CFP Theorizing Zombiism: Toward a Critical Theory Framework Conference (9/1/2018; Dublin 7/25-27/2019)

Theorizing Zombiism: Toward a Critical Theory Framework
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/04/13/theorizing-zombiism-toward-a-critical-theory-framework

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: University College Dublin, Ireland

contact email: theorizingzombiism@gmail.com



Theorizing Zombiism: Toward a Critical Theory Framework

University College Dublin

UCD Humanities Institute

25-27 July 2019


The rising academic interest in the zombie as an allegory for cultural and social analysis is spanning disciplines including, humanities, anthropology, economics, and political science. The zombie has been used as a metaphor for economic policy, political administrations, and cultural critique through various theoretical frameworks. The zombie has been examined as a metaphor for capitalism, geopolitics, globalism, neo-liberal markets, and even equating Zombiism to restrictive aspects of academia.


The zombie as a cultural figure has its beginnings in allegorical folk tales related to the experience of the Haitian slave. Roger Lockhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History, examines these folk tales concerned with the horrific existence of slavery as told through the enigmatic zombi, which was quickly assimilated into western film and pulp fiction. Early films such as White Zombie, mark the induction of the savage zombies into western culture. George A. Romero transformed the zombie narrative into a survival story reflecting aspects of human society. This long standing tradition of the zombie genre is the basis for the successful series The Walking Dead. However, the rise of popular forms of the Zombie narrative, I, Zombie and the Netflix Original Santa Clarita Diet shifts the focus to the first person experience of the Zombie.


The evolution of the zombie narrative in both culture and academics indicates its adaptability and viability as a distinct framework for critical theory. This conference aims to investigate the possibility of developing a singular theoretical framework to evaluate culture and society through the zombie narrative trope. Contributors are encouraged to provide discipline specific, and interdisciplinary, examinations of the zombie with the purpose of formulating an overall theoretical structure of Zombiism.


Potential Topics both discipline specific and non-discipline specific, but not limited to:

• Nationalism through the zombie narrative films: Rec (Spain), Le Horde (France), Cockneys vs Zombies (England), Dead Meat (Ireland), Ravenous (Canada), etc.
• Zombie phenomenology/philosophy/phsychoanalysis
• Globalization, Refugees, and Migration.
• Pedagogical Zombiism.
• Gender and the Undead.
• Zombies in Popular Culture: Re-evaluating the function of horror in society.
• Expanding Praxis: Evaluating the expanding Zombie trope into other art forms and fields.
• The Zombification of History: Re-telling historical events through Zombiism and other horror tropes (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, etc).
• Undead digital objects and issues of digital curation/Undead archival objects.
• Legal Zombiism: Law and Legislation that refuses to die.
• Ecocritcal Zombiism.
• Science/Science Fiction: The science of Zombiism/The Zombification of science.
• Zombiism and visual culture and art history.

Send abstracts of 300 words for consideration to theorizingzombiism@gmail.com by 1 Sept, 2018.

Website: https://theorizingzombiism.wordpress.com

Conference organizers: Scott Hamilton (UCD), Conor Heffernan (UCD)

CFP Critical Essays on Arthur Machen (9/1/2018)

Collection on Arthur MACHEN [EXTENSION OF DEADLINE]
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/07/collection-on-arthur-machen-extension-of-deadline

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: Dr. Antonio Sanna

contact email: isonisanna@hotmail.com



Critical Essays on Arthur Machen

edited by Antonio Sanna


In spite of his prolific production of novels, short stories and essays, Arthur Machen (1863-1947) is one of those Victorian and twentieth-century writers whose works have been unjustly forgotten by contemporary readers and scholars. Machen was an ardent believer in mysticism and the occult, an admirer of the medieval world and a pioneer in psychogeography. His literary works have influenced celebrated writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Williams and Jorge Luis Borges and they are still pleasurable and valuable sources of entertainment. However, nowadays he is mainly remembered for his 1894 novella“The Great God Pan”, whereas his equally-successful volumes The Three Impostors (1895), The Hill of Dreams (1907), The Terror (1917), The Secret Glory (1922) and The Green Round (1933) as well as his short stories (“The Inmost Light”, “The White People”, “The Bowmen” and “N”, to mention merely a few) are rarely mentioned in studies on the English literature of the late-Victorian period and the first half of the twentieth century.

