Literature and History Conference - Australasian Association for Literature

Call for Papers - now closed

Debates about the relationship between literature and history have long haunted literary practice, history and criticism. For some, historicism can be seen as a form of hermeneutical aggression, for others it provides the key to the literary representation of psychological and cultural phenomena. The archive, viewed from these diverging perspectives, obfuscates or illuminates. Recent flirtations with reading literally have been equally contentious, shifting the focus away from aesthetics towards the traces of material culture that clutter narrative space with forgotten or repressed histories.

Papers are invited that address the troubled, complex relationship between literature and history, and may include any of the following issues:

• Tensions between theory and history
• Resistance to history / anti-historicism
• Writing and re-membering lives
• Temporality – literary and historical time
• Ficto-historical writing / historical fiction / history and fiction
• Literature and material culture
• The interaction between a work and its contexts
• Political, ethical and / or legal implications of historical fiction
• Reconsidering the literary significance of ‘history from below’
• Literary history and its mediations (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.)
• Problems of memory and epistemology in writing history
• Questions of genre, periodisation and dis/continuity
• Reflections on reading history / the history of reading
• Any other issues that concern the relationship between
literature and history

The literary works discussed might be drawn from any period and from any language (though all papers will need to be presented in English).

Proposals should be 250-300 words in length and sent via email, by 30 April 2008, to: conference@aal.asn.au

Conference address: www.aal.asn.au/conference/
AAL address: www.aal.asn.au

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