A major conference dedicated to exploring the cultural influence of the novel has received a funding boost from a prestigious academic publisher.
Routledge Press has given a special grant to The Novel and Its Borders conference, which is due to take place at the University of Aberdeen from July 8-10, 2008.
Organised by the University's Centre for The Novel in association with the AHRC Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, the conference will host 300 delegates from across the world and is expected to generate in excess of £400,000.
The Routledge grant will be used to fund travel bursaries, entitled Routledge-ABES Travel Awards, for two postgraduate delegates to the conference.
The publisher made the award as part of celebrations surrounding the re-launch of the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies under the Routledge name.
Professor Janet Todd, Director of the Centre of The Novel, said: "The conference has attracted people from as far away as Malaysia, Brazil, Iran, and Eastern Europe and is likely to be the largest and most international literature conference ever held in Scotland."
Co-organiser Abigail M. Smith added: "It is the culmination of all the Centre of The Novel's work since its launch in 2006 and will bring scholars from around the world together with the North-east's literary community to explore the novel as a genre and its role as a powerful cultural phenomenon."
Miss Smith said that by bringing the conference to the North-east, the English Department has also now been officially recognised as an Ambassador for the city and region by the Aberdeen Convention Bureau.
The Novel and Its Borders will engage with the novel in all its aspects, material and theoretical, from the 18th to the 21st centuries.
Paper topics include the novel and real/imagined communities, memory, history, narrative time; libraries, archives, publishers, markets, transport, travel, translations, borders of the mind, territories of the body, technology, science, old/new media, realism and its limits, genealogies and genres.
The Plenary speakers for the three day event are as follows:
Terry Castle, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University: 'Brunette Coleman and the Lesbianism of Philip Larkin'
Ian Duncan, Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley: 'The Great Book of Nature'
Jonathan Lamb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University: 'Persons, Fancies and the Drift of Fiction'
For more information please visit the conference website by clicking here.