This anthology will explore Machen’s heterogeneous oeuvre from multidisciplinary perspectives. This volume seeks previously-unpublished essays that explore the English writer’s production. I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the subject that can illuminate the diverse facets of the writer’s work. There are several themes worth exploring when analyzing Machen’soeuvre, utilizing any number of theoretical frameworks of your choosing. I request the chapters 1) to be based on formal, academic analysis and 2) to be focused mainly on the writer’s works (though comparisons with other authors’ works are more than welcome).

Contributions may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Machen’s autobiographies
• The supernatural
• The seen and the unseen
• Representations of madness
• Representations of childhood, parenting and ageing
• Machenand fairy tales
• Gender and queer readings
• Machenand philosophy
• Exploration of dreams and the subconscious
• Fear of the Other
• The problem of evil
• Biblical interpretations
• Cultural studies and popular culture
• Class consciousness
• Science, science fiction and mystery
• Machen and the occult
• Machen and psychogeography
• Machen’s legacy

The anthology will be organized into thematic sections around these topics and others that emerge from submissions. I am open to works that focus on other topics as well and authors interested in pursuing other related lines of inquiry. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about the project and please share this announcement with colleagues whose work aligns with the focus of this volume.

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution, a brief CV and complete contact information to Dr. Antonio Sanna (isonisanna@hotmail.com) by the 1st of September, 2018. Full chapters of 4000-6000 words would be due upon signing a contract with a publisher. Note: all full chapters submitted will be included subject to review.

CFP Otherness and the Urban (Spec Issue of Otherness: Essays and Studies) (9/28/2018)

Special Journal Issue: “Otherness and the Urban”

deadline for submissions: September 28, 2018

full name / name of organization: Centre for Studies in Otherness

contact email: otherness.research@gmail.com


Otherness: Essays and Studies 7.1

The peer-reviewed e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for a special issue, forthcoming Spring 2019 – “Otherness and the Urban”


Edited by Maria Beville, this issue seeks to publish research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that examine, in as many ways as possible, the concepts of otherness and alterity as these relate to the experience and representation of the city.


The city is a unique and subjective space. It is fragmented and indistinct. It is at once place and text: to walk the city is to read it. In ‘Semiology and Urbanism’ (The Semiotic Challenge), Roland Barthes notes that the city is a discourse and a language: ‘[t]he city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it’. However, in this discourse, there exists ‘a conflict between signification and reason, or at least between signification and that calculating reason which wants all the elements of the city to be uniformly recuperated by planning’. Our desire to map the city is a desire to map the self: an impossibility that constantly reminds us of our own inherent Otherness.


In this way the city is multivalent. It is both the location and the sign of the Other. And rather than merely existing as a physical place, the city is experience; individualised and multiplied in its alterity. While the city exists as a place to be read and is unique in every individual reading, it is also a place to be written, inspiring writers, artists, and thinkers to become lost in city streets and locales as they struggle to find new ways to meet the challenge of representing the unrepresentable.


Thus, the city is where the subject and space become intertwined. While the city becomes part of the subject and the subject a part of the city, urban space in its resistance of representation remains a constant challenge to notions of self, of sameness, of homogeneity. The city is therefore bound to exist in tension with identity, both individual and collective. Just as is the case with the self, there can be no cohesive vision of the city because the city not only resists mapping, it resists unified narrative in its flux; in its phantasmagoria.


And yet the otherness of the city remains a part of the definition of urban selfhood and understanding this is best achieved through a balanced view of the city’s physical and metaphysical dimensions. No examination of the textuality of the city should overlook the materiality of the city and its impact on the city experience. City design, city building, city governance and city use form the structures of the city which carry and mediate its otherness.


This issue seeks to develop a collective of research papers which examine the otherness of the city and the Other in the city.


Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The city as other in literature/ Otherness in the city in literature
• Otherness and the philosophy of the city
• Urban aesthetics and otherness
• Twinned cities
• Hybrid cities
• Haunted cities
• Folklore and otherness in the city
• Globalisation, otherness and the urban
• The uncanny city (in literature, art, film, media)
• The politics of alterity in the city
• Otherness in the postcolonial city
• The postmodern city
• The Gothic city
• Minority urban experience (in literature, art, film, media)
• Urban Otherness and popular culture

Articles should be between 5,000 – 7,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with a Word document attachment formatted to the Chicago Manual of Style standards. Please send submissions to the editor, Maria Beville at otherness.research@gmail.com


The deadline for submissions is Friday, September 28, 2018.


*Barthes, Roland. ‘Semiology and Urbanism.’ In The Semiotic Challenge, translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. P191-201.



