Skip navigation

Category Archives: CFP

CfP Frankenstein and the Fantastic (Themed Session) (6/15/16; NEPCA Keene, NH 10/21-22/16)

  • April 22, 2016 – 11:50 am
  • Posted in CFP
  • Comments Off on CfP Frankenstein and the Fantastic (Themed Session) (6/15/16; NEPCA Keene, NH 10/21-22/16)

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE FANTASTIC

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A THEMED-SESSION OF THE

FANTASTIC (FANTASY, HORROR, AND SCIENCE FICTION) AREA

 

Visit us at NEPCA Fantastic: http://nepcafantastic.blogspot.com

 

2016 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)

Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire

21 and 22 October 2016

Proposals by 15 June 2016

 

Michael A. Torregrossa

Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area Chair

NEPCAFantastic@gmail.com

 

Formed in 2008, the Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area celebrates its ninth anniversary in 2016, and, this year, we hope to commemorate the 200th-anniversary of the composition of Frankenstein by seeking proposals from scholars of all levels for papers that explore any aspect of Mary Shelley’s novel and its relationship to texts of the ongoing Frankenstein tradition. We are especially interested in papers that explore underrepresented works and media.

 

Please see our website NEPCA Fantastic (http://nepcafantastic.blogspot.com) for further details and ideas. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes in length (depending on final panel size).

 

Potential presenters should be aware that studies of Frankenstein in popular culture do not exist in a vacuum, and, in pitching their ideas, will be expected to be familiar with previous discussions of the Frankenstein tradition, including Donald F. Glut’s The Frankenstein Catalog (McFarland, 1984) and The Frankenstein Archive (McFarland, 2002) and Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s Frankenstein: A Cultural History (Norton, 2007).

 

 

If you are interested in proposing a paper, please address inquiries and send your biography and paper abstract (each of 500 words) to the Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area Chair at nepcafantastic@gmail.com, noting “Frankenstein and the Fantastic Proposal 2016” in your subject line. Do also submit your information, under the “Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area,” on NEPCA’s official Paper Proposal Form accessible from https://nepca.wordpress.com/2016-conference/.

 

 

Please submit inquiries and/or proposals for complete panels directly to the Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area Chair atnepcafantastic@gmail.com.

 

 

The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (a.k.a. NEPCA) was founded in 1974 as a professional organization for scholars living in New England and New York. It is a community of scholars interested in advancing research and promoting interest in the disciplines of popular and/or American culture. NEPCA’s membership consists of university and college faculty members, emeriti faculty, secondary school teachers, museum specialists, graduate students, independent scholars, and interested members of the general public. NEPCA is an independently funded affiliate of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. Membership is open to all interested parties, regardless of profession, rank, or residency. NEPCA holds an annual conference that invites scholars from around the globe to participate. In an effort to keep costs low, it meets on college campuses throughout the region.

 

Membership in NEPCA is required for participation and annual dues are included in conference registration fees. Further details are available at http://nepca.wordpress.com/membership-information/.

 

CfP: Future Humans

Type:
Call for Papers
Date:
June 1, 2016
Location:
Massachusetts, United States
Subject Fields:
Religious Studies and Theology, Popular Culture Studies, Literature, Political History / Studies, World History / Studies

How do we understand ourselves as human beings?  Historically, we have considered where we are in time and place and in relation to others.  Throughout history, humans have wondered about their origins and about their futures.  Charles Darwin gave some a foundation of understanding where human beings came from and how we evolved.  The greater question now is how we will change; will human beings continue to evolve and adapt in response to the changes in the natural world?  Or will the changes be more deliberate?  In what ways will human beings be responsible for the ways we change in the future?  Considering the speed with which technology advances, how might we be plunging headlong into a future we might have only imagined?  Will future humans evolve naturally or will we change deliberately being combined with technology and becoming “cyborgs”?  Will the nature that shapes our evolution be the one we created through climate change?  Will our present world be changed in order to shape a future we are more comfortable anticipating?  In short, human beings have consistently been preoccupied with the future; considering some of the visions of the future presented in novels and movies, what has gone by the wayside and what has shown prescience?  How might we use these predictions of the future as bellwether so we might change course and shape a future that’s more to our liking?

