Cfp: "Recycling Myths, Inventing Nations," Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University, July 14-16, 2010.

The organisers of "Recycling Myths, Inventing Nations" would like to invite proposals for panels and papers that explore myth and myth-making in all its guises. The conference will bring together scholars working across creative and critical disciplines, historical periods and theoretical approaches in order to explore the links between story-telling, mythology, histories, identities and ideologies. The organisers welcome contributions that will explore these issues in ways that will engage with current and emerging scholarly dialogues and demonstrate the diverse range of approaches being adopted in the study of mythology, both in contemporary culture and cultures of the past. Proposals should raise new questions and ideas in relation to the cultural, social and political functions of myth; the “recycling” of stories; the formation of “invented” identities and the multivalent relationships between mythology, history, fact and fiction. Suggested themes include;

• the ways in which writers draw on myths to retell the stories of people and nations
• the re-inscription of myths in fiction as a challenge to “official” history
• the use of myth by writers to represent new kinds of personal or collective identity
• using myth as a way to rethink literary traditions
• the fictional critique of myth and its politics
• the links between story-telling, mythology, identity and history
• mythologising origin or originary culture
• the supernatural in relation to origin and ancestral identity
• recycling mythologies to reflect contemporary political, cultural and global crises.

We welcome proposals, in the form of a 250 word abstract on any of these topics, or a related area. The deadline for abstracts is 30th November 2009. Proposals, expressions of interest and enquiries by email to myth2010@aber.ac.uk.

Or visit the conference webpage: http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/english/myth2010/.

Howard, Jennifer. "From 'Once Upon a Time' to 'Happily Ever After.'" CHRONICLE May 22, 2009.

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Fairy Tales: a New History. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Long long ago, villagers and nursemaids spun stories, handing them down from generation to generation. Then collectors like the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault came along, jotted them down, and transformed them into literature. That's one old story line about fairy tales. To hear Ruth B. Bottigheimer tell it, that story is itself a fairy tale." It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition," Bottigheimer writes in the introduction to her most recent book, Fairy Tales: A New History (State University of New York Press, 2009). "It may therefore surprise readers that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact. Literary analysis undermines it, literary history rejects it, social history repudiates it, and publishing history ... contradicts it." . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i37/37b00601.htm.