General Submissions

Scholars are always welcome to submit articles within the scope of the journal for consideration for our next general issue. We anticipate a general issue to come out in the Autumn of 2019.

Please address any inquires to Matthias Stephan: otherness.research@gmail.com.
 

CFP Gothic in the Nineteenth Century (7/15/2018; Loyola University Chicago 10/27/2018)

CFP Deadline Extended: “Hideous Progeny”: The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century (7/15/2018; 10/27/2018)
https://www.navsa.org/2018/06/14/cfp-deadline-extended-hideous-progeny-the-gothic-in-the-nineteenth-century-7-15-2018-10-27-2018/
Jun 14, 2018

“Hideous Progeny”: The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century

Lake Shore Campus, Klarcheck Information Commons, 4th floor

October 27, 2018, 8:30am-5:30pm



“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”
Mary Shelley, 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein

In this truly Gothic year, the Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society celebrates both the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights (1847), two famous Gothic novels which sparked questions regarding the potential of human connections across social classes, time, and death itself. Subsequent authors of Gothic fiction similarly employed this genre to interrogate the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, systems of power and reproduction, sexual, religious, and socio-political taboos and norms, reinterpret previous literatures, and reject contemporary notions of the limits of reality, scientific possibility, and human progress. Given the 19th-century recognition of the Gothic as an unstable, versatile space that can function as a surprising and subversive mechanism for social critique, the Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society asks what are the possibilities, values, narrative strategies, ideas, versions, mutations, and adaptations of the nineteenth century Gothic? Over the course of the nineteenth century, what endured, progressed, and morphed in this genre, and why?

The Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society solicits paper proposals addressing Gothic questionings of texts, bodies, and the supernatural. Possible CFP categories include but are not limited to the following:

• textual studies and digital humanities
• narrative theory
• adaptations
• history of science
• queer theory
• women and gender studies
• art and architecture
• post-colonial studies
• the gothic and the neo-gothic
• mutations, perversions, and disability studies.

Plenary Speaker: Alison Booth (University of Virginia)

Keynote Speaker: Suzy Anger (University of British Columbia)

Please send abstracts no longer than 300 words to lucvictoriansociety@gmail.com no later than 15 July 2018.

In the weeks and months ahead, more details will be forthcoming on our website: http://lucvictoriansociety.wix.com/lucvs.

CFP MEARCSTAPA/Preternature special issue (10/1/2018)

MEARCSTAPA/Preternature special issue
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/21/mearcstapapreternature-special-issue

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2018

full name / name of organization:
MEARCSTAPA

contact email:
tmtomaini@gmail.com



MEARCSTAPA

Call for Papers



MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application) invites papers on any topic of Monsters/Monster theory, or the Supernatural/Uncanny for a special issue of the journal Preternature (PSU Press). The special issue will celebrate MEARCSTAPA’s tenth anniversary as an academic society dedicated to the study of the monstrous.



Papers are welcome from anywhere on the globe, in any discipline of the Humanities, can reflect any genre, and can include any historical or literary period. Papers must be in English, and must conform to the Preternature submission guidelines. Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_Preternature.html



Please send full papers of 8,000-12,000 words by October 1, 2018to Melissa Ridley Elmes at MElmes@lindenwood.edu and Thea Tomaini at tmtomaini@gmail.com. Papers will undergo a double-blind review by at least two reviewers.



Preternature provides an interdisciplinary, inclusive forum for the study of topics that stand in the liminal space between the known world and the inexplicable. The journal embraces a broad and dynamic definition of the preternatural that encompasses the weird and uncanny—magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, occultism, esotericism, demonology, monstrophy, and more, recognizing that the areas of magic, religion, and science are fluid and that their intersections should continue to be explored, contextualized, and challenged.

CFP Transforming Bodies in Early Modern Drama (7/16/2018; RSA Toronto 3/17-19/2019)

RSA 2019: Transforming Bodies in Early Modern Drama (July 16th, 2018)
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/17/rsa-2019-transforming-bodies-in-early-modern-drama-july-16th-2018

deadline for submissions: July 16, 2018

full name / name of organization: Christina M. Squitieri / New York University

contact email: cms531@nyu.edu




Renaissance Society of America (RSA) 2019: 17–19 March 2019, Toronto, Canada

Transforming Bodies in Early Modern Drama

**This is a guaranteed session**

How are bodies–of people, plants, or animals–transformed on the early modern stage?

