LM Montgomery Conference 2012
Planning is well underway for the 10th biennial offering of the Institute's International Conference on LM Montgomery, scheduled for June 21st - 24th, 2012 at UPEI in Charlottetown.
Conference Co-Chairs: Jean Mitchell (mjmitchell@upei.ca) and Simon Lloyd (slloyd@upei.ca)
Program Chair: Benjamin Lefebvre (ben@roomofbensown.net)
1. Registration
Click here to REGISTER NOW!
Early Bird Deadline extended to May 11th
2. Program
Click on the Date links at left to see the Draft Conference Program (note that program details are subject to change)
3. Accommodations
The Conference is pleased to partner with UPEI Conference Services in offering on-campus accommodations to attendees at a preferred nightly rate: click here for more information.
Information on other local accommodation options is available here.
L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory
(Overview from the Call for Proposals: Please note that submissions are now closed)
University of Prince Edward Island, 21–24 June 2012
“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.” — The Golden Road (1913)
“and even if you are not Abegweit-born you will say, ‘Why … I have come home!’” — “Prince Edward Island” (1939)
For the tenth biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, we invite scholars, writers, readers, and cultural producers of all kinds to consider the topic of L.M. Montgomery and cultural memory. A term that originated in the field of archaeology and that now resonates in a wide range of disciplines, cultural memory refers to the politics of remembering and forgetting, sometimes in opposition to official versions of the past and the present. Within textual studies, the term invites us to consider the ways in which the past, the present, and the future are remembered, recorded, and anticipated by members of a collective and encoded into text. As a result, cultural memory touches on a number of key concerns, including identity, belonging, citizenship, home, community, place, custom, religion, language, landscape, and the recovery and preservation of cultural ancestries.
But what versions of Prince Edward Island, of Canada, of the world do Montgomery’s work and its derivatives encourage readers to remember? How do gender and genre (not to mention religion and power) affect and shape Montgomery’s selective and strategic ways of remembering in her fiction and life writing? What acts of memory can be found in the depiction of writers, diarists, letter writers, oral storytellers, poets, and domestic artists in her fiction? What roles do domesticity, nature, conflict, and war play in the shaping and reshaping of cultural memory? To what extent do nostalgia and antimodernism drive Montgomery texts in print and on screen? How have these selective images of time and place been adapted to fit a range of reading publics all over the world?
