Call for Papers: The Child and the Book (Graduate student conference; 3 April 2004)

Deadline: 1 December 2003

The Roehampton Children's Literature Research Forum announces its inaugural conference: The Child and the Book: Current Scholarly Approaches to Children and Literature, University of Surrey Roehampton, 3 April 2004.

This one-day conference seeks to bring together postgraduate students from all disciplines whose work is concerned with children and literature in its broadest sense. The aim of the event is twofold: to review and share information and knowledge about those areas currently under research and to encourage meaningful collaboration between scholars.

The conference programme will be determined primarily by those research students interested in participating and, at this stage, there are few restrictions on the subject areas which might be incorporated in the day's schedule, although we would hope to be able to cover a wide spectrum of periods and themes. For example, the conference could include such diverse research areas as:

• Orphan children in Dickens
• Harry Potter and the child reader
• Children's publishing at the Fin de Siècle
• The psychological impact of contemporary fairy tales for children
• Cult fiction for teenagers
• The narrative voice in contemporary children's fiction
• Changing representations of gender in children's books
• Transatlantic fiction
• Literature in translation
• The didactic narrative
• Children's Literature criticism/theory

Selected papers will be published after the conference in a refereed on-line journal.

Abstracts not exceeding 300 words for papers of 20 minutes duration should be sent to Laura Atkins, The Child and the Book, National Centre for Research in Children's Literature, University of Surrey, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PH or emailed to l.atkins@roehampton.ac.uk.

The closing date for submissions is 1 December 2003.

For further details about the conference, go to http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/childandbook.

This page last updated 1 October 2003.