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Global Histories of Crime Fiction: Redefining a Popular Genre – seminar of the ACLA 2022 Meeting (CFP)

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CFP: Global Histories of Crime Fiction: Redefining a Popular Genre 

American Comparative Literature Association 2022 Annual Meeting, 15-18 June 

National Taiwan Normal University 

Seminar organisers: Jesper Gulddal (University of Newcastle, Australia) and Stewart King (Monash University)

Crime fiction today is a uniquely global genre in the sense of being written, published, sold and read on a significant scale on all continents and in almost every country. It is also global in the sense that it serves across a wide range of locations as an important vehicle for investigating and interrogating relationships between law, crime and justice. This global orientation challenges the persistent notion that crime fiction is predominantly a UK and US phenomenon and that other crime fiction traditions are either peripheral or derivative. Publishers have already embraced the idea of world crime fiction, as evidenced by the large number of crime fiction translations, not only with English as the source or target language, but also between other languages. Similarly, readers around the world have few concerns about reading foreign crime novels, and the combination of familiar forms and unfamiliar, “exotic” content has become one of the major selling points of global crime writing. The scholarly literature has been slow in catching up with these developments, but the last few years have seen lively debate around the concept of crime fiction as world literature. Following on from these discussions, this seminar seeks to overcome one of the last bastions of conventional crime fiction scholarship, namely the tendency to write the history of crime fiction either as the succession of canonical Anglophone formats (classic, hardboiled, etc.) or as accounts of individual national traditions. We pose the question, how can we globalise the historical narratives around crime fiction and move towards an account of the genre that recognises its global diversity and transnational connections.

We welcome papers dealing with any aspects of world crime fiction and the historiographical challenges it presents. Suggested focal points include:

  • The historiographical challenges presented by world crime fiction 
  • Autochthonous crime fiction traditions in China, Japan, India, the Arab world and elsewhere
  • Appropriations and localisations of canonical English-language formats around the world 
  • Translation as a means of localising crime fiction
  • Lateral circulations of crime fiction that bypass the Anglosphere (such as between China, Japan and Korea, in the Mediterranean, and within the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War) 
  • Comparative perspectives on world crime fiction 
  • Formal innovation and hybridisation at the “periphery”
  • Indigenous and First Nations crime fiction 
  • Reinterpreting British and American crime fiction from a transnational perspective
  • Digital and data-driven approaches to world crime fiction 

Enquires: jesper.gulddal@newcastle.edu.au or stewart.king@monash.edu 

Conference website: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting-2022 

Submit a paper proposal here: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper 

Caribbean Noir (2) – CFP

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Confiant Pepin

The  Centre Aixois d’Etudes Romanes (Aix-Marseille University) calls for papers for its 2nd conference on  Caribbean Crime Fiction in Spanish, French and English.  The conference will take place on May 28 & 29, 2020, in  Aix-en-Provence.

All submissions must be received by 30 September 2019.

Learn more, including how to submit your paper here , or contact the organisers :

Nelly Rajaonarivelo : nelly.rajaonarivelo@univ-amu.fr

Dante Barrientos Tecún : dante.barrientos-tecun@univ-amu.fr

To see the full call (and some impressive art), click here

 

 

Violet Hill

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violet hill

 

Belfast-born author Henrietta McKervey will be reading at the Delicate Infractions Conference this week end.  Her  third novel, Violet Hill, was published by Hachette Ireland in 2018.

Here is a taster:

 December 1918: Post-War London is grieving, the city a wound whose dressing was taken off too soon. Violet Hill, the only female private detective in the city, is hired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s business manager to uncover spiritual trickery he believes is deceiving his employer.

January 2018: Susanna is a super-recogniser, one of an elite Met Police team of officers with extraordinary powers for facial recognition. When a freak injury causes her unusual ability to suddenly disappear, a dangerous criminal whom she no longer recognises decides to close in.

More information on the conference can be found here

The programme is available here : 

 

Europeanness in Contemporary Crime Fiction

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“Unified in Diversity?”

The Promotion and Reception of Europeanness in Contemporary Crime Fiction

Call for abstracts

While there is clearly still some way to a European media market that knows no borders––there is certainly not yet a single European market, and there are still a great many frontiers and boundaries to negotiate––, one must acknowledge that crime narratives travel extremely well in Europe, be it in the form of literary fiction, film or television series. From the perspective of cultural studies, this harbours the potential for transnational exchange, transculturalism, and the emergence of a shared European identity, thus serving as a vehicle for cultural exchange and debate.
On the other hand, one might argue that crime shows which do stress their Europeanness by means of location marketing and inviting cultural tourism are fundamentally Europuddings by appropriating a well proven storytelling formula and setting these narratives to European locations, which are exotic and appealing to most of the audience worldwide. In that sense, one might question whether the generic concept of Noir, which has certainly travelled from the very North to the very South of Europe, enables a European dialogue or jumps from the regional/local to the global and thereby skipping notions of Europeanness.
The aim of this proposed panel is to examine whether, and how, crime narratives are advertised as European in promotional material such as trailers, covers, posters, copywriting, ads and the like. At the same time, we invite case studies which do not only focus on the promotional strategies but also focus on reception by looking at newspapers, magazines, websites, social media, and so on. This panel will therefore explore how Europeanness has been conveyed through promotional strategies, and will discuss which factors have proven relevant for this Europeanness to be detected by critics and audiences.

