Helsinki Literature and the City Network 

City Peripheries / Peripheral Cities
The first international conference of the Helsinki Literature and the City Network (HLCN)
Helsinki, Finland 29-30 August 2013
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/conference/

The conference ‘City Peripheries / Peripheral Cities’ invites papers on new approaches to the study of literary cities, city peripheries and peripheral cities in any historical period or part of the world. The deadline for the call for papers is 15 March 2013. The language of the conference is English. Please send proposals (length approximately 300 words) to lieven.ameel@helsinki.fi

The keynote speakers are Professor Tone Selboe, University of Oslo and Professor Jeremy Tambling, University of Manchester. Professor Selboe has written extensively on city literature and urban theory. Her latest articles in English include “Home and City in Dickens’s Great Expectations and Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale”, and “Virginia Woolf and the Ambiguities of Domestic Space”. Professor Tambling is the author of numerous books on comparativist literary themes including, with an urban focus, Lost in the American City: Dickens, James and Kafka (2001), Going Astray: Dickens and London (2009) and, with Louis Lo, Walking Macao: Reading the Baroque (also 2009). 

The city has always occupied a special position amongst literary spaces. From the very earliest surviving literary texts, city images appear in all their contradictory complexity: as nodes of creative and destructive energy; as beacons of utopian possibility and of moral warning. As Burton Pike has pointed out, ‘[w]e unthinkingly consider this phenomenon modern, but it goes back to early epic and mythic thought. We cannot imagine Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Iliad, or the Aeneid, without their cities, which contain so much of their energy and radiate so much of their meaning’. Cities in literature appear as organisms: they are described as rising and falling, as growing, blooming, prospering, and decaying. Recent centuries have seen the kind of rhetoric used concerning cities and their literature modulate from the centripetal perspectives of the nineteenth-century urban novel to the increasingly centrifugal perspectives found in modernist and postmodernist literary visions. 

Cities tend to be defined by a sense of centrality and density, contrasted to a (suburban, rural, colonial) hinterland or periphery. As urban sprawl and the implosion of post-industrial cities have shown, a sense of peripheral urbanity may, however, turn out to be essential to many contemporary city centres. Simultaneously, some of the most interesting urban phenomena are being acted out in what was formerly considered the periphery: in Europe, redeveloping harbour areas; in China and in developing countries megacities arising in regions that until recently were barely urbanised. In another sense, an interest in city peripheries can be seen as central even to many of the most canonical city novels and poems, from the evocations of the prostitute and urban scavenger in Baudelaire and Dickens, to the sudden and often uncanny appearance of such peripheral figures as the immigrant, the suburban outcast, the isolated housewife, or the tourist passing through, in a plethora of city novels. 

The difference between centre and periphery is often not only a question of spatiality, but also of temporality: the differences in experiences of urban time are as momentous when suburban cyclicality is compared with the time experiences of the bustling city centre, as when the expanding time of a subjectively experienced moment of epiphany is set against the temporal consciousness of the urban crowd. This experiential range finds appropriate expression in urban and suburban narratives, which reflect, exaggerate, and sometimes mix or juxtapose, specific types of spatio-temporal experience.  

What kinds of new theoretical frameworks can be brought to bear on peripheral cities and city peripheries? The most helpful will perhaps be those which are able to explain both cities that seem peripheral from the perspective of the capitals of modernity and post-modernity, and which also include an awareness of the multiple senses of geographical, social, gendered and racial city peripheries to be found in literature.

The conference ‘City Peripheries / Peripheral Cities’ invites papers on subjects including, but not limited to, the following themes are welcome:

•	City peripheries in pre-modern literature
•	City writing from below: slumming, narratives of marginal urbanities
•	>From the centre to the margins and beyond: urban dynamics in literature
•	Literary descriptions of travel to and beyond city peripheries
•	Literature which addresses the question of how city peripheries are to be defined: what is and what is not city?
•	The literature of cities (and language cultures) which are distant from other urban centres or from today's globalised megacities
•	Peripheral urban genres: novels aimed at young readers, the ‘urban novel’ or ‘street lit.’, the hard-boiled crime novel, etc.
•	Suburban perspectives on city literature
•	Shifting and overlapping boundaries between the urban, the suburban and the rural
•	Frontiers within the city (social, spatial, literary)
•	Multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual cities
•	Urban wastelands: the literature of abandoned areas and deserted buildings

Particular sessions on literary London, urban dynamics, and Northern peripheral cities have been proposed, and further sessions will be organized on the basis of the final applications.

During the conference, a round table discussion will be held to discuss the development of the network and the possibilities for further cooperation between international scholars in the field of urban literary studies. A peer-reviewed publication on the basis of selected conference papers is planned.

For more information contact:
Lieven Ameel, University of Helsinki (lieven.ameel@helsinki.fi)
Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University (jfinch@abo.fi)
Markku Salmela, University of Tampere (markku.salmela@uta.fi)

HLCN website:
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/conference/