore
has a profound and unsettling impact on the imaginative perception of
landscape, identity, time and the past. Folk memory is often manifested as an
intrusive and violent breach from an older repressed, ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarous’
state that transgresses the development of cultural order. Gothic and weird
fictions are burgeoning as the focus of serious academic enquiry in philosophy and
literary criticism, and the genres continue to have an impact on popular
culture. Through the writing of Nigel Kneale and Alan Garner, among others, the
tradition has influenced British horror cinema and television, being revived
and reimagined in films such as Quatermass and the Pit (1967), The
Devil Rides Out (1968), Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on
Satan’s Claw (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), and more recently in Ben
Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013). The conference
will examine “folk horror” texts, films and music in their period context and
the implications for British culture’s understanding of its own unsettled past.
Proposals are welcomed for presentations that engage with various aspects of
‘folk horror’ from researchers in the disciplines of Literature, Film Studies,
Music, Drama, History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Folklore, Geography, Art History,
Philosophy and Theology. Presentation topics may include (but are not limited
to):- Late 19th century Gothic literature
- Early 20th century weird fiction
- Modernism and weird fiction
- The ghost story
- Contemporary horror and fantasy fiction
- Children’s literature
- Folklore collectors and redactors
- Folklore and the supernatural
- Primitivism, atavism, degeneration
- Rural and urban folklore
- Horror cinema and television
- Folkmusic
Please submit a 300 word abstract together with a brief biography to:
folkhorror@qub.ac.uk – by 1st June 2014.
folkhorror@qub.ac.uk – by 1st June 2014.