What are the agents of transformation, and is there something about drama in particular that allows for bodily transformation?

How is transformation represented (or not represented) dramatically?

What constitutes a "body" on stage, and is a body still the same if parts of it transform?

What does the transformation of the body tell us about corporeal unity, identity, transformation, or the instability of the body or identity?

How can bodily transformation intersect with theoretic frameworks such as materialism, historicism, ecocriticism, animal studies, or the post-human?

Topics may include (but are not limited to) the way violence (physical, sexual, verbal), ritual, disguise, death, love, the natural world, disease, wounds, language, power, fear, etc have a transforming effect on the early modern human and non-human bodies that populate early modern drama, through any theoretical lens.

Please send 150-word abstracts and brief CV to Christina M. Squitieri (cms531@nyu.edu) and Penelope Meyers Usher (pfm250@nyu.edu) by Monday, July 16th, 2018. This panel will be sponsored by the Early Modern and Renaissance Society at New York University.

​

CFP Shakespeare and the Gothic Imagination (6/30/2018; ICR South Carolina 10/25-28/2018)

Origins and Assemblages of the "Modern;" Shakespeare and the Gothic Imagination
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/15/origins-and-assemblages-of-the-modern-shakespeare-and-the-gothic-imagination

deadline for submissions:
June 30, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Lucian Ghita (Clemson University)

contact email:
lucianghita78@gmail.com


Writing in 1800, the Marquis de Sade claimed that the Gothic was the inevitable product of the revolutionary tremors felt throughout Europe. In revealing the proximity between poetic and political terror, the Gothic became the inescapable condition and symptom of modernity itself. The rise of the Gothic in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe is closely bound up with the discovery of Shakespeare as a "modern dramatist" by Hegel and, later, Marx. Like the Gothic, Shakespeare's plays had a propensity for exploring the "dark underbelly" of the new modern world. This seminar explores the mutually constitutive relationship between "Shakespeare" and "the Gothic," viewed as cultural catalysts for modernity and modern creativity. This panel invites a vast range and variety of proposals that use theoretical, historical, empirical or contextual approaches to explore not only how the two phenomena "were born together" and developed in tandem during the "long" Romantic period (1764-1850), but also how they have become cultural and critical categories for analyzing modernity itself.

Papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following areas, questions, and issues:

- Gothic adaptations and reworkings of Shakespeare's plays from the period
- Philosophical and political assemblages (Hegel, Marx, Voltaire)
- Shakespeare Revolutions- Discourses and Narratives of Modernity (related to Shakespeare and the Gothic)
- Romantic and Gothic Formations in Shakespeare
- Theatricality and Gothic Excess
- Gothic "Monsters"
- Assembling/Disassembling Shakespeare
- Ghost in the Machine (theatrical reception and history)- Macabre, Terror, and the Uncanny
- Shakespeare and His "Doubles"
- The influence of Horace Walpole, de Sade, and other Gothicists


Send all proposals and inquiries to lucianghita78@gmail.com by June 30, 2018.



This panel will be part of the 2018 International Conference on Romanticism ("Romantic Assemblages") to be hosted by Clemson University and held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, between October 25-28, 2018.

http://pearce.caah.clemson.edu/international-conference-romanticism/icr-...

The International Conference on Romanticism was founded in 1991 and aims to pursue the study of Romanticism across linguistic, national, and political disciplines. For more information please visit http://icr.byu.edu. Conference attendees and participants must be current members of ICR. Please visit http://icr.byu.edu/membership to become a member or renew your membership. The International Conference on Romanticism was founded in 1991 and aims to pursue the study of Romanticism across linguistic, national, and political disciplines. For more information please visit http://icr.byu.edu. Conference attendees and participants must be current members of ICR. Please visit http://icr.byu.edu/membership to become a member or renew your membership

New Book Series: Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature

New Gothic Book Series
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/13/new-gothic-book-series

deadline for submissions:
December 31, 2019

full name / name of organization:
Anthem Press

contact email:
proposal@anthempress.com


NEW INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC BOOK SERIES.

The Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature incorporates a broad range of titles that undertake rigorous, multi-disciplinary and original scholarship in the domain of Gothic Studies and respond, where possible, to existing classroom/module needs. The series aims to foster innovative international scholarship that interrogates established ideas in this rapidly growing field, to broaden critical and theoretical discussion among scholars and students, and to enhance the nature and availability of existing scholarly resources.