These are some of the questions we would like to address in a proposed book.  This book proposes to examine literature, film, television, history and popular culture.  Abstracts due by June 1st, 2016.

Contact Info:

Louisa MacKay Demerjian, lmdemerjian@gmail.com

Contact Email:
lmdemerjian@gmail.com

CfP: Growing Up with the Undead: Vampires in the 20th- and 21st-Century Literature, Films and Television for Young Children

  • April 20, 2016 – 2:37 pm
  • Posted in CFP
  • Comments Off on CfP: Growing Up with the Undead: Vampires in the 20th- and 21st-Century Literature, Films and Television for Young Children
Type:
Call for Papers
Date:
May 31, 2016
Subject Fields:
Childhood and Education, Popular Culture Studies, Literature, Film and Film History, Cultural History / Studies

Since Bram Stoker’s seminal vampire novel, Dracula, published in 1897, the figure of the vampire has been a persistent presence in Western popular culture. Though largely the remit of adult audiences since the 1970s, the vampire has become increasingly present in narratives (books/films/television) for younger children. In fact, in the 21st century, one might even venture to say it is a staple of the genre. During this time the meaning of the vampire itself has drastically changed from a symbol of otherness and potential danger to one that accepts difference and offers agency to all young readers. This shift within young children’s narratives is largely a reflection of the changing positioning of the undead within adult and young adult narratives that have seen an increasing romanticization of the vampire, which constructs it as both inspirational and aspirational within, or indeed outside of, an increasingly consumerist and globalized world. This volume will examine the continuing presence of vampires within children’s literary and visual narratives in relation to contemporaneous representations in popular narratives and the social environment that creates them.

 

Abstracts/proposals are invited for chapters that look at narratives featuring vampire characters, as either main protagonist or incidental role, in books, film, television, comics, toys, games, etc. aimed at children of 12 years old or younger (not YA). Chapters can be either an overview of a particular medium or focus on a few titles that example certain themes or topics.

 

Possible subjects include but are not limited to:

  • Child vampires, male/female vampires, animal vampires, non-human vampires
  • Scary vampires, stranger danger, warnings against non-normative behaviour
  • Queer vampires, individual identity positions, role models
  • Historical precedents from folk/fairy tales or classic children’s literature
  • Franchises that cover many media that feature vampires, Monster High, Mona the Vampire, Disney (characters such as Maleficent/Ursula etc)
  • Vampires in games, Lego, activity books, pop-up books etc
  • Vampires in children’s advertising/products such as Count Chocula, Oreo adverts, Kinder adverts etc.
  • Children’s vampires in relation to their YA and adult contemporaries
  • Any of the above in relation to gender, sexualities, minorities, ethnicity, class etc.
  • Non-bloodsucking vampires: veggie vamps and those that drink washing liquid, or energy etc.
  • Vampires that are not vampires, i.e. Scooby Doo, Araminta Spook etc.

 

Abstract of no more than 350 words with “Growing up with the Vampire” in the subject line,  should arrive by 31st May, 2016.

Final manuscripts of 5,000-8,000 will be expected by 28th August, 2016, manuscripts to be formatted MLA-style with a separate works cited page section, for publication by Universitas Press in Montreal (www.universitaspress.com) by the end of 2016/start 2017.

