The deadline for the upcoming conference "Gothic Cults and Gothic
Cultures" to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada, has now been
extended to March 1, 2001.
Our plenaries will include, Steven Bruhm, Nancy Armstrong and Ken Gelder.
We have accepted the following panel proposals:"Gothic Domestic Fiction",
"Slavery, Gothicism and Intertextuality" , and "Postcolonial Gothics"
among a number of others. For a full description of the conference,
please set your web browser to <http://www.sfu.ca/english/iga2001>
Please mail, fax, or email your abstract to:
John Whatley
Conference Coordinator
IGA 2001
Department of English
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia
Canada, V5A 1S6
Tel: 604-291-4354
Email: whatley@sfu.ca
Fax: 604-291-4964
Office: WMC 1378
Panel chair Professor Mason Harris is calling for papers in the following
panel:
Darwinism, Degeneration and Dystopia in the Gothic Tradition
This panel invites papers on a set of related themes that
become explicit in the late nineteenth century and remain dominant
forces both in horror fantasy and science fiction thereafter: the
exploration of a primal ferocity assumed to lurk in the dark ancestry
of human nature; the menace of criminal types supposedly descended
from our animal ancestry; the degeneration of individuals and whole
(urban) populations into animalistic sub-species; and/or the freezing
of time in dystopian visions of the future to produce a nightmare
social stasis, often represented at least partly in biological terms.
These themes play a crucial role in revitalizing the Gothic
tradition and making it a major literary genre in the late nineteenth
century--and all of the twentieth. The emergence of late Victorian
versions of Darwinism emphasizing an inheritance of animal aggression
give new vigour to Gothic literature, the most obvious examples being
R. L. Stevenson's exploration of motiveless criminality in *Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*, and the visions of a degenerate future and
of murderous imperialism in H. G. Wells's *The Time Machine* and *The
War of the Worlds*. Bram Stoker's *Dracula*, while more traditional
in its concept of evil, makes copious reference to contemporary
science (and the New Woman) while evoking a vision of Gothic sexual
degeneracy taking over British society.
In the same period European intellectuals prophesy the
decline of the West and coming racial degeneration, most notably Max
Nordau's proclamation of degeneracy in the arts, and Cesare
Lombroso's immensely influential analysis of criminal types
supposedly arising from animal reversion. These ideas have many
successors in the literature and political mythology of the twentieth
century. Even dystopias which are primarily focused on social
themes retain traces of biological degeneration. Also, precursors
can be found in the earlier nineteenth century, as in the apparently
innate evil of Mary Shelley's monster in *Frankenstein*.
Hence submissions to this panel could deal with a variety of
themes including assumed animal aggression in human nature, social
and biological degeneration, theories of criminality, and dystopian
futures, over a wide range of the Gothic tradition, from its early
forms to the present time.
John Whatley
Simon Fraser University
Tel: 604-291-4354
Email: whatley@sfu.ca
Fax: 604-291-4964
Office: WMC 1378
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