Series Editor: Carol Margaret Davison, University of Windsor, Canada

Editorial Board Members:
Xavier Aldana Reyes – Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Katarzyna Ancuta – Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
Ken Gelder – University of Melbourne, Australia
George Haggerty – University of California, USA
Tabish Khair – Aarhus University, Denmark
Tanya Krzywinska – Falmouth University, UK
Vijay Mishra – Murdoch University, Australia
Marie Mulvey-Roberts – University of the West of England, UK
Andrew Hock Soon Ng – Monash University, Malaysia
Inés Ordiz – University of Stirling, UK
David Punter – University of Bristol, UK
Dale Townshend – Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock – Central Michigan University, USA
Maisha Wester – University of Indiana, USA
Gina Wisker – University of Brighton, UK

We welcome the submission of proposals for challenging and original works that meet the criteria of this series. We make prompt editorial decisions. Our titles are published simultaneously in print and eBook editions and are subject to peer review by recognized authorities in the field. We are accepting proposals for monographs, edited collections, scholarly introductions and sourcebooks, and course readers. Please contact proposal@anthempress.com for more information. There is no formal deadline.

CFP Our Monsters, Ourselves (Film & History Horror Area) (7/1/2018)

Wish I could attend, but this conflicts with MAPACA.


Film & History Horror Area CFP: Our Monsters, Ourselves
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/05/31/film-history-horror-area-cfp-our-monsters-ourselves

deadline for submissions: July 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: Film & History Conference

contact email: ashleysmith2017@u.northwestern.edu



CALL FOR PAPERS


Our Monsters, Ourselves

An area of multiple panels for the 2018 Film & History Conference:

Citizenship and Sociopathy in Film, Television, and New Media

November 7-12, 2018

Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club, Madison, WI (USA)

Full details at: www.filmandhistory.org/conference



DEADLINE for abstracts: July 1, 2018



It is often said that every era gets the monster it needs. Whether they maintain or challenge the status quo, guard or confront power, champion or eradicate difference, our cinematic monsters tell us more about our own lives than about the fantasy worlds they inhabit. Cultural, racial, and religious others often become those monsters, as anxieties about identity, loss, corruption, invasion, and rapid social change bubble over onto the screen. Likewise, we—and those like us—become the monsters as we cling to outmoded values and ways of being.



How do we use our cinematic monsters to craft the stories we tell about ourselves, and our ever-changing fears? In what ways do our monsters defend or interrogate our ideas of nation? With so much real-world horror interwoven in our daily lives, how might our monsters be a source of coming to terms with—and perhaps healing—the evils of the world?



Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

• National horror (Don’t Breathe, The Witch, The Walling, The Purge)
• Monsters among us (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Cherry Tree Lane, Cloverfield)
• Power, politics, and horror (Society, The People Under the Stairs, The Howling)
• Making racism’s horrors explicit (Get Out, White Dog, Candyman)
• Buying into the horror: monstrous consumption (Fido, The Stuff, Dawn of the Dead, American Psycho, Street Trash)
• The horrors of aging (Drag Me to Hell, Rosemary’s Baby, The Visit, Rabid Grannies)
• Fear and fascination: our romance with sociopathy (My Friend Dahmer, The Killer Inside Me, Zodiac)
• Body horror: Fear of frailty (Malefique, Don’t Look Back, Tusk, Teeth)
• Stuck in a post-9/11 horror film: What’s next?

Abstracts that engage with genre horror films as social commentary are particularly welcome. Proposals for complete panels of three related presentations are also welcome, but should include an abstract and contact information (including email) for each presenter.



Please e-mail your 200-word proposal to the area chair:



Ashley R. Smith

Northwestern University

ashleysmith2017@u.northwestern.edu

Vampires and New England

I recently finished Blood Lines: Vampire Stories from New England (Nashville: Cumberland House, 1997), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg as part of The American Vampire Series.

It is an interesting collection with works from a very disparate selection of writers. A number of the stories play with New England's own traditions of vampire folklore (or create new ones), but too many of the narratives seemed to use the setting only as a place to tell a vampire story rather than expand on what has come before or relish in the location. All are worth a read, but readers should be forewarned that they might not find what they are expecting here. These are, perhaps, best referred to as "Vampire Stories Set in New England," rather than to be thought of "Vampire Stories of New England".


