Adapting the Canon Conference

When Legenda was founded in the 1990s, it was as part of a little ferment of academic activity, and the editors were roped into organising all kinds of local conferences and colloquia, from The Future of the Humanities to The Politics of Opera. When we were reorganised and expanded in 2004, however, we put our heads down and got on with the serious business of being a scholarly press.

Conference poster

But this year we are proud to be hosting a new Legenda conference, on the tenth anniversary of our reformation:

Adapting the Canon: Friday 10th October 2014, 09:00-19:00. The Court Room, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

The keynote speakers are Prof. Dudley Andrew (Yale), Dr Kamilla Elliott (Lancaster) and Prof. Clive Scott (UEA). Clive’s keynote, opening the conference, doubles as the 2014 Presidential Address of the MHRA. It’s a packed day, with three sets of parallel sessions. Here’s a brief summary in the style of a three-course prix fixe menu:

French Poetry across the Channel (Claire Pasolini-Campbell, Adam Watt) or Intertextual ‘Figures’ (Michael Lee, Harriet Hulme) or ‘Popular’ Culture & the Canon (Nina Holst, Guillaume Lecomte)

Case Studies: Adapting the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (Bradley Stephens, Kate Griffiths, Andrew Watts) or Case Studies: Shakespeare(Linde de Potter & Yves T’Sjoen, Robert Gillett, Jozefina Komporaly)

Graphic Adaptation: Illustration, Comic Books & Graphic Novels(Christina Ionescu, Juliane Blank, Armelle Blin-Rolland) or Novel to Film: New Perspectives (Christine Geraghty, Marion Schmid, Oliver Knabe) or Re-visioning Themes & Motifs (Jeremy Strong, Jaimey Fisher, Femke Essink)

The topic of adaptation and translation is one which we are actively pursuing as a press — indeed, we welcome book proposals in this field — and the proceedings of the conference will be published in Legenda: details will be announced to the book trade shortly.

The conference is a joint venture of Maney Publishing and the Modern Humanities Research Association, who are Legenda’s proprietors, and our long-time colleagues at the Institute of Modern Languages Research. (The IMLR is another reformation, growing out of the old Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.)