International Crime Fiction Association

Call for Papers

Captivating Criminality 5: Crime Fiction, Insiders and Outsiders

Bath, UK

28th – 30th June 2018

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its fifth UK conference. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous four successful conferences, Crime Fiction: Insiders and Outsiders, will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre is able to incorporate both traditional ideas and themes, as well as those from outside mainstream and/or dominant ways of thinking.

Crime fiction narratives continue to gain in both popularity and critical appreciation. This conference will consider the ways in which writers who work within generic cultural and critical boundaries and those who challenge those seeming restrictions, through both form and content, have influenced each other. Crime fiction, in its widest sense, has benefited from challenges from diverse ‘outsiders’ who in turn shift and develop the genre. This was as true in the early days of the genre as it is today and, as such, we welcome submissions from the early modern to the present day.

A key question that this conference will address is the enduring appeal of crime fiction and its ability to incorporate other disciplines such as History, Criminology, Film, TV, Media, and Psychology. From the ‘sensational’ novelists of the 1860s to today’s ‘Domestic Noir’ narratives, crime fiction has proved itself to be open to challenges and development from historical and cultural movements such as, feminism, gender studies, queer politics, post modernism, metafiction, war, and shifting concepts of criminality. In addition, crime fiction is able to respond to and incorporate changes in political and historic world events. With this in mind, we are interested in submissions that approach crime narratives from the earliest days of crime writing until the present day.

This international, interdisciplinary event is organised by Bath Spa University and the Captivating Criminality Network, and we invite scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing, to participate in this conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real crime.

Topics may include but are not restricted to:

Feminist Sleuths (second wave and beyond)
The Victorian Lady Detective
Femininity and the Golden Age
Masculinities
Crime and Queer Theory
Crime and War
Crime and Gothic
Gothic Outsiders
Gothic Disruptions and Disturbances
The Cozy Crime Novel
Victims and Perpetrators
Crime Fiction and Form
The Prison and Other Institutions
Madness and Criminality
Technology
Film Adaptations
Post-Communist Crime Fiction
Crime Fiction in Times of Trauma
Latin American Crime Fiction and Trauma
The Psychological
The Detective, Then and Now
The Anti-Hero
True Crime
Contemporary Crime Fiction
Victorian Crime Fiction
Eighteenth-Century Crime
Early Forms of Crime Writing
The Golden Age
Hardboiled Fiction
Forensics and Detection
The Body
Seduction and Sexuality
The Criminal Analyst
Others and Otherness
Landscape
The Country and the City
The Media and Detection
Adaptation and Interpretation
Justice Versus Punishment
Lack of Order and Resolution

Please send 200 word proposals to Dr. Fiona Peters and Joanne Ella Parsons (captivatingcriminalitynetwork@gmail.com) by 3rd February 2018. The abstract should include your name, email address, and affiliation, as well as the title of your paper. Please feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Postgraduate students are welcome. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome.

Attendance fees

Full Fee: £180 (£135 if a member of the International Crime Fiction Association)

Reduced Rate (students, ECRs not on a permanent contract/retired): £130 (£95 if a member of the International Crime Fiction Association)

To join the International Crime Fiction Association please email: captivatingcriminalitynetwork@gmail.com

Keynote Speakers

Mary Evans

We are delighted to welcome back Prof. Mary Evans to Captivating Criminality as keynote speaker. Mary is Emeritus Leverhulme Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at LSE and has previously taught Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Kent. In her sociological research, Prof. Evans looks at the role of narratives in our constructions of meaning and identity in society, and has a particular interest in what we term ‘fiction’ and the role this plays in these constructions. Prof. Evans’s long publications list includes Imagination of Evil. Detective Fiction and the Modern World (2011), a fascinating examination of the relationship between detective fiction (especially the figure of the detective) and the ‘morality’ of real life crime and other social issues, which asks what the figure of ‘the detective’ stands for. Mary is also co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory and her latest publication is entitled The Persistence of Gender Inequality.

Val McDermid

Dubbed the Queen of Crime, Val McDermid has sold over 15 million books to date and is translated into over 30 languages. She is perhaps best-known for her Wire in the Blood series, featuring clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan, which was adapted for television starring Robson Green. She has written three other series: private detective Kate Brannigan, journalist journalist Lindsay Gordon and, most recently, cold case detective Karen Pirie. She has also published in several award-winning standalone novels, two books of non-fiction and a children’s picture book, My Granny is a Pirate.

McDermid continues to be a hugely versatile writer with her novels selling across the globe. She is also an experienced broadcaster with regular and hugely popular appearances on TV and radio. She is highly sought after as a speaker at literary festivals and other events across the country and overseas.

A regular broadcaster with BBC Radio, Val has written dramas and presented programmes on Radio 4 and was also a huge success on the evergreeen Desert Island Discs. In early 2017 Val’s latest BBC Radio 4 play, Resistance, aired to great acclaim. It was produced in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and Val is currently Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize. Val has fronted several features for BBC Two’s The Culture Show and appeared several times as a panellist on BBC Question Time. She further added to her broadcasting credentials in late 2016 by captaining the winning University Challenge alumnae team! She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger, the Grand Prix des Romans D’Aventure, the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011 and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. In 2012 she became a Celebrity Mastermind champion. In 2016 she received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award at the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Harrogate Crime Festival and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Val was born in Kirkcaldy, a coastal town in the heart of the Scottish mining community. She graduated in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford - the first from a Scottish state school to do so - before going on to be an award winning journalist for sixteen years. Her first novel was published in 1987. She is a lifelong Raith Rovers Football Club supporter and in 2011 was appointed as a Director on the board. She is the current home shirt sponsor. Val’s other loves in life include walking, music, gaming and cooking. She writes full time and divides her time between Edinburgh and Cheshire.

For more information please contact Laura Sherlock, laura.sherlock@littlebrown.co.uk.

Linda Mizejewski

Linda Mizejewski is a Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University and the author of five books in feminist media studies, including Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (2004). Her most recent monograph is Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (2014). With Victoria Sturtevant, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Hysterical! Women in American Comedy (2017).