Pleasure and / in Historical Fictions

One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network

30 November 2024 (online in Zoom) ca 8 am to 5 pm (GMT)

15 min talks

The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its second one-day workshop on the topic of “Pleasure and / in Historical Fictions”.

Since the historical novel has come out of its critical closet in the last three decades to become a literary genre which “has come to dominate literary culture” (Wilson 2005: 145), which wins literary prizes (see de Groot 2019: 169) and “is snapped up for film and television” (Wilson 2005: 145), it is no longer considered a mere “ ‘feminine’ form” (Wallace 2005: 3) used by women to escape from reality.

Instead, the manifold uses to which the historical novel and historical fictions more generally have been put have become a frequent concern of academic inquiry. Historical fictions, it has been pointed out, serve as a means of finding orientation in a world of flux, “constructing continuity, orientation and identity” (Paletschek 2011: 3). They satisfy “the need for emotional and aesthetic experience and for adventure, for a risk-free encounter with what is strange” (ibid.; cf. also Jordanova 2019: ch 7). Moreover, historical fictions offer the opportunity to write marginalized groups back into the past (see e.g. Wallace 2005), and thus to address past wrongs.
In this one-day workshop, we aim to focus particularly on the Pleasures and / in Historical Fictions and to explore not only why the public are enthusiastic to consume the past in many popular forms, but also the manyfold pleasures that are described in historical fictions.

Short, 15-minute papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:
- Food and its consumption in historical fiction
- The aesthetic and visual appeal of the past and past settings
- Love and Sex in historical fiction
- Liberties, equalities and opportunities in historical fictions
- Exoticism and escapism in historical fictions
- Utopian histories
- Representations of sport and/or recreation in the past
- Representations of collective /shared pleasure in the past
- Historical fictions and taboo

Paper proposals are due by 1 October 2024. They should consist of a title, an abstract of 250 words max., and a short bio (150 words max). Please submit proposals through our online form (https://conferences.historicalfictionsresearch.org/hfrn24_workshop/).

Organisers: Series Editors Global Historical Fictions (https://brill.com/page/hifi)
Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Jerome de Groot, Dorothea Flothow, Siobhan O’Connor, and Stephanie Russo.