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I am hereby sending you a conference announcement. I would much appreciate it if you could bring this to the attention of our members. Thank you. Sincerely, Ton Hoenselaars. C O N F E R E N C E Facing History. Recent developments in the study of the relationships between literature and history. Since the beginning of the 1980s we have been witnessing the steady rise of a number of new methods of historico-contextualist criticism. One of these is the new historicism, which originated in the work of a number of Anglo-American Renaissance-scholars and which since has found its way into the fields of Medieval Literature, Romanticism, Victorian studies and the study of 20th-century literature. In the wake of post-structuralist theories of representation, new historicists have found it difficult to hold on to traditional conceptions of the relationship between literature and history and have stressed the need to find new theoretical models that would highlight the dynamic, mutual dependency of text and context. One of these models is to be found in the work of the leading new historicist Stephen Greenblatt. In his work on Shakespeare he suggested that we understand the historical embeddedness of texts in terms of what he called "the circulation of social energy." This enables us to conceive of literary texts as both determined by and constitutive of historical reality. It is the purpose of this conference to introduce the work of such renowned critics as Stephen Greenblatt (University of Berkeley/California, USA) and Catherine Belsey (University of Cardiff, Wales) - both key-note speakers at our meeting - in the Belgian and Dutch academies. Also, the conference aims at confronting in a critical manner the new reading-method which these critics proposed with a number of urgent questions. Some of these will no doubt concern what our third key-note speaker, Frank Ankersmit (University of Groningen, the Netherlands), has termed "the chiastic relationship of literature and history." Other speakers include cultural and literary theorists, philosophers, Shakespeareans and historians, who will address equally important questions: what, if any, are the advantages of 'facing history' for the literary critic?; how should history be faced?; what, exactly, does it mean to do so? For further information please contact: Juergen Pieters, Vakgroep Nederlandse Literatuur en Algemene Literatuurwetenschap, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Gent. (e-mail: [log in to unmask]) Int/9/221.46.80. (home) Int/9/264.40.97 (work) Fax: Int/9/264.31.95