Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Reading Walter de la Mare - a Cambridge Conference


‘Reading Walter de la Mare’
is a two day conference to be held in Cambridge on 20-21 September 2018, organised by Yui Kajita and Anna Nickerson, with support from the University of Cambridge and The Walter de la Mare Society.

The conference has now issued a call for papers on any aspects of de la Mare’s writing – his poetry, plays, fiction, essays, anthologies. Proposals should be received by 31 March 2018. Expressions of interest in attending are also invited. The announcement for the conference advises that “It is anticipated that the main programme, including lunch and refreshments, will be free for all.”

De la Mare’s influence on the field of supernatural fiction has been profound, and can be seen directly, for example, in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Butts, Forrest Reid and probably Robert Aickman. He may be seen as one of the first to move the ghost story into subtler and more uncertain terrain, and to mesh ideas of an other world with the ambiguities of this one, the borderlands of the mind, the enigmatic country of dreams, obsessions, visions.

The idea for the conference is very welcome and should be an excellent opportunity to explore the many rich dimensions of de la Mare's work.

Mark Valentine

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