Abstracts and enquiries should be sent to Simon Bacon at: baconetti@googlemail.com

URL:
http://www.universitaspress.com

CfP: The Comics Work of Neil Gaiman: In Darkness, In Light, and In Shadow

Type:
Call for Papers
Date:
May 15, 2016
Location:
Kentucky, United States
Subject Fields:
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, British History / Studies, Childhood and Education, Cultural History / Studies, Women’s & Gender History / Studies
full name / name of organization:
Joseph Michael Sommers, CMU, and Kyle Eveleth, U-Kentucky
contact email:
sommerseveleth@gmail.com

Call for submissions to an edited collection requested by publisher

Since his seminal writing on The Sandman (1989-present) and long since before and after on works such as Batman, Miracleman, The Books of Magic, The Endless, Stardust, The Graveyard Book, etc. from adult graphic novels (Neverwhere) to voluminous amounts of children’s graphic novels and illustrated texts (Coraline, Chu’s Day, Fortunately, the Milk, Hansel and Gretel etc.), Neil Gaiman has established himself as one of the most prominent, if not prolific, writers in the medium of sequential art in the late twentieth and twenty-first century.

Interestingly enough, Gaiman’s work is oft classified along regularized perceptions (by age, by tone, etc.) while he himself resists that particular ideological breakdown proclaiming that his work is meant to be read and seen by everyone, muddying those clear constructs and bracketing of his work. This volume seeks to examine Gaiman’s broadly illustrated corpus (picture books, comics, graphic novels, video games, etc.) along those lines of the dark, the light, and those that are particularly difficult to classify and define by the fact that they are seemingly both—the shadowy genre-bending work. However an essayist for this collection might seek to interpret those constructs (optimism, pessimism, pragmatism, for example) or whether a writer would seek to only write on a particularly evident construct from the three (Chu’s Day doesn’t seem to possess many dark portents; however Blueberry Girl, by comparison, articulates a life far more complex than simple optimism) is open for discussion and welcomed.

This volume will investigate the comics and graphic novel work of Neil Gaiman broadly. Proposals are welcomed for critical essays that approach the subject from any of a variety of methodological/ theoretical perspectives such as: aesthetic or textual, historical, philosophical, cultural, psychoanalytic, semiotic, post-structural, post-colonial, gendered, feminist, etc.

Essays might include (but are by no means limited to) the following topics:

-Adaptation of Gaiman’s prose works to comics and comics to films and television
-Gaiman’s work in video games (Wayward Manor)
-Gaiman’s comics connection to music, greater literary movements, etc.
-Gaiman’s literary antecedents and referents in comics
-Gaiman’s work with regular artists (McKeon, Bachalo, Dringenberg, Riddell, Buckingham etc.)
-Historical comparisons and intertextualization of Gaiman with his contemporaries and influences
-Gaiman’s light-hearted/ serious fare for children and adults alike
-Major Gaiman work (The Sandman) and comparably minor works or one-shots (Cerberus #147, Spawn #9, Angela #1-3 etc.)
-Comparisons of Gaiman’s ostensibly “adult” works and/ to his ostensibly “children’s” works (not to mention his supposed YA work)
-Gaiman’s work in other visual storytelling media (his writing for Doctor Who, his screenplay of Princess Mononoke for example)
-Gaiman’s influences on character/series/comics as a medium’s traditions (Swamp Thing, The Sandman, comics readership)
-Gaiman’s influences on other literary traditions (fantasy, sci-fi, etc)
-Gaiman-as-character, both inside his comics and outside his comics
-Gaiman and cultural capital, Gaiman as commodity
-Naughtiness, puns, double-entendres/double-consciousness/doublespeak, dual meanings, sidelong glances, subtle jabs, subversions, sublimations, and slips of the tongue
-Memory and remembering, forgetting and misremembering in Gaiman’s work
-Humor and seriousness, gravitas and mirth, bathos and pathos in Gaiman.
-Etc.

