To all our delegates accepted to present papers at Captivating Criminality 7, July 2-4th 2020, at Bath Spa University:

We are extremely sorry to have to write to say that we are having to cancel the conference this July, due to the COVID-19 virus.

Bath Spa is now a 'virtual' university and will continue to be so until at least September 2020. This year we received a large number of extremely strong and fascinating abstracts and were looking forward to welcoming you to Bath - either for the first time or catching up with old friends. The conference series has run successfully every year since 2014 and cancelling it this year is very much a last resort. If you have registered then you will be refunded. Please allow the relevant department at Bath Spa time to do this - we are all working virtually at the moment and staff are trying their best to respond to this unprecedented situation as quickly as possible.

I do have one piece of great news to share, which would have been announced in July. This is from Kerstin-Anja Munderlein: 

"Even though this year's Captivating Criminality will have to be cancelled because of COVID-19 and the emergency measures Bath Spa University has had to take, we would like to invite you to next years conference. In 2021, Captivating Criminality will go on holiday again! This time, the University of Bamberg in the south of Germany will be our host. The Call for Papers to the Bamberg conference is attached to this e-mail, but please be assured that due to this extraordinary situation abstracts from this year will receive favourable consideration. We are looking forward to seeing you in Bamberg in July 2021. Stay safe, everyone, and see you when all of this will (hopefully) have blown over."

All best wishes,

Fiona, and the organising team, Eric, Amber and Ffion.

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its seventh conference, which will be held in Bath, UK. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous six successful conferences, Memory, History and Revaluation, will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre necessarily incorporates elements of the past – the past in general and its own past, both in terms of its own generic developments and also in respect of true crime and historical events. 

As Tzvetan Todorov argued in “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” crime fiction in many of its various sub-forms has a special relationship with the past. In classic forms of detective fiction, the central event around which the narrative is organized – the murder – occurs in pre-narrated time, and the actual narrative of the investigation is little more than a form of narrative archaeology, an excavation of a mysterious past event than is only accessible through reconstruction in the present. But this relationship between crime fiction and the past goes beyond narrative structure. The central characters of crime writing – its investigative figures – and frequently represented as haunted by their memories, living out their lives in the shadow of past traumas. More broadly, crime writing is frequently described as exhibiting a nostalgic orientation towards the past, and this longing for the restoration of an imagined prelapsarian Golden Age is part of the reason it has been association with social and political conservatism. On the other hand, there is a strong tradition of radical crime fiction that looks to the past not for comfort and stability, but in order to challenge historical myths and collective memories of unity, order, and security. Val McDermid argues that ‘…crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.’ Thus, crime fiction has been used to challenge, subvert and interrogate the legal and cultural status quo. Crime fiction’s relationship with the past is thus inherently complex, and represents a fascinating, and underexplored, focus for critical work.

Papers presented at Captivating Criminality 7 will thus examine changing notions of criminality, punishment, deviance and policing, drawing on the multiple threads that have fed into the genre since its inception. Speakers are invited to embrace interdisciplinarity, exploring the crossing of forms and themes, and to investigate and challenge claims that Crime Fiction is a fixed genre. Abstracts dealing with crime fiction past and present, true crime narratives, television and film studies, and other forms of new media such as blogs, computer games, websites and podcasts are welcome, as are papers adopting a range of theoretical, sociological and historical approaches.