NEW BOOK: Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story (Palgrave, 2019), edited by Barbara Korte and Laura Lojo-Rodríguez
This book represents a contribution to both border studies and short story studies. In today’s world, there is ample evidence of the return of borders worldwide: as material reality, as a concept, and as a way of thinking. This collection of critical essays focuses on the ways in which the contemporary British short story mirrors, questions and engages with border issues in national and individual life. At the same time, the concept of the border, as well as neighbouring notions of liminality and intersectionality, is used to illuminate the short story’s unique aesthetic potential. The first section, “Geopolitics and Grievable Lives”, includes chapters that address the various ways in which contemporary stories engage with our newly bordered world and borders within contemporary Britain. The second section examines how British short stories engage with “Ethnicity and Liminal Identities”, while the third, “Animal Encounters and Metamorphic Bodies”, focuses on stories concerned with epistemological borders and borderlands of existence and identity. Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the varied and complex ways in which British short stories in the twenty-first century engage with the concept of the border. More Information.
NEW BOOK: Gender & Short Fiction. Women’s Tales in Contemporary Britain (Routledge, 2018), edited by Jorge Sacido Romero and Laura Lojo Rodríguez
In Gender and Short Fiction: Women’s Tales in Contemporary Britain, Jorge Sacido-Romero and Laura Mª Lojo-Rodríguez explain why artistically ambitious women writers continue turning to the short story, a genre that has not yet attained the degree of literary prestige and social recognition the novel has had in the modern period. In this timely volume, the editors endorse the view that the genre still retains its potential as a vehicle for the expression of female experience alternative to and/or critical with dominant patriarchal ideology present at the very onset of the development of the modern British short story at the turn of the nineteenth century. More Information.
INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR: Gender and Short Fiction. Women’s Tales in Contemporary Britain (21-22 April 2016)
On 21 and 22 April 2016, the Research Project “Women’s Tales” (FEM2013-41977-P) organized the international seminar Gender and Short Fiction: Women’s Tales in Contemporary Britain, held at the Faculty of Philology, University of Santiago de Compostela. Central to this seminar was the presence of Scottish writer Janice Galloway, whose plenary lecture gave an interesting insight into an author’s view on literature and literary production. The event also hosted lectures by reputed critics in the field who focused on the intricate relationship between the short story form and questions of femininity, sexuality, ethnicity and authorship. More Information.
INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR: Women’s Tales in Motion: Contemporary Writing in the British Isles (4-6 March 2015)
On 4, 5 and 6 March 2015 21 and 22 April 2016, the Research Project “Women’s Tales” (FEM2013-41977-P) organized the international seminar Women’s Tales in Motion: Contemporary Writing in the British Isles, held at the Faculty of Philology, University of Santiago de Compostela. More Information.