Abstracts of approximately 250-500 words (with author’s affiliation and brief biography) are due 15 May 2016 with first drafts of essays running 5000-5500 words due 15 October 2016. Please send any inquiries and proposals to Joseph Michael Sommers and Kyle Eveleth atsommerseveleth@gmail.com .

cfp categories:
american
childrens_literature
classical_studies
film_and_television
gender_studies_and_sexuality
general_announcements
interdisciplinary
journals_and_collections_of_essays
medieval
modernist studies
poetry
popular_culture
postcolonial
religion
romantic
theory
twentieth_century_and_beyond
victorian
Contact Info:

Please send correspondences to Joseph Michael Sommers and Kyle Eveleth.

Contact Info:

Joseph Michael Sommers, somme1jm@cmich.edu; Kyle Eveleth, k.w.eveleth@uky.edu; shared CFP account, sommerseveleth@gmail.com

Contact Email:
sommerseveleth@gmail.com
URL:
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/66751

CfP – Anticipations: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions

Anticipations:
H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions
8-10 July 2016
H. G. Wells Conference Centre, Woking, UK
Organised by the H. G. Wells Society
Plenary Speakers: Stephen Baxter and Lesley A. Hall

H. G. Wells was a novelist, social commentator and utopianist, and is regarded as one of the fathers of science fiction. His early scientific romances featured time travel, mad scientists, alien invasion, space travel, invisibility, utopia, future war and histories of the future: his mappings of the shape of things to come was an overture to over a century of science fiction.

We wish to mark the 150th and 70th anniversaries of Wells’s birth and death respectively by exploring his science fiction, his precursors and successors and his lasting influence upon the genre in print, on film, on television, on radio, online and elsewhere. This is especially appropriate because the event will be held at the H. G. Wells Conference centre in Woking, the town where Wells wrote The War of the Worlds. Many of his ideas on politics, science, sociology and the direction in which he feared humanity was going were contained in his early science fiction and ran through his later influential work.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • specific individual or groups of novels/stories;
  • the connections between Wells’s fiction and nonfiction, including his political, utopian and scientific writings;
  • utopia/dystopia;
  • histories of the future;
  • precursors to Wells’s sf;
  • sf writers influenced by Wells;
  • sequels by other hands;
  • adaptations into other media.

Please send a brief biography and an abstract of 400 words for a twenty minute paper by 15 April 2016 to andrewmbutler42@gmail.com.

Further details will be available from anticipations2016.wordpress.com.

CRSF Call for Papers

Abstracts of 300 words for a 20 minute English language paper and a 100 word biography should be submitted to CRSF.team@gmail.com by Monday 7th March 2016. Please circulate as appropriate.

The 2016 conference will be welcoming Dr Caroline Edwards and Dr Patricia Wheeler as this year’s keynote speakers. In addition, the conference will be serving as the opening, as I’m sure you’re all well aware, for the SFRA’s three-day conference in Liverpool (28th-30th).

We are seeking abstracts for 20 minute papers on topics related to speculative fiction on a wide variety of subjects:

•Alternate History •Alternative Culture •Animal Studies •Anime •Apocalypse •Body Horror •Consciousness •Cyber Culture •Drama •Eco-criticism •Fan Culture •Gaming •(Geo)Politics •Genre •Gender •Graphic Novels •The Grotesque •The Heroic Tradition •Liminal Fantasy •Magic •Meta-Franchises •Morality •Monstrosity •Music •Non-Anglo-American SF •Otherness •Pastoral •Poetry •Politics •Post-Colonialism and Empire •Proto-SF •Psychology •Quests •Realism •Sexuality •Slipstream •Spiritualism •Steampunk •Supernatural •Technology •Time •TV and Film •Urban Fantasy •Utopia/Dystopia •(Virtual) Spaces and Environments •Weird Fiction •World Building •Young Adult Fiction.

CfP: Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture Call for Proposals

SERIES EDITOR:

Sherryl Vint (Professor, University of California, Riverside)

Science is at the centre of daily experience in twenty-first century life. Fusion of science and the cultural imagination define moments of intense technological change, such as the Space Race of the 1950s or our own looming era of synthetic biology. This book series seeks to publish groundbreaking research exploring this productive intersection and its consequences for our present and future.

