One of the most unconventional writers and artists of the past century, Leonora Carrington (1917- 2011) was also one of the most central to the production of modern art. Born in England in 1917, she participated in the surrealist movement in Paris during the 1930s, escaped from Nazi-occupied France through Spain during the war, and then lived in Mexico City from 1945 until her death in May 2011. With a career spanning over three quarters of a century, she was at once a British writer, a French surrealist, and a Latin American artist and author who was very much part of the “boom” generation of Magical Realists as well. Her work featured strongly in feminist literary and art criticism of the 1970s and 80s, and her novels and stories were collected and published in English, French, and Spanish. This will be the first major scholarly study of Carrington’s impact on modern art and literature as a whole, focusing on her interaction with international avant-garde movements such as surrealism and the Latin American boom.

A fascinating author and artist in her own right, Carrington is also one of the most powerful—if under-recognized—intellectual figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While previous studies have tended to interpret her practice as marginal to the avant-garde or on the feminist fringes of Surrealism, we propose to re-read the avant-garde through Carrington as a key player. Just as her own career brought her in contact with artists and intellectuals in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Hungary, the United States, and Mexico, her work is likewise multifarious. It both draws from a dizzying array of cultural reference-points, and yet—more profoundly still—also offers tools for working through these systems of reference, in ways that are by turns uproariously funny and deeply moving. Carrington’s body of experimental art and writing provides us, we propose, with nothing less than answer to the crisis in knowledge-production we face in today’s world of information systems and diminishing faith in the sustainability of art.

Chapters already solicited include Carrington and Irish fairy tales, Carrington and Magic Realism, Carrington and the new novel, Carrington and the Virago Press, Carrington and epistemology, Carrington and the Italian Renaissance. We invite proposals dealing with others aspects of her multifaceted oeuvre, particularly, but not limited to, the following:

- Carrington's Education in England
- Carrington and French Surrealism
- Carrington and Mexico (post-1968 especially)
- Carrington and Latin America
- Carrington and Sorcery, Magic and Myth
- Carrington and her contemporaries (other than Max Ernst)
- Carrington’s later works
- Carrington and the aristocracy/family
- Carrington and alternative modernism

Deadline for abstracts 31 January 2013
Please send detailed 300 word abstracts, a working bibliography and short biography/CV to Dr Catriona McAra and Dr Jonathan Eburne at: c.f.mcara@hud.ac.uk and jpe11@psu.edu