Call for Papers, Presentations and Performance Art Proposals for the annual St. Stephen's Confest: Romantically Inclined: Romance in Literature, Film and Popular Culture, Last Date: December 10th 2012

St. Stephen’s College, Delhi invites papers for its annual international conference-festival on Romance in literature, film and popular culture. Verse and prose sagas of adventure and love in literatures across the world bear testimony to the earliest literary inclination to Romance. Such as the tradition of the Hindavi Romance narratives in the sub-continent that grew out of Sanskrit and Persian to combine rasa and Sufi allegories in Padmavat and Madhumalti. One strain of the continental Romance evolved with Spenser, withstood the satire of Cervantes and the radical departures of the romantics to become the counterpoi

nt to the realist novel. The Romance has given into new genres such as magic realism and fantasy fiction, but continues as an enduring literary style in contemporary world literatures. The secret to the survival of Romance in literature and popular cultures may be that it is highly adaptive and popular in appeal. It embraces, in a broad accommodating sweep, literature and art with all the gravity of the canon as well as the pulp excluded from it. We seek the romantically inclined to explore the breadth of Romance – as a literary mode and as a cultural leitmotif in performative and representative arts. As a conference-festival, we welcome academic papers, presentations as well as music and performance art proposals that appraise the value of Romance. 

The conference dates are 23rd, 24th, 25th February, 2013. Please send a 300 hundred word abstract to stephensconfest@gmail.com by December 10th 2012.

The scope of papers and performance concept may include but are not confined to the following:

Mythology and History as proportions of Romance
Realism, Anti-Romance: A Rose is Just a Rose
Romance of the High Seas
Melodrama in Romance as a challenge to modernity
Romance as Nostalgia
Cinematic Romance
Musical Romance
Romantically Ink/lined: Intersecting Art and Literature
Popular Romance: Pot-Boiler Love
Rethinking Romance as Genre
Romance and the philosophical bait
Creatures of Romance