International Conference

EURONOIR

PRODUCERS, DISTRIBUTORS AND AUDIENCES
OF EUROPEAN CRIME NARRATIVES

30 SEPTEMBER – 2 OCTOBER 2019

AALBORG UNIVERSITY, DENMARK

Although a widely popular genre for over a century, crime narratives are presently experiencing an unprecedented popularity all across Europe. In the fields of literature and television, we are witnessing a deluge of episodes and series utilizing crime and violence as a central source of inspiration. More than any other narrative genre, the crime genre has proven able to travel across the European continent and beyond, becoming a vehicle for cultural exchange and debate.

Besides evoking transborder cultural exchange, crime narratives are today a strategic means in European place branding on local, national, regional and transnational levels of communication. As a result, the generic concept noir is now common among producers, distributors and audiences of crime fiction, and increasingly EURONOIR narratives have been located in recognizable places and regions across Europe, resulting in e.g. Mediterranean, Tartan, Catalan, Nordic Noir.

Such spatial labels evoke local and regional narrative/visual styles that, carefully built by authors, publishers and producers, at the same time may achieve transnational success in foreign markets. The international appropriation of certain stylistic features of Nordic Noir (possibly the most popular cross-media production strand on the continent for the past decade) in a great number of European crime narratives is a most interesting case in point.

The organizers invite speakers to present work on the production, distribution and reception of explicitly transnational European crime narratives as well as more local strands of European crime narratives production, distribution and reception. This includes significant market players and institutions in/across Europe, transcontinental creative and culture industrial processes and practices as well as more locally and regionally successful and less successful crime narratives.

The conference invites papers on European crime narratives from 1989 until today.

Deadline for submission of panel proposals is 15 April 2019. Notification of acceptance is due 15 May 2019.

Download the Call for Paper