Novel celebrated as Scotland’s largest literary conference begins

The power and world-wide influence of the novel will be celebrated at a major three-day international conference beginning today (Tuesday, July 8) in Aberdeen.

Over 300 delegates from every corner of the globe will congregate at King's College at the University of Aberdeen for Scotland's largest ever literary conference.

The Novel and its Borders conference will welcome scholars from over 30 different countries, including Brazil, Japan, Iran, New Zealand, Malaysia, South Africa, the United States – and from all across the UK.

Scores of papers – critiquing everything from the work of Irvine Welsh and Virginia Woolf to Atonement author Ian McEwan and the lesbian writings of Philip Larkin – will be given over the course of the event.

"We believe it is the largest and most international literature conference ever held in Scotland," said Professor Janet Todd, Director of the Centre for the Novel, which organised the event in conjunction with the University's AHRC Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies.

The Centre for the Novel was set up in 2006 to promote the study of novels and novelists and has hosted a string of well-received seminars and events.

"The conference is the culmination of all our work so far," added Professor Todd. "It will bring scholars from around the world together with the North-east's literary community to explore the novel's role as a hugely powerful cultural and social phenomenon unconstrained by borders and continents.

"In the popular arena, you only have to look at the recent successes of films like Atonement, Brokeback Mountain and The Kite Runner – three films adapted from the world of literature – to realise how the novelist's imagination pervades all areas of our culture and influences how we experience the world."

Themes mined over the three days of the conference will include the novel and real/imagined communities, memory, history, transport, travel, translations, borders of the mind, the body, technology, science, and old and new media.

The keynote speakers 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'

The Novel and its Borders takes place from July 8 to July 10. For more information visit http://www.abdn.ac.uk/novelconference/