Maggie Gee Conference Thursday 30 – Friday 31st August 2012 School of English, University of St Andrews

Sponsored by Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher Part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series

Keynote Speakers:
Maggie Gee
Dr John Sears (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
Professor Susan Alice Fischer (The City University of New York, US)

Since she was selected for Granta’s first list of Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 (in company with Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain), Gee has worked in publishing, academic research (gaining a PhD in the twentieth-century novel from Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1980) and was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently working as one of the Society’s Vice Presidents, as well as acting as Visiting Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. In addition to her publishing and academic responsibilities, Gee is also highly critically acclaimed: her eighth novel, The White Family (2002), was shortlisted in 2002 for the Orange Prize for Fiction as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2004.

Ceaselessly inventive and astonishing, Gee’s writing is distinguished by ambitious scope and aesthetic innovation, tackling political themes and writing across a broad range of subjects and genres. Intertwining intimate domestic dramas with grand-scale, seismic shifts in cosmic balance, several of Gee’s novels imagine global disaster, apocalyptic futures and environmental catastrophes. Meanwhile, Gee is also concerned with exploring issues of racism, prejudice, cultural difference and class inequalities. Her body of work confronts political attitudes in contemporary Britain through satire, comedy, family saga, thriller and romance.

The organisers welcome papers on any topic related to Maggie Gee’s writing. Topics might include, but are not limited to, Maggie Gee’s writing and:

genre, science fiction, thriller, autobiographical fiction, romance, family saga, political satire
war, terrorism, violence and political activism
(post-)apocalypse and ecocatastrophe
inter-generational conflict, familial relationships
utopian and dystopian thinking
the urban and the rural
racism, migration and multicultural Britain
the role, and representation, of women
the environment and new ecocritical directions
class, social mobility, poverty and social inequality
modernism and its inheritances
death, suicide and posthumous narrative voices
the representation of time and imagining the future
nuclear weaponry
society, nature and the cosmos
cosmopolitanism, Africa, Japan
contemporary women’s writing and publishing
translation, the British publishing industry

The conference welcomes papers from any discipline, a variety of theoretical perspectives, and those which engage with media beyond that of the written text. Submissions are welcome from both research students and academics. Please send a title and 300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper along with your name, affiliation and 100 word professional biography to gee_at_glyphi.co.uk by 1st February 2012.

The conference is organised by Dr Sarah Dillon, Lecturer in Contemporary Fiction, School of English, University of St Andrews and Dr Caroline Edwards, Tutor in English Literature, Department of English, University of Surrey. For more information on the research and professional activities of Dr Dillon and Dr Edwards, see their homepages:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/academicstaff/dillon/

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/english/people/caroline_edwards/

For more information regarding the St Andrews School of English and its activities, as well as the Department of English at the University of Surrey, see the homepages:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/english/

The conference is sponsored by Gylphi Arts and Humanities Publisher. Selected papers from the conference proceedings will be published as Maggie Gee: Critical Essays, with a foreword by Gee, as part of Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series (Series Editor: Dr Sarah Dillon). For more information regarding the Series see:

http://www.gylphi.co.uk/criticalessays/index.php

The Gee conference website will launch in July 2011:
http://www.gylphi.co.uk/gee