2011 C. S. Lewis International Conference in France

A C. S. Lewis and Inklings Resource Blog is issuing a call for papers for an international conference on “C. S. Lewis, His Friends and Associates: Questions of Identity.” This conference, to be held June 2-3, 2011, at the Lille Catholic University, is “the first of its kind . . . in France.” The deadline for proposals is June 5, 2010. You can find more information about the conference here.

. . . we hope to look at Lewis’s life and work, and those of his friends and associates, from many different angles.

Questions of identity are essential to the understanding of any writer. The ways authors perceive themselves and who they are, the communities they belong to by birth or choice, inevitably influence their work. The way they present other people, real or fictional, may also be rooted in their own conception of identity.

We are therefore seeking for papers which examine gender and family roles, national, regional, racial or professional identities, membership of a particular church, movement or club, ideological or political attachments, descriptions of oneself (eg. dinosaur, Old Western Man) either with regard to Lewis and those who knew him or in a study of their writings.

Among Lewis’s friends and associates we would include his brother Warnie, his wife Joy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, T.S. Eliot, Ruth Pitter and Owen Barfield, but would also consider studies of anyone who worked with Lewis or who influenced him. Comparative studies of Lewis and another writer are also possible.