CFP: Medievalisms in Popular Culture, PCA/ACA 2017 National Conference

CFP: Medievalism in Popular Culture

PCA/ACA 2017 National Conference

April 12 – 15, 2017 – San Diego, California

The Medievalism in Popular Culture Area accepts papers on all topics that explore either popular culture during the Middle Ages or transcribe some aspect of the Middle Ages into the popular culture of later periods.  These representations can occur in any genre, including film, television, novels, graphic novels, gaming, advertising, art, etc.   For this year’s conference, I would like to encourage submissions on some of the following topics:

·         The Arthurian World

·         Codes of Conduct and/or Representations of Fellowship

·         Adaptation

·         Medievalism in Game of Thrones

·         Robin Hood

·         Medievalism and Teaching

·         Board Games/Online Gaming and/or Cosplay

·         Medievalism in Advertising

If your topic idea does not fit into any of these categories, please feel free to submit your proposal as well.  I would like to encourage as much participation as possible, and depending on submissions, I may rearrange the topic groupings.

All papers will be included in sessions with four presenters each, so plan to present on your topic for no more than 15 minutes, inclusive of any audio or visual materials. 

Panel submissions are also welcome on any topic of medievalism. If you would like to propose a panel, please submit your complete panel to me directly at cfrancis@bloomu.edu. Individual papers must be submitted to the PCA online system (see below).

Submission requirements:

Please submit a title and a 250 word abstract to conference.pcaaca.org.   All submissions must be directed to the online database.  Be sure to indicate whatever audio/visual needs you may have.  Traditionally, all rooms at the PCA/ACA conference provide a projection screen with sound capability.  Presenters are required to bring their own laptops and any special connectors.

Deadline for submission: October 1^st, 2016 (one month earlier than previous years)

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Christina Francis, Associate Professor of English, Bloomsburg University, at cfrancis@bloomu.edu. 

CFP: 11th Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies

The Eleventh Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies will take place on 16-17 June 2017 at Auburn University at Montgomery, Montgomery, Alabama, USA.

The theme for this two-day international conference is “Southern Outlaws,” and proposals are welcome on any aspect of “southern” outlawry, banditry, piracy, and other transgressive activities and movements. Such topics spanning the fields of outlaws of the Southern United States, Australia, and South America are particularly welcome. Papers are also invited that explore the metaphorical and spatial conceptions of a “southern” outlaw, especially bad outlaws and trickster figures, and the ways in which geographical and topographical features create and foster outlawry. Papers on the Robin Hood tradition are also welcome. Conference participants will enjoy a variety of peer-reviewed papers from a number of academic fields: literature, history, folklore, theatre, music, anthropology, sociology, geography, art history, and media studies.

For more information on the conference and to submit abstracts, please see the conference's webpage:

http://www.cas.aum.edu/robin-hood

Call for Abstracts/Essays: Food and Feasting in Post-1700 Outlaw Narratives

We are soliciting abstracts for a proposed collection on food and feasting in post-1700 outlaw narratives.

While outlawry has its formal origins in the Middle Ages, the outlaw is a figure and trope present in many modern, post-1700 texts, especially American, Native American, African American, and Australian outlaw narratives. Food, its preparation, and its consumption are presented in outlaw narratives as central points of human interaction, community, and fellowship, providing readers with opportunities to examine and analyze agricultural practices as well as trade, economics, and the social standing of its producers and consumers. Feast scenes perform a wide variety of functions, serving as a cultural repository of manners and behaviors, a catalyst for the adventure, or a moment of regrouping and redirecting the narrative, for instance.

This collection will consider the presence and function of food and feast in outlaw narratives, with an eye to considering whether and how instances of food preparation and eating in these tales can be said to display, to develop, or to subvert the conventional ideas of community and fellowship most commonly associated with foods and feasts in literature. This collection is unique in a number of ways. It builds upon a growing body of scholarship on outlaw studies and food studies, which in recent years has seen a number of important analyses from such scholars as Allison Carruth, Stephen Knight, Susan Leonardi, Anita Mannur, Thomas Ohlgren, and Helen Phillips. Indeed, some twenty-five years after Leonardi's landmark 1989 PMLA article, "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," scholars are less ambivalent about the status of food studies. It seems that now is the opportune time for an examination of the transgressive world of outlaws within the context of one of life's basic necessities, food.

