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Under the Red, White, and Blue: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and America - British Association for American Studies

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Under the Red, White, and Blue: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and America

call-for-papers

The Eighth Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium

Under the Red, White, and Blue: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and America

May 10th and 11th, 2025

Online via Zoom

With keynote addresses by:

Dr Michael P. Bibler

(author of Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 [University of Virginia Press, 2009])

and

Dr Laura Rattray

(Co-Editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to F. Scott Fitzgerald [Bloomsbury, 2025]

1925 was a monumental year in American letters. William Faulkner began his writing career in New Orleans under the apprenticeship of Sherwood Anderson, culminating in the publication of the New Orleans Sketches in 1955. Meanwhile, F. Scott Fitzgerald, already a literary celebrity and the chief chronicler of the Jazz Age, published The Great Gatsby, widely regarded as the Great American Novel. In celebration of the centenary of Fitzgerald’s masterwork The Great Gatsby and Faulkner’s early writing years, the Faulkner Studies in the UK Research Network is excited to announce the call for papers for our next colloquium.

We welcome submissions on any aspect of Faulkner and Fitzgerald’s life and writings, including (but in no way limited to) the following:

  • Comparative approaches
  • Biographical contexts, especially new readings of Joseph L. Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography (1974) and Matthew J. Broccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1981)
  • Questions of American identity, including the clash between the urban and rural, North and South, the wealthy elite and the working class
  • Youth culture, including readings of the Flapper and the “Sad Young Man” in Faulkner and Fitzgerald’s fiction
  • Academic institutions (Havard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, and Ole Miss) in Faulkner and Fitzgerald’s life and work
  • Dreams, hopes, ambitions, money, and greed
  • The legacy of the two World Wars, including impacts on mental health, national memory, and gender relations
  • Geographical locations across the United States and beyond, including Mississippi, New York, California, Minnesota, Paris, and London
  • The nature of tragedy
  • Late or unfinished work, including new readings of The Reivers and The Last Tycoon
  • Teaching and/or editing Faulkner and Fitzgerald
  • Questions of canonicity, legacy, reputation, and the “dead, white male author” debate
  • Faulkner and Fitzgerald’s centrality to American Studies around the world

Participants interested in presenting an individual paper should submit a max. 300-word abstract for a 20-minute presentation. Participants seeking to assemble a full-panel for a 60-minute session should include a one-page overview of the panel and max. 300-word abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. Please submit your abstracts to the event organiser, Dr Ahmed Honeini, at ahmed.honeini@rhul.ac.uk by  March 3rd, 2025. Successful applicants will be informed of their acceptance by March 10th, 2025.

The Faulkner Studies in the UK Research Network is dedicated to soliciting papers from scholars who reflect the diversity of Faulkner Studies in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, institutional affiliation, and locality. We aim to include a mix of participants from across the career spectrum (from under- and post-graduate students to full professors). All are welcome to apply.

Follow us on Twitter: @Faulkner_UK.