Talk - Fantasy Worlds with Frances Hardinge

Wednesday 8th February, 6 – 7pm followed by a drinks reception

G07, Percy Building, Newcastle University

Join us for an exclusive event with Frances Hardinge, as she discusses the borders between fantasy and reality and her inspiration for her writing with Aishwarya Subramanian from Newcastle University’s Children’s Literature Unit. Her latest novel, The Lie Tree, described as ‘a Victorian Gothic mystery with added paleontology, blasting powder, post-mortem photography and feminism” won the Costa Book of the Year 2015 and audiences will also be treated to a reading from the outstanding novel by Frances as part of this very special event.

This event is hosted by Newcastle University’s School of English Literature, Langauge and Linguistics with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books.

Free event. Please book online in advance at: http://www.sevenstories.org.uk/whats-on/events/122952/fantasy-worlds-with-frances-hardinge

This event complements the Children’s Literature Unit’s Postgraduate Visit Day, which will be hosted earlier that day for prospective Masters and PhD students. For more information and to book, visit: http://forms.ncl.ac.uk/view.php?id=11282

Talk - Memory, Miniaturization, and the Transformative Energy of Fairy Tales

Professor Maria Tatar, The John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature, Harvard University. Thursday 01 December 2016, 17:00 - 18:30 Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 8PQ, DMB, Room GS5

"Fairy tales may be simple stories but they also give us the expression of complex thought. On the one hand, they offer up stark enactments of binary oppositions and cultural contradictions, with encounters between predator and prey, beauties and beasts, or primal innocence and cannibalistic cruelty. At the same time, their surfaces conceal layers of cultural memory saturated with historical meaning. This talk will draw on Walter Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller to understanding the cultural repetition compulsion that drives us to keep retelling “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and other fairy tales."

Maria Tatar is without doubt one of the world’s leading authorities on children’s literature, fairy tales and folklore. She was born in Hungary, but her family moved to the USA in the 1950s, when Maria was a child. She grew up in Highland Park Illinois, which she refers to in her 2014 Lowell Lecture for the Boston Public Library (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR10oa8hq18). Maria went from Highland Park High School to Denison University in Ohio, and from there to graduate study at Princeton. On completing her doctoral work, Maria joined the faculty of Harvard University where she is now the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology. She also shares her love of wonder tales and children’s literature with a wider audience through her Breezes from Wonderland blog (http://blogs.harvard.edu/tatar/). Her extensive list of publications includes _The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales_ (1987), _Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood_ (1992), _Enchanted Hunters_ (2009), and _Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives_. (2004).

http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/68717

CFP - All About Cinderella: retellings in the cultural imagination

University of Bedfordshire, 9th – 10th June 2017.

Three-hundred and nineteen years since the publication of Charles Perrault’s famous Histories du Temps Passé, the myth of Cinderella remains integral to many current facets of our cultures. Inspired by the University of Bedfordshire’s collection of scripts, books, theatrical memorabilia, designs, and ephemera on Cinderella and organised by the Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance, this conference focuses on the role of performance and storytelling as a way to analyse moments of significant artistic, cultural and social change. The interdisciplinary event will provide an open debate about this ever-present story from different cultural perspectives across the world and we invite abstracts of 300 words for 20 minute papers.

Possible themes include:

• Cinderella narratives and metaphors
• Cinderella on screen and stage
• Transnational Cinderella
• The publishing of Cinderella
• Victorian Cinderella
• Cinderella and design
• Adaptations of the Cinderella story
• The psychology of Cinderella

Non-traditional proposals featuring collaborative papers, practice-led research, video-essays, elements of performance etc. where they increase our knowledge of the role of re-narration of fairy tales in artistic, cultural and social change are actively encouraged. RIMAP wishes to offer a prize for the best Postgraduate proposal.

Please include the following with your abstract:

• Collaborators’ and presenters’ names, addresses, affiliations, contact details in a short biography, together with a URL to a sample of work (if appropriate). Please state if you are a postgraduate research student.
• Description of the presentation/performance/screening 300 words max (if appropriate)
• Technical or space requirements
• Duration (the standard duration is 20 minutes but you may request multiples)

Please send your abstracts and support documentation to Cinderella@beds.ac.uk by 11.30pm on 9th December 2016. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 3rd February 2017. More information about the conference will be posted on the conference website: www.beds.ac.uk/cinderella and on Twitter @cinderellaconf

New Fairy Tales - online magazine

See here for further details, and here for the latest issue (#5 - including a contribution by Kelley Swain).

7th June

Skillicorn Room, Homerton College, 7.30-9pm

For our last meeting of the year, we are no longer going to hold a creative-writing workshop; rather, a more relaxed end-of-term evening of conversation over a glass of wine or two. If you'd like to read something, then do have a look at the mock-Victorian insect fairy-tale, ‘Things Are Not What They Seem', from A.S. Byatt's ‘Morpho Eugenia’, Angels and Insects (1992). Let me know if you need a copy of this.

All welcome!

24th May - Water

We meet once more from 7.30-9pm in the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College; a modified reading list is below. If you have trouble accessing the second reading then let me know and I can email you a pdf document.


All welcome!

1.'The Drop of Water’, Hans Christian Andersen (1848)

2. ‘The Water-Drops: A Fairy Tale’, [Henry Morley], Household Words, 17 August 1850, pp. 482-9. [.cam domain]

3. 'Water Bewitched’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859).

4. ‘A Drop of Water on Its Travels’, Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879).

17th May - Insects

We meet, as usual, from 7.30-9pm in the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College. The modified reading list is all online, with links below:

‘The Fresh-Water Siren’, ‘Acheta Domestica’ [L. M. Budgen], Episodes of Insect Life (1849), vol. I, chapter 9.

‘A Lesson of Faith’ and ‘Knowledge not the Limit of Belief’, Margaret Gatty, Parables From Nature (1855-)

‘Metamorphoses’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859)

All welcome!

10th May - Stars

We begin our exploration of the fairy-tales of science by travelling to the stars. All of this week's readings are available online at the links below. We meet from 7.30-9pm in the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College: this is in the Ibberson Building on this map. I will be at the porter's lodge at 7.20 should anyone prefer to meet there instead. All welcome!

General Introductory Reading

Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879), lecture 1.

Readings for 10^th May

‘A Flight Through Space’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859).

‘Training the Pole-Star’, and ‘The Tail of a Comet’, Elizabeth W. Champney, In the Sky-Garden (1877).

‘Sunbeams and the work they do’, Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879), lecture 2.

‘The Magician’s Chamber by Moonlight’, Arabella Buckley, Through Magic Glasses (1890).