A publisher has expressed interest in the collection. We ask that 300-500 word abstracts and brief biographies be sent, by July 1, 2016, to Alex Kaufman (akaufman@aum.edu) and Penny Vlagopoulos (pennyvlag@yahoo.com).

Essays for accepted abstracts will be due by December 1, 2016, and should be 6,000-8,000 words in Chicago style.

Reviews from the Greenwood: Melissa Ridley Elmes Reviews Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake

Review: Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake

Reviewed by Melissa Ridley Elmes

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

 

Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-55597-717-7. Pbk, $16.00. 365 pp.

Much has been said already about the use of language in Paul Kingsnorth’s first novel since its initial publication by London’s Unbound Press in 2013, with critics falling broadly into two camps: those who praise his courage and skill in writing an entire novel from the perspective of an English landowner dispossessed by the Norman Invasion and in a shadow-tongue of the English spoken at that time, and those who condemn his use of this constructed language as a stunt at best, and an irresponsible custody of the history of the English language at worst.[1] Medievalists (and in particular Anglo-Saxonists) tend to belong to this second group; social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have been home to several rousing debates conducted among scholars of the medieval period about the book’s language. 

Moving beyond this debate over the perceived charms or defects of its language, the reader is engaged with a text that seems at once familiar and unfamiliar, accessible and impenetrable, and it is this carefully crafted tension—of which the language used is only one aspect, albeit perhaps the most visible and immediate—that is this book’s true achievement as a literary work. A historical novel constructed as an artifact, but told with a decidedly modern sensibility; a postapocalyptic story, yet one set in the known past rather than an as-yet-unknown future world; a Joycean stream-of-consciousness, close first-person presentation of the events; a Tolkien-esque implementation of the author’s own historically-inspired imagined language: The Wake weaves together the best of modern and postmodern narrative approaches to craft a story so stark and unforgiving that it can reduce a reader in the right frame of mind to tears over the seemingly insurmountable conflict between the human and the inhumane that categorizes so much of our collective historical record and which this book so grippingly fictionalizes. As a work of literature, then, this is truly a stunning achievement. For scholars and aficionados of medieval outlaws in history and legend, The Wake is essential reading, not only for the fictionalized but compelling insight it provides into the decision to turn outlaw which lies at the heart of the protagonist’s narrative, but also because it is certain to become a gateway into the greenwood for modern readers seeking narratives of outlawry that go beyond Robin Hood.

The book opens with two epigrams drawn from the historical record: William of Normandy’s deathbed confession of the atrocities he committed against the English during the Norman Invasion on the first page, followed on the second by William of Malmesbury’s (1095-1143?) postcolonial lament that “England is become the residence of foreigners and the property of strangers … they prey upon the riches and vitals of England.” These passages serve to situate the reader in the novel’s unrelenting view of the French invaders as devils to be driven from the land. From here, the novel opens into a short prologue given in the voice of its protagonist, Buccmaster, a pagan landowner of Danish descent related to the famed blacksmith Weyland.[2] Like a scop in Old English literature, Buccmaster says he will tell through songs the truth of “a folc harried beatan a world broken apart […] deofuls in the heofon all men with sweord when they sceolde be with plough the ground full not of seed but of my folc” (2). Even in these opening passages of the novel Buccmaster’s tone is not mournful, but indignant. He resents more  so than fears the impending disruptions to his daily life predicted in various omens, and he grows increasingly irascible and contemptuous as the narrative unfolds and he watches his way of life dissembling around him, until ultimately, stripped of everything, he turns to vigilante outlawry against his foes. This characterization of a privileged individual watching his privilege stripped from him seems at once historically viable and a commentary on the current political climate in some arenas. 

