Organisers: Karunika Kardak (IMLR) and Catherine Barbour (University of Surrey)

This online symposium invites abstracts for 20-minute papers on historical fiction by women writers across languages, time periods and cultural settings. The aim is to facilitate a dialogue between scholars working on and/or from the Global South and North on intersectional feminist approaches to women’s histories and literary texts.

We invite papers which explore how the genre unearths women’s historical experiences, retrieves them from the archive and fills gaps in historical narratives through fiction in order to counter and challenge patriarchal and cisnormative official histories. In other words, the symposium explores how fiction can become a way for women writers, especially ethnic, LGBTQIA+ and other minorities, to reclaim their ancestral pasts and write forgotten subjectivities back into history. It also seeks to discuss how works of historical fiction draw upon and go hand in hand with contemporary feminist activist movements.

We particularly welcome Black, Asian and Latinx feminist approaches as well as scholarship on trans voices, transcultural texts, migrant narratives and women writing in minority languages.

The symposium will close with a roundtable discussion which will reflect upon trends in historical fiction and gender-based approaches to the genre. We aim for this to be a significant step towards developing more inclusive, transnational, comparative and comprehensive theoretical notions on women’s historical fiction.

Following the symposium, we hope to invite contributions on novel approaches to women’s historical fiction to be published in an edited volume.

For 20-minute presentations, please send a 250-word abstract with a short author biography by 3 September 2021 to Karunika Kardak: karunika.kardak@sas.ac.uk The symposium is envisaged primarily as an exchange of ideas and we welcome papers discussing works in progress.

https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/24535