Call for Papers: Rereading Stephen King: Navigating the Intertextual Labyrinth (Due 12 June)

CFP: Rereading Stephen King: Navigating the Intertextual Labyrinth

REREADING STEPHEN KING: NAVIGATING THE INTERTEXTUAL LABYRINTH

KINGSTON UNIVERSITY

SATURDAY 11TH NOVEMBER 2017

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: SIMON BROWN (KINGSTON UNIVERSITY)

In Stephen King’s Gothic (2011) John Sears asserts that rereading King represents ‘an exercise in the extension of repetition, in the act of rereading an oeuvre already deeply structured … by its own engagement in the Gothic habit of rereading … To reread King would be to enter … and perhaps to become lost within, a labyrinth of intra- and intertextual relations, an immense and complex textual space’ (2). Sears’s framing of King’s writing is a critical response to David Punter’s question about the susceptibility of King’s writing to rereading (1996). To celebrate the publication of the inaugural issue of Pennywise Dreadful: The Journal of Stephen King Studies, this one-day symposium will extend critical dialogues concerning the intertextuality that permeates King’s fiction, and the variant ways in which King’s work is both haunted by his literary and cultural heritage, and haunts contemporary configurations of Gothic and horror. Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers concerned with the intertextual relations manifest in the work of Stephen King. Topics which may be explored by speakers could include, but are not limited to:

• King and Genre (Horror, Gothic, Science Fiction, Western, Crime)
• King’s Influences (Bradbury, Lovecraft, Matheson, Poe et al.)
• King’s Influence (on Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Joe Hill et al).
• King’s Short Fiction
• King on Screen
• King’s Recurrent Places/Spaces (Castle Rock, Maine, Shawshank)

Proposals of approximately 300 words, plus a 50 word bionote should be submitted via email to Alan Gregory and Dawn Stobbart, co-editors of Pennywise Dreadful, at pennywisedreadful@gmail.com.

Proposals should be submitted no later than Monday 12th June 2017.