We invite case studies in literary fiction, film and television series. For example, we are looking for analyses of cross-media phenomena such as Inspector Montalbano, the Millenium trilogy, or Babylon Berlin, which originated from literary works and became transnationally successful television series. Such cases would be especially interesting since the market logic for audiences in literary and screen reception is still markedly different. We are also particularly interested in case studies about television series such as The Team, Crossing Lines, or Eurocops, whose presumed Europeanness is already embedded in their production process.

Please send your abstract until April 10th 2019 to both federico.pagello@unibo.it and M.Schleich@qub.ac.uk
This panel will be part of the conference “EURONOIR: Producers, distributors and audiences of European crime narratives“ held from the 30th September to October 2nd 2019 at the Aalborg University in Denmark.

Arabic Crime Narratives

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Arabic Crime Narratives

 

A two-day conference organized in Paris at the Inalco  and the Institut du Monde Arabe on March 28th and 29th will discuss Arabic crime narratives, their distinctive features and their conditions of existence and reception in the Arabic world.  While a number of Literary works from the classical period represent thieves and criminals, and deal with criminal cases, crime fiction as a recognized genre is relatively recent in Arabic literature. The logico-deductive inquiry, as well as the judicial inquiry are mostly absent. The emergence and critical appraisal of Arabic Noir only really started in the past decades. International scholars from various disciplines will approach Arabic crime fiction and highlight its diversity and potential.

 

Full program (in French) here:

“Delicate Infractions”: Innovations, Expansions, and Revolutions in the Crime Genre (CFP)

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International Crime Genre Research Group: 8th Biennial Conference

 

Death and the compass

“Delicate Infractions”: Innovations, Expansions, and Revolutions in the Crime Genre

Friday 14 – Saturday 15 June, 2019

Maynooth University, Ireland

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges famously remarked that the detective genre “thrives on the continual and delicate infraction of its rules”. Taking this as a point of departure, the 8th Biennial conference of the International Crime Fiction Research Group will aim to bring together researchers with a shared interest in exploring how the genre has changed and continues to change by way of such delicate infractions, but also occasionally by way of full-blown transgression and definitive ruptures.

Under the broad title of “Delicate Infractions”, we invite proposals related to the following areas:

Systemic troubles reflected in the crime genre

  • The crime genre in the age of Black Lives Matter, Trump and resurgent far-right ideology.
  • The representation and promotion of radical politics in crime narrative.
  • Genre responses to the refugee crisis in Europe and beyond.
  • How can or should the genre reckon with the ‘slow violence’ of pollution, climate change, ocean acidification, and ecocide?

Formal re-configurations of the crime genre:

  • Re-imaginings and re-workings of the tropes of crime.
  • Re-configurations of the archetypal detective/criminal/victim triad.
  • Challenges to the gendered and racialized assumptions of conventional crime narratives.
  • Crime, Modernism, and/or Postmodernism (and beyond).
  • Crime, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde.
  • Hybrids and intersections with other genres.

Changing technologies and how they influence crime, crime detection, and crime writing

  • The technological pre-conditions for the emergence of the genre.
  • Historic changes or ruptures wrought on the genre since its inception by technological innovations in transport, communications, and weaponry.
  • Cyberspace, Artificial Intelligence, and the elaboration of new kinds of crime and new modes of investigation.
  • Digital Humanities, Big Data, Digital Gazetteers, Crowd Sourcing; New technologies for Crime Fiction Studies.
  • Apps, Immersive Narratives and technology-supported Crime Fiction Tourism.
  • The place of YouTube, Social Media, podcasting, and other online platforms in the publication of crime narrative.
  • New technologies and new experiences of reading Crime Fiction.

As in previous years, we also welcome submissions that do not fall neatly within the above categories (or that expand them), and we are open to research questions that are themselves ‘infractional’ in respect of the critical paradigms that have grown around crime genre scholarship.

Submissions can be centred on crime fiction and/or film, but we also welcome submissions relating to true crime and that analyse other forms of media, as well as examinations of relevant topics within fields such as history, criminology, anthropology etc. Our guiding objective since our first conference in 2005 is to bring together scholars from a diverse range of areas with a view to highlighting and exploring the points of convergence (and divergence) that emerge.

Organising Committee Chair Dr David Conlon (MU). Committee members Dr Dominique Jeannerod (QUB); Dr Kate Quinn (NUIG); Dr Marieke Krajenbrink (UL).

Please send your abstracts to one of the following by November 29th 2018:

david.conlon@mu.ie

d.jeannerod@qub.ac.uk

kate.quinn@nuigalway.ie

marieke.krajenbrink@ul.ie

“Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age”

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University of Tampere, Finland, August 23-24, 2018

Keynote speakers: Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast) & Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University)

First Call for Papers

Murder tweet

The advent of new technologies and digital media have transformed society and influenced cultural narratives. The changes brought about by technological innovations, digitalisation, and globalisation have affected not only the subject matter and themes of contemporary crime narratives but also the production, distribution, and consumption of crime fiction on the global market, as well as the analytical tools, techniques, research methods, and theories available to scholars. These changes are readily visible in detectives’ digital investigations or in how criminals employ digital technology in committing cybercrimes such as online stalking or theft. Moreover, the potential of digitalisation in modifying crime narratives nowadays ranges from podcasts such as “Serial” to Sherlock Holmes fan fiction to transmedia narration in “Sherlock” and the Twitter adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. Continue reading →