We seek proposals for manuscripts dealing with any aspect of science in popular culture in any genre. We understand popular culture as both a textual and material practice, and thus welcome manuscripts dealing with representations of science in popular culture and those addressing the role of the cultural imagination in material encounters with science. How science is imagined and what meanings are attached to these imaginaries will be the major focus of this series. We encourage proposals from a wide range of historical and cultural perspectives.

Downloadable CfP with contact information for series editors: http://vm3.ehaus2.co.uk/macmillan/resources/images/Hums/SIPC-CFP.pdf

CfP: The Female Fantastic, 1860-1930: On the Gendered Supernatural in Texts by Women

Where realism was the signature feature of earlier Victorian fiction, mid-to-late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers increasingly embraced fantastic modes. Rosemary Jackson, in her 1981 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, inaugurated the now-ubiquitous truism of literary studies that late Victorian fantastic narratives frequently hold strong – and often covertly revolutionary – metaphorical relations to social concerns. Supernatural and symbolic texts are ideal sites for encryption of radical queries and pervasive anxieties related to gender, sexuality, religion, medicine, science, ethnicity, substance abuse and colonialism (to name a few).

This is an especially persistent trait – one manifested and developed in many directions in the Edwardian and early Modernist fantastic. In supernatural thrillers, ghost stories, science fictions, and amorphous fantasias, counter-cultural angsts find substitutive satisfactions and conflated expression.  The uncanny effects of fantastic literature enable this; indirection, obscuration and innuendo are ideal mediums for saying-not-saying things. Indeed, whatever energies crescendo in fantastic literature are exactly those that  realism – by default – tends to eclipse, reduce, or normalize.  Experiments in form and language, from aestheticism to Modernism, only add to the covert power of fantasy.

Given the substantial scholarship dedicated to non-realist representations written by male writers, this book project will specifically explore women-identified writers’ uses of the fantastic from 1860-1930. Writers like Ouida, Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Mary Butts, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sylvia Townsend Warner used narratively polymorphous fantastic sub-genres to dramatize their particularly activist arguments and ideas. This provided the flexibility to explore not only the darkest corners of the external world, but also the deepest subterranean secrets of the mind. For not only did women-identified writers wield these forms’ easy strategic cover to subvert the status quo, but they also used them to explore the gendered psyche’s links to imagination, pathology and creative, personal and erotic agency. In addition to providing dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, these texts also illuminate intriguing and complex relationships to key moments in gender(ed) history.

This collection will be submitted to an already-enthusiastic selective academic press.

We invite submissions that engage in any related issues, including the following:

 

  • Fantastic figures (ghosts, mummies, werewolves, vampires).
  • The evolving genre and forms of the fantastic/supernatural
  • Occult communication networks: Annie Besant, Emma Hardinge Britten, Helena Blavasky, and the women of the Golden Dawn
  • The shifting meaning/purpose of the female fantastic from mid-century (Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marrayat, Charlotte Riddell) to the fin de siècle  to the 20th-century
  • The transatlantic, global, or colonial supernatural
  • The role of the fantastic or otherworldly in conceptualizations of gender and sexuality
  • Nationhood, the “fantastic” other, race, and empire
  • Nationalism, Fascism, Socialism and other political movements
  • Pacificism, war, and trauma
  • The fantastic in periodical and print culture
  • Visualizing or depicting the fantastic through illustrations, art, performance, photography and film
  • Science, pseudo-science, psychoanalysis, medicine, and the supernatural
  • Mental illness, Addiction, and Social Deviance
  • Relations of Fantastic to Aestheticism, Decadence, Symbolist, Surrealist, Modernist or other movements
  • Female-authored sources for and/or reactions to more “canonical” fantastic literature
  • Female academic influences on the Classical and/or “Oriental” imagination (Jane Harrison and Margaret Murray, for example)

Abstracts should be 500 words, exclusive of a selected bibliography and brief author’s bio. Final papers should run between 4,000 – 6,000 words (inclusive of endnotes and works cited) and be formatted in current MLA style. Revisions may be requested as a condition of acceptance. Please send all queries to the editors (Dr. Elizabeth McCormick, Dr. Jennifer Mitchell, and Dr. Rebecca Soares) at FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com.