Contents (from The Locus Index to Science Fiction: 1984-1998):

Blood Lines: Vampire Stories from New England ed. Lawrence Schimel & Martin H. Greenberg (Cumberland House 1-888952-50-4, Sep ’97 [Oct ’97], $12.95, 225pp, tp) Vampire anthology of ten stories, one original. Authors include Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Manly Wade Wellman, H.P. Lovecraft, and Esther Friesner. Introduction by Schimel.

• ix · Introduction · Lawrence Schimel · in
• · New Hampshire
• 1 · Investigating Jericho [Saint-Germain] · Chelsea Quinn Yarbro · na F&SF Apr ’92
• · Massachussetts
• 51 · The Brotherhood of Blood · Hugh B. Cave · nv Weird Tales May ’32
• · Connecticut
• 73 · Chastel [Lee Cobbett; Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant] · Manly Wade Wellman · nv The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII, ed. Gerald W. Page, DAW, 1979
• · Maine
• 99 · Doom of the House of Duryea · Earl Peirce, Jr. · ss Weird Tales Oct ’36
• · Vermont
• 115 · Moonlight in Vermont · Esther Friesner · nv Sisters in Fantasy 2, ed. Susan Shwartz & Martin H. Greenberg, Roc, 1996
• · Connecticut
• 139 · Secret Societies · Lawrence Schimel · ss *
• · Massachussetts
• 151 · Luella Miller · Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman · ss Everybody’s Magazine Dec ’02
• · New Hampshire
• 165 · When the Red Storm Comes · Sarah Smith · ss Shudder Again, ed. Michele Slung, Roc, 1993
• · Connecticut
• 179 · The Beautiful, the Damned · Kristine Kathryn Rusch · ss F&SF Feb ’95
• · Rhode Island
• 197 · The Shunned House · H. P. Lovecraft · nv Weird Tales Oct ’37

 

Review of Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones

The local news magazine The Smithfield Times recently included a review of the Lovecraft-inspired game Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones. The review by columnist Ron Scopolleti can be accessed at http://smithfieldtimesri.net/2018/03/game-preview-stygian-reign-of-the-old-ones/.

The official site for the game is http://www.stygianthegame.com/.

Gothic Nature: New Journal Launch/CFP

 A head's up from the IAFA news site:

NEW JOURNAL: Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-horror and the EcoGothic
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2017/cfp-new-journal-gothic-nature-new-directions-in-eco-horror-and-the-ecogothic/

deadline for submissions:
April 15, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-horror and the EcoGothic

contact email:
gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com

We are seeking submissions for our new Gothic Nature journal, due out in 2018.

Further to the success of the November 2017 conference Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-horror and the EcoGothic, we will be producing a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the same themes.

The editorial board so far includes Dr Elizabeth Parker, Emily Bourke, Professor Simon C. Estok, Professor Andrew Smith, Professor Dawn Keetley, Professor Matthew Wynn Sivils, and Dr Stacy Alaimo. The inaugural issue will also feature an opening essay on eco-horror and the ecoGothic from Dr Tom J. Hillard.



‘Horror is becoming the environmental norm.’ —Sara L. Crosby

Gothic and horror fictions have long functioned as vivid reflections of contemporary cultural fears. Wood argues that horror is ‘the struggle for recognition of all that our society represses or oppresses’, and Newman puts forward the idea that it ‘actively eliminates and exorcises our fears by allowing them to be relegated to the imaginary realm of fiction’. Now, more than ever, the environment has become a locus of those fears for many people, and this conference seeks to investigate the wide range of Gothic- and horror-inflected texts that tackle the darker side of nature.

As we inch ever closer toward an anthropogenic ecological crisis, this type of fiction demands our attention. In 2009, Simon C. Estok highlighted the importance of ‘ecophobia’ in representations of nature, emphasising the need for ecocriticism to acknowledge the ‘irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world’ present in contemporary society. Tom J. Hillard responded to Estok’s call ‘to talk about how fear of the natural world is a definable and recognizable discourse’, suggesting that ‘we need look no further than the rich and varied vein of critical approaches used to investigate fear in literature.’ What happens, he asks, ‘when we bring the critical tools associated with Gothic fiction to bear on writing about nature?’

Gothic Nature seeks to address this question, interrogating the place of non-human nature in horror and the Gothic today, and showcasing the most exciting and innovative research currently being conducted in the field. We are especially interested for our inaugural issue in articles which address ecocritical theory and endeavour to define and discern the distinctions between ‘eco-horror’ and ‘ecoGothic’. We welcome academic articles from a variety of different subject backgrounds, as well as interdisciplinary work.

