Future Conferences

CALL FOR PAPERS

EXTENDED DEADLINE

 

* VIRTUAL GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE, April 23, 2022. Abstracts are welcome on any topic in D.H. Lawrence studies, including any aspect of his fiction, poetry, essays, literary contacts, and place in modernism and/or literary history. We are especially interested in papers relating to the topic of relationships: love, hate, friendship, family, courtship, and marriage.

 

The online conference will use the Zoom meeting platform but will follow the traditional format of in-person meetings. Each session will be led by a Chair and will feature a respondent, a senior Lawrence scholar who will provide constructive commentary on the papers. Our aim is to enable as many students as possible to participate without budgetary pressures. There is no conference fee, but DHLSNA membership is required for presenters (student rate $10 USD).

Please email an abstract of 200-300 words plus concise curriculum vitae to Ron Granofsky, Professor Emeritus, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, at granofsk@mcmaster.ca by April 1, 2022. Acceptance notices will be sent by April 10, 2022.

 

MLA 2023

San Francisco, CA (Jan. 5-8, 2023)

 

* The Dickens Society and the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invite papers for a joint panel on “Portrayals of the Working Class in Dickens and Lawrence” at the Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco, CA on 5-8 January 2023. Papers comparing the two writers are especially welcome. Please email an abstract of 250-300 words with a brief c.v. and A/V requirements to Robert L. Caserio, Penn State University, at rlc25@psu.edu by the 19th of March, 2022.

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* 35th INTERNATIONAL D. H. LAWRENCE CONFERENCE

7-9 April 2022

Université Paris Nanterre

D.H. LAWRENCE, AN ISLANDER AND THE SEA

 

The contemplation of the sea has often fostered dreams of escape. Lawrence was always in search of new shores, so were a number of his fictional characters. To leave his “island country” and travel around the world, he depended on maritime transportation. His letters and writings bear witness to his enjoyment of sea voyages and sea bathing and to the fascination that this ever-changing watery element held for him. He is not a writer of maritime novels like Melville or Conrad but the list of his early readings reveals a passionate interest in books connected with the sea like Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, Ballantyne’s Coral Island among many others. Four of the works he wrote are set on real or imaginary islands: The Trespasser, Kangaroo, “The Man Who loved Islands,” and Sea and Sardinia. Several of his last poems, including “The Ship of Death,” recall the theme of the sea voyage. Innumerable allusions to the sea, to isles and islands, and very striking sea tropes are generously scattered throughout his prose works and poems. He was a sea-lover like many past and modernist British writers who meditated on the sea, on its intimations of sublimity or eternity, its dangerous power, and resorted to sea metaphors, sea symbolism and water mythology. T.S. Eliot is often quoted for asserting “The sea has many voices/many Gods and many voices” (The Dry Salvages). The sea had many voices for Lawrence too. At times, it even seemed to be a living entity rather than a pure backdrop in his fiction. His dialogue with this “primordial element” could inspire him with poetic reveries, an Oceanic feeling, as well as historical, political, scientific, mystic and philosophical reflections. The sea was important to his health, to his creative powers and to his cosmogony. Islands, as the aim of the voyage, stirred his utopian dreams and fed his often misanthropic reflections on man as a social being.