Buccmaster, of course, is “privileged” by the standards of eleventh-century Englishmen: he is a freeman and holds “three oxgangs of good land” and “two geburs to worc for [him] on it” and “four oxen of my own for the plough” a bounty he claims is “mor than any other man  in this ham” and has entitled him to be viewed as “a great man” who had “a seat on the wapentac” and who owes no dues to any thegn but “geld wolde [he] gif but only to the cyng” (11). It would be folly, however, to view him as a nobleman, or as being privileged in the sense of being a wealthy upper-class individual. Kingsnorth reinforces the understanding that for all his self-proclaimed importance Buccmaster is still an average man at best by filling his speech with shadow-tongue profanity; his enemies and men he deems stupid are esols and he makes prolific use of the word fuccan. This casual use of profanity in its main character, as much as anything, gives the novel its modern sensibility. Buccmaster might be any self-righteous vigilante figure in a modern television police drama, for instance, spouting profanities to openly demonstrate his street cred and contempt for the recipient or subject of his profanity-laced insults.

Buccmaster is an anti-hero. Like his counterparts in the medieval outlaw legendary, including Robin Hood, Gamelyn, and Hereward the Wake—who plays an important role in this book as one of the subjects of Buccmaster’s contempt—he finds himself stripped of his former prestige and social position and, in response, turns to vigilante activity, taking his place in the greenwood with a small group of men to rally against the French and Christian invading powers. However, unlike his medieval counterparts, who each certainly performs brutal and even gruesome acts of violence against their enemies yet who also exhibit loyalty, courtesy, and compassion when it is warranted, there is no redeeming factor in Buccmaster’s character. His outlawry, although undertaken for the same causes that led to the outlawry of Robin Hood and of Hereward—the conquest, slaughter, and enslavement of the English by the French, and the corruption of the officials of the Christian Church—is not so much undertaken for justice as for vengeance, and because of this it succumbs to doubt and treachery, while Buccmaster himself succumbs to paranoia and self-delusion, to which he responds with still further violence. He is stubbornly one-sided and adamantly selfish, so that ultimately he fails in his self-imposed task of reclaiming England from her invaders not so much because his enemies are that much stronger and better equipped, but because he cannot see past his own, limited view of the world and of his place within it to consider other ways of handling the situations in which he finds himself. If he has a fate, it is certainly of his own creating, and therein lays the tragedy of this character. 

The Wake is a challenging, entertaining, at times infuriating and utterly absorbing reimagining of an exceptionally turbulent period in English history. Thematically laced with issues concerning, among others, colonialism, ecocriticism, gender, and political and social systems in flux, the book will pair well instructionally with historical studies and primary source materials from the period it covers for a variety of classroom purposes. Beyond the classroom, The Wake should prove a lasting and influential contribution to the canon of historical novels set in the medieval period, and especially so in terms of its addition to the rapidly-growing cadre of re-imagined outlaw narratives which includes Angus Donald’s Outlaw Chronicles (10 titles, 2009-2015) Stephen McKay’s Forest Lord trilogy (2013-2015), and Elizabeth Chadwick’s The Outlaw Knight (2013).

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[1]Among those in the first camp are Adam Thorpe of The Guardian (“The Wake By Paul Kingsnorth Review: A Literary Triumph,” 2 April 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/02/the-wake-paul-kingsnorth-review-literary-triumph) and Caleb True for Ploughshares (“Review—The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth,” 12 February 2016, http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/review-the-wake-by-paul-kingsnorth/) . In the opposing camp, medievalist Robert DiNapoli writes in his review of the book that “On websites, readers and reviewers have reported being beguiled by Kingsnorth’s linguistic re-invention of a distant past, an enchantment that I cannot share, and not out of mere scholarly nicety. It is possible to grow used to the odd spellings and vocabulary, but his attempt to represent anything you could call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ by these means fails wretchedly” (“Lost in Translation,” Arena Magazine (Fitzroy, Vic), No. 133, Dec 2014 - Jan 2015: 52-53, http://themelbourneliteratureseminars.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Kingsnorth-The-Wake-Review.pdf).

