For a book-length collection entitled War Gothic, we invite essays on the intersection of the gothic tradition in literature, art, cinema, television, as well as in visual and digital media, with the representation of war and the military in its various manifestations.
Submissions should fall roughly into either the category of “Literary Gothic” or “Visual Gothic,” which may extend from engravings, paintings and posters to video games and online culture. Historical reference points range from civil wars to national, colonial, and post-colonial conflicts, the Cold War and post-Cold War global conflicts.
Submissions might address literary and artistic responses to war framed within gothic traditions, but also the use of these gothic traditions in the discourse of war itself, i.e. in non-literary texts like historiography, non-fiction, military manuals, etc.
Strongly encouraged are submissions, especially in the areas of visual media, which move beyond representational analysis to address the overlap of and complicity between gothic discourse and the realm of military experience, i.e. the development and exchange of technologies, of financial, organizational, institutional, and logistical structures.
Topics ranging across the wide historical scope of the Gothic in different national traditions might include, yet are not limited to:
– military mobilization: imagining the enemy
– war propaganda: heart and minds
– the discourse of militarism and militarization
– the experience of combat
– the space of the battle field
– the home front: shelters, homes, hospitals
– the veteran: medicine, trauma, biopolitics
– gender discourse: warriors, soldiers, cannon fodder
– military technology: destruction and reconstruction
– high-tech/low-tech war: from swords to drones
– remembering war: memoirs and monuments
Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short CV should be submitted to the editors by December 31, 2013 . Final essays should be between 6000-8000 words, in MLA style, and will be due June 30, 2014.
The two co-editors of the collection are Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (University of Lausanne), editor, with Justin E. Edwards, of The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture (2012) and author of The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic (2010); and Steffen Hantke (Sogang University, Seoul), editor of Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004), Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Rudolphus Teeuwen, of Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers, and the Global Academic Proletariat: Adjunct Labor in Higher Education (2007).
For all questions, proposals, and rough draft submissions, please contact Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (agnieszka.soltysikmonnet@unil.ch) and Steffen Hantke (steffenhantke@gmail.com or shantke@sogang.ac.kr) before December 31, 2013.