Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: Reception, Translation and the Modernist Cultural Agenda

[Polly Jones]

Posted on behalf of Philip Bullock (philip.bullock at wadh.ox.ac.uk)

CALL FOR PAPERS
Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: Reception, Translation and the Modernist
Cultural
Agenda

25-26 June 2009

A two-day conference hosted by the Institute of English Studies, University
of
London

Keynote Speakers: Olga Kaznina (Gorky Institute of World Literature and Art,
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), Laura Marcus (University of
Edinburgh),
Laurence Senelick (Tufts University)

Organisers: Rebecca Beasley (School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck
College, University of London), Philip Ross Bullock (Faculty of Medieval and
Modern Languages, University of Oxford)

This major international conference will examine the profound impact of
Russian
and Soviet culture on British modernism. In 1915, Rebecca West declared
that 'Russia is to the young intellectuals of to-day what Italy was to the
Victorians', and the diverse influences of the Ballet Russes, Constance
Garnett's translations, and Soviet cinema are routinely cited in studies of
modernist writers as different as H.D., Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield
and
Virginia Woolf. British modernists played a central role in the
dissemination
of Russian literature and culture: reviewing, editing, publishing and
translating. However, there has been surprisingly little sustained attention
to
the structural details of this engagement. This conference aims to map an
intricate and wide-ranging set of interdisciplinary relations, and will
trace
the transformative effect of Russian and Soviet culture from the first
translations of Russian realist novels in the 1880s, to 1940, the eve of the
Soviet Union 's involvement in the Second World War. This 'long modernist'
perspective is intended to encourage contributions on a broad spectrum of
topics, from the simple life and socialist communities of the late
nineteenth
century, through the cosmopolitanism of high modernism, to the early
reception
of Soviet literature, cinema and theatre, the impact of socialist realism,
and
the rise of professional Russian studies in Britain.

Please submit a title, 300 word abstract, and brief CV by 15 December 2008
to
r.beasley at bbk.ac.uk or philip.bullock at wadh.ox.ac.uk.

Further information is available at
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2009/Russia/index.htm

-- 
Dr Polly Jones
Lecturer in Russian
School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES-UCL)
University College London
Gower St
London WC1E 6BT
0207 679-8723
P.jones at ssees.ucl.ac.uk; polly.jones at gmail.com
http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk

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