[2] Also spelled in Old English “Weland” or “Welund,” a historical figure featured on the front panel of the Franks’ casket and in the Old English texts Deor and Beowulf, in the Norse tradition with his own story in the Poetic Edda (“Völundarkviδa”), he is son of the king of the Finns, variously the forger of such legendary swords as Roland’s Durendal and Archbishop Turpin’s Almace (Karlamagnus’s Saga) and Sigmund’s sword Gram, which is destroyed and reforged for his son, Sigurd, who uses it to slay the dragon in Volsunga’s Saga.

CFP: Making History: Biographical Imperatives in Constructing “Robin Hood,” SEMA 2016 (DEADLINE EXTENDED) & Kzoo 2017

Lorraine K. Stock is soliciting abstracts for SEMA 2016 and Kalamazoo 2017. Please note the deadlines, as the SEMA one is soon. While the Kalamazoo deadline for abstracts is in September, Lorraine would appreciate abstracts sooner than later so that she can better plan for Kalamazoo 2017 as session proposals are due to the Congress in mid-June.

CFP: Making History: Biographical Imperatives in Constructing “Robin Hood”

SEMA 2016, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, October 6-8, 2016

AND

51^st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 11-14, 2017

Robin Hood (hereafter RH), his outlaw comrades, and antagonists sprang ex nihilo from the greenwood and urban centers of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire in such late medieval ballads as RH and the Monk, RH and the Potter, The Gest, and RH and Guy of Gisborne. Presuming audience familiarity with RH’s biography and the origins of his outlawry, these early texts narrated RH’s adventures in medias res, without supplying background about or the origins of the outlaw. Langland’s casual reference to the “Rimes of Robyn Hode” in Piers Plowman (1377) attests medieval familiarity with RH’s real or fictional identity. Already by the 15^th century, Andrew of Wyntoun, Walter Bower, and John of Fordun chronicled (therefore historicized) RH’s exploits. 16^th-century writers further summarized or augmented RH’s growing collective biography. Citing an “auncient pamphlet,” in 1569 Richard Grafton historicized his elevation of RH from yeomanry to an earldom. Anthony Munday’s 1598 plays, The Downfall … and the Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, extended the growing “biography” of RH: situating him in Richard I’s Plantagenet court; endorsing his earldom; and affiancing him to noble Matilda Fitzwater/Maid Marian, absent in the medieval ballads. The creation of anonymous 17^th and 18^th-century broadside ballads and chapbooks supplied backstory for the outlaw’s “history.” Bishop Percy combined ballads from Samuel Pepys’ 1723 collection with the Percy Folio’s texts (including RH ballads) in his 1765 oft-reissued Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Capping this biographical imperative, antiquarian Joseph Ritson published his 1795 (and oft-reissued) 2-volume Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads…To Which are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life. Ritson’s Preface, a 10-page “Life” of RH, is documented by 104 pp. of “Notes and Illustrations” supporting his construction of RH’s personal history. Subsequent iterations of RH’s biography adopted and adapted Ritson’s paradigm.

Rather than solicit documentation attesting the historical existence of an actual outlaw who was (or supplied the model for) the figure now recognized as “RH,” this session about biography/historiography and RH invites 15-20 minute papers investigating various manifestations of this enduring imperative to adapt, augment, or change the “history” or constructed “biography” of RH in any media including (but not limited to): medieval and post-medieval literary texts and chronicles; modern historiography (Rodney Hilton, Maurice Keen, etc.); post-medieval poetry, plays, fiction; opera; films; television; print and film documentaries. Final paper length depends on the number of apt abstracts.

For those interested in submitting an abstract for the 55^th Annual Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA) Conference, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, October 6-8, 2016, send 1-page abstracts before May 25 to Lorraine K. Stock, University of Houston: lstock@uh.edu

For those interested in submitting an abstract for the 51^st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 11-14, 2017, send 1-page abstracts before September 10 to Lorraine K. Stock, University of Houston: lstock@uh.edu