Call for Papers – Children’s Literature, Childhood Death, and the Emotions 1500-1800

The University of Western Australia
5-6 December, 2013

Conference Website

Confirmed plenary speakers from the Children’s Literature Unit in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, UK:

  • Kate Chedgzoy, Professor of Renaissance Literature and Head of School
  • Matthew Grenby, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • Kimberley Reynolds, Professor of Children’s Literature

Proposals are invited for papers on any topic from any discipline that can be used to increase understanding of how the death of children was presented to children in texts for them as part of the emotional economies of the period.

Topics of interest could include but are not limited to:

  • Childhood death and grief/sorrow
  • Adults’ responses to childhood death
  • Institutional responses to childhood death
  • Illustrating death for/of children
  • Managing children’s responses to childhood death
  • Children’s fear of death
  • Emotions associated with potentially fatal illnesses and injuries
  • Child martyrdom, child murder and infanticide
  • Dramatizing the death of children

Please send 300-word abstracts to kim.reynolds@ncl.ac.uk by 31 July 2013. General queries about the conference theme should also be sent to Kim Reynolds at that address.

Queries about travel, venue, and other practical arrangements should be addressed to Pam Bond at UWA.

It is intended to bring a number of papers from the conference together to create either an edited volume suitable, for example, for the Palgrave History of Childhood series, or a special number of an appropriate peer-reviewed journal.