CSTonline

10 June 2017

10am--5pm, with a public screening at 6:20pm

Venue: NFT3, BFI Southbank, London

Featuring a Q&A with screenwriter [David
Rudkin](http://www.davidrudkin.com/){target="_blank"}

Including contributions from: Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck), Yvonne Salmon
(Cambridge University), Will Fowler (BFI), Gareth Evans (Whitechapel
Gallery), and more tbc.

The Centre for Contemporary Literature is glad to support [Child be
Strange](https://childbestrangeblog.wordpress.com/){target="_blank"}, a
one-day symposium on the TV series [*Penda's
Fen*](http://www.davidrudkin.com/index.php/ct-menu-item-53/ct-menu-item-57){target="_blank"},
organized in partnership with the British Film Institute, the Birkbeck
Institute for the Moving Image, and Strange Attractor Press. Proposals
are now invited for papers at this conference.

When Alan Clarke's *Penda's Fen* was first broadcast in 1974 as a BBC
*Play for Today*, *The Times* commented that it was a "major work of
television" and praised David Rudkin's writing for its "beauty,
imagination and depth." Including the film in its 2011 selection of the
best 100 British films, *Time Out* magazine described *Penda's Fen* as a
"multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social,
sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines." It has since been
recognized as an extraordinary contribution to 1970s counter-cultural
investigations of alternative 'pagan' histories of landscape, myth,
theology and psyche at a crucial transitional moment in post-war
Britain. The film vanished into unseen cult status, but after decades of
unavailability the BFI has released *Penda's Fen* on Blu-ray and DVD.
This one-day symposium seeks to bring together academics, writers, and
artists from across different fields to excavate this weird and
wonderful cultural artefact.

Suggested topics for papers might include but are not limited to
*Penda's Fen* and:

**History -- Folklore & Folk Horror -- Politics, Nationalism &
Romanticism -- Music -- Genre -- Gender -- David Rudkin -- Television
studies -- Theology, Paganism & Occulture -- Queer studies --
Ecocriticism -- Landscape and Place**

Conference organisers Matthew Harle (BFI/Barbican) and James Machin
(Birkbeck) invite abstracts of 350 words for 20-minute papers; please
submit along with a short biographical note by 1st March 2017 to
childbestrangeconference@gmail.com.

Strange Attractor Press will be producing a critical anthology of
writing on *Penda's Fen*, edited by the conference organizers, which
will include outcomes from the conference.


10 June 2017  10am–5pm, with a public screening at 6:20pm  Venue: NFT3, BFI Southbank, London  Featuring a Q&amp;A with screenwriter David Rudkin  Including contributions from: Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck), Yvonne Salmon (Cambridge University), Will Fowler (BFI), Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery), and more tbc.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

Child Be Strange: A Symposium on Penda’s Fen