bristol | Kathleen Jennings

Last year I went to the Diana Wynne Jones: Bristol 2019 conference in, obviously, Bristol, and had a wonderful time. Fannish academic conventions(? academic-ish fan conventions?) are wonderful fun, and we made new friends whose tastes we already approved of, and after the convention was over several of us tramped all over, and danced the witchy dance at Clifton Suspension Bridge, and rode a carousel, and tried to find the 21st-century equivalent of Janine’s boutique (some of these references are to Deep Secret which had a formative effect on my career).

Also, although I was between degrees, I gave a paper on:

“Contracts and Calcifer, or “In Which A Contract Is Concluded Before Witnesses”: the Transactional Structure of Howl’s Moving Castle.”

No regrets were had.

And the conference ebook is now available, for £10 : The Proceedings of the Diana Wynne Jones Conference, Bristol 2019.

Table of Contents

Diana Wynne Jones Conference E-book – Introduction
1. Everything I learned about running a convention I learned from Deep Secret
The Pleasures and Challenges (Expected and Unexpected) of Teaching Diana Wynne Jones in the College Classroom
2. Teaching Fire and Hemlock and Charmed Life
3. “Not One Hobbit Have I Seen!”: Generic Conventions and Teaching Diana Wynne Jones’ Work
4. Teaching Howl’s Moving Castle
5. Diana Wynne Jones’ Stories for Young Readers: “How Do Young Readers Like Them?”
Families and How to Survive Them
6. The Tough Guide to Growing Up: Diana Wynne Jones’ Lessons on Coming of Age
7. Family in the Works of Diana Wynne Jones
8. Step-parents in The Ogre Downstairs and Howl’s Moving Castle
9. Diana Wynne Jones and Cats
Wiles and Wisdom
10. Mini, Millie, Magid: Unconventional Women in the Works of Diana Wynne Jones
11. “Drowning in Bleach”: Guilt and Shame in Diana Wynne Jones
Under the Influence
12. What Did They Teach Her in Those Schools? Or “Damn It! I’m Turning into C.S. Lewis”: Diana Wynne Jones and C.S. Lewis
13. Where She Got It From: Diana Wynne Jones, Other Towns, and Piers Plowman
14. Invisible and Visible Influence: Diana Wynne Jones, E. Nesbit, and Children Who Are Not Seen
15. Keynote: Living a Charmed Life
Concealment and Revelation
16. “Do We Know Each Other?”: Hidden Identities, Referential Characters, and Narrative Possibilities in Diana Wynne Jones’ Hexwood
17. Concealment and Revelation: Reading Diana Wynne Jones’ Magic through Western Esoteric Traditions
18. Buried Alive: The Arthur/Merlin Motif in the Novels of Diana Wynne Jones
Built Environments
19. Contracts and Calcifer, or “In Which A Contract Is Concluded Before Witnesses”: the Transactional Structure of Howl’s Moving Castle
20. Jones and Quantum Foam
21. Making Sense of Settings: How Sensory Description Builds Dalemark
22. Diana Wynne Jones’ Contemporary Medievalism
Into the Woods
23. Ideologies of Power in Hexwood
24. Fractured Humanity/Fragments of Humanity in Hexwood
25. Time in Diana Wynne Jones
26. There’s Nothing Magic About Words: Translating Diana Wynne Jones into Hebrew
Wizarding Worlds
27. “So Would You Mind Telling Me Where I Am? It’s a Stately Home of Some Kind, Isn’t It?” (Charmed Life)
28. Walled Gardens, Lonely Attics and Public Schools: the Romance, the Canon and Constructions of Englishness in the Chrestomanci Series
29. It Takes a Wizard: Exploring the Role of Wizards within their Communities in Howl’s Moving Castle, Frogkisser! and The Evil Wizard Smallbone
30. The Wizard of a Thousand Faces: Pinning Down the Trickster Wizard in The Howl Trilogy
Power and the Corporations
31. A Remedy, or, the Meaning of the Goon’s Small Head
32. “Want Television!”: the “Drama of Screens” in Archer’s Goon (BBC, 1992)
33. “We Need to Make the Place Pay Somehow”: Magical Universities and Money in Year of the Griffin
Nationality and Borders
34. Deconstructing Dalemark: an Alternate History of Northern Europe
35. Bounds, Homes and Riding away: An Exploration of Border Representation and National Identity within the Novels of Diana Wynne Jones
36. In Short, the Map is Useless: Cartography and Maps in Diana Wynne Jones’ Books and Stories
37. Diana: My Sister’s Imagination
Primary Bibliography: Works by Diana Wynne Jones
The Contributors
Kickstarter supporters
Index of Chapters Discussing Jones’ Books
Poems, by Diana Wynne Jones.