Submissions Guidelines and Timeframe

By February 15, 2016:

  • Send one electronic copy of your 500-word abstract to FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com;
  • Include a selected bibliography of 10 sources;
  • and a brief bio of less than 250 words.

By March 15, 2016:  We will notify applicants of our decisions.

By July 15, 2016  Full papers are due.

——-

Rebecca Soares, Ph.D.

 

Honors Faculty Fellow

Barrett, the Honors College

Affiliated Faculty, Department of English

Arizona State University

Rebecca.Soares@asu.edu

The Ravenclaw Conference 2016 (Theme: Sociology of Harry Potter)

 

6th Annual Ravenclaw Conference 2016

Sept 19-23 (during our 6th annual Edinboro Potterfest)

Edinboro University

 

We invite submissions from faculty and students on the wide range of USA societal issues raised in the Harry Potter saga.  Paper topics or panel discussion should focus on any of the following:

  • prison issues, death penalty issues, the use of brutal interrogation techniques, the national security surveillance state, the use of mass media to control and influence opinion and public policy (Azkaban &The Ministry)
  • the war with death through organ transplants, cryonics, and cloning (Horcruxes and The Resurrection Stone)
  • diversity vs. purist cultural issues, feminism, education system issues, discrimination against behavioral or appearance abnormalities (Hogwarts)
  • the sports culture “balance” between the value of individual talent vs. team success, the tradition of excluding females from full contact (coed) sports (Quidditch Pitch)
  • adoption and foster care, child abuse, bullying (Dursley Cupboard)
  • care and treatment of other creatures (Hagrid’s Hut)
  • national health care issues (Madam Pomfrey)
  • war on public education?  war on higher education? (Hogwarts School)

 

Submissions could also be discussions of articles published in the Sociology of Harry Potter (2012).  Our Keynote Speaker will be Professor Jenn Sims.

 

An abstract with a 200 word maximum should be submitted by faculty and students.  Students submitting paper proposals should also submit their paper along with their abstract.  Deadline for consideration: Sept 2, 2016.  Papers accepted and presented will be included in our conference Proceedings. Past presentations can be accessed online via our website:  potterfest.com

 

Submissions should be sent to: Dr Corbin Fowler, cfowler@edinboro.edu

For more information, contact Dr Fowler via email or phone (814) 602 1694.

 

Presentations will be given throughout the week of Sept 19-23, afternoon and evening sessions.

Contact Info:

Dr Corbin Fowler, Department of English and Philosophy, Edinboro Unviersity, Edinboro, PA 16444

Contact Email:
corbinfowler3@gmail.com
URL:
http://potterfest.cs.edinboro.edu/

Call for Papers: The Weird & the Southern Imaginary

General Eds.: Travis Rozier & Bob Hodges

 

Deadline extension: Our first round netted some excellent submissions, but we are extending the deadline for proposals to January 18, 2016.

 

Keynote: The Weird & the Southern Imaginary will introduce the aesthetics and generic conventions of the Weird to cultural studies of the U.S. South and the region’s local, hemispheric, and (inter)national connections. Contributions from literary critics, film and popular culture scholars, philosophers, and critical theorists will consider forms of the Weird in a range of texts (literature, art, film & television, comics, music) from, about, or resonant with conceptions of different South(s).

 

Description: S. T. Joshi periodizes Haute Weird Fiction from 1880-1940, and China Miéville describes how the paradigm of Haute Weird Fiction, especially in its foremost practitioner H. P. Lovecraft, invokes horror, alterity, and/or awe on a cosmic scale, which seeps into the mundane experiences of cognitively ill-equipped scientific or academic protagonists. The Weird aesthetic, especially pre-World War II, is often inextricable from revanchist horrors of democracy, political revolution, miscegenation, and female or other non-normative sexualities, although Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s recent Weird compendium stresses the “darkly democratic” aspect of a C20 and C21 Weird tradition that spans nations, genders, genres, and levels of literary status.

 

Representations of the U.S. South as an irrational or reactionary space draw on what Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee describe as the southern imaginary, a fluid reservoir of topoi referencing an enduring material history of land appropriation, coercive labor practices, carceral landscapes, racial and commercial mixing, extralegal violence, and insular patriarchies. The Weird & the Southern Imaginary will explore Weird South(s) of national aberrance and cosmic otherness.  For example, the first television season of True Detective melds the conservative politics and religious fervor often equated with the South to vaster hints of conspiratorial and cosmic horror in a postindustrial Louisiana swampscape.

 

The dark fantasy of the Weird diverges sharply from the usual monstrosities of horror and speculative fictions as well as many modes of southern representation: the gothic, the grotesque, the uncanny, the ghostly or hauntological, or the folkloric, modes with longstanding southern associations and almost as longstanding critical fatigue for Southernisits. The Weird can also bridge Southern Studies and its old associations with recent work in object-oriented ontology, ecotheory, other new materialisms, and nihilist philosophy as well as apocalyptic popular cultural fixations.

 

Submission Guidelines: All proposed essays should address the concepts of the Weird and the South, however understood. Essays should be written in English, but can be written about texts read or viewed in other languages. We will also accept work on texts in translation. We are looking for critical essays (5,000-8,000 words). If you are interested in contributing an essay to the collection please send us a 300-500 word abstract.

 

Possible Topics:  (Feel free to combine topics or propose a topic not represented in the list)

  • Weird South(s) in U.S. literature
  • International Weird Fiction & southern imaginary, subtly connected or not
  • Race & the southern imaginary in Weird Fiction
  • Political or cultural reaction & Weird South(s)
  • Weird carceral practices & the southern imaginary (Franz Kafka “In the Penal Colony”)
  • Environmental transformation or degradation & Weird South(s)
  • The nonhuman or posthuman in southern literature (Matthew Taylor)
  • Dark ecology (Timothy Morton) & southern landscapes, swampscapes, etc.
  • Nihilism, extinction, or the recalcitrance of the world (Eugene Thacker) & the South(s)
  • C19 South & proto-Weird Fiction (Ambrose Bierce, Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Allan Poe)
  • The Weird associations of the South & the Antarctic (Poe, Herman Melville, Lovecraft)
  • R. H. Barlow in Florida, his Weird Fiction, or his correspondence with Lovecraft
  • Robert E. Howard in Texas, his Weird Fiction, or his correspondence with Lovecraft
  • Weird Appalachia (Lovecraft, Manly Wade Hopkins’s Silver John stories, Fred Chappell)
  • Henry S. Whitehead’s Weird West Indian tales
  • Eudora Welty & Weird Fiction (Mitch Frye)
  • Weird Fiction, modernist literary strategies, & the South (William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston “Uncle Monday”, Flannery O’Connor)
  • The Weird in Latin American Boom fiction (Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Monterroso), its forbearers (Jorge Luis Borges), or its successors (Junot Díaz, Jamaica Kincaid)
  • Contemporary or New (South) Weird (Poppy Z. Brite, Moira Crone, Stephen Graham Jones, Caitlín Kiernan, Joe Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeff VanderMeer)
  • Weird southern comics (Alan Moore et al. Saga of the Swamp Thing, Garth Ennis et al. Preacher) 
Contact Info:

Travis Rozier / Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz / jamesrzr138@gmail.com; Bob Hodges / University of Washington /bhodge4@gmail.com

Contact Email:
jamesrzr138@gmail.com