23 Novembre 2021

Call for Papers The multitalented woman of letters, writer of fiction, and theoretician Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935) very early –and deeply—marked the field of fantastic literature. Many of her works, like those gathered in the collection *Hauntings* or such as “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady”, make use of a background immersed in the supernatural, be it real or suggested, to deal with questions that are recurrent in her work. Art works (sculptures, portraits, music) or the *genius loci* (often the spirit of Renaissance or Eighteenth Century Italy, but also Greek and Roman Antiquity, or the great Jacobean houses in England), often provide in-between, liminal spaces that border on the present and the past, broken into by a fascination with the historic that disrupts all topographical and temporal landmarks. Readers familiar with Vernon Lee’s theoretical texts have identified narrative patterns such as the Apollonian being overwhelmed by the Dionysiac, or the frontier between past and present or between people being abolished. This conference hopes to ask, if we consider the fantastic as the irruption of the supernatural in everyday life, how can we then assess and understand Lee’s fantastic fiction when her own texts and theory suggest a complex, fundamentally psychological process, rather than supernatural phenomena as described in classic ghost stories? It is possible to argue that Lee’s chosen theoretical posture on the fantastic reveals itself when empathy is evoked by a work of art, a portrait, a natural place or a building which arouses a feeling of “hauntedness”. Yet at the core of so many ghost stories (some too, by Lee), there is the assumption that the powerful personalities of the past can be endowed with a supernatural existence being willed to do so by the dissatisfied living. So how should one interpret Lee’s fantastic texts? This conference would like to interrogate Lee’s position on, and place within fantastic literature. We would also welcome broader comparisons between Vernon Lee and other writers who shared similar geographical, historical or artistic predilections. Lee’s decadent and cruel celebration of the Renaissance may situate her within the “New Romance” movement whicb boomed in the late 19th century and is exemplified by another woman of letters, Marie Corelli. There may also be the inevitable parallels with Oscar Wilde, or resemblances drawn between Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft’s ancient drama having cast a curse on the initial protagonist’s descendants. Perhaps the resurgence and the revival of art works or of gods and goddesses from Antiquity may connect Vernon Lee with a literary galaxy gathering authors like Prosper Mérimée, Arthur Machen, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Wilhelm Jensen, Robert W. Chambers, Théophile Gautier and many others, while the fascination of Renaissance portraits or haunted portraits is reminiscent of Robert Browning, of Walter Pater’s meditations on Mona Lisa, not to mention, to different degrees, novelists like Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and James Branch Cabell, all of whom endowed old portraits suggestive of some great tragedy with quasi supernatural powers. We invite papers in French or in English. Please send you 300-word abstract and short personal resume no later that 14 April 2022 to Pr. Marc ROLLAND garryowen@wanadoo.fr Pr Marc Rolland, Professor at the Université Littoral Côte d’Opale, recently published *Epouser la déesse, Essais sur la femme, le surnaturel et l’hyperbole*, éditions Shaker Verlag, 2021 <http://shaker.de/de/content/catalogue/index.asp?ID=8&ISBN=978-3-8440-7730-8> . We are delighted to announce that the annual event of the International Vernon Lee Society, co-organiser of the conference, is scheduled during this conference most aptly taking place in Vernon Lee’s own birthplace. Conference website: AAP: Vernon Lee et le fantastique, Boulogne-sur-Mer, 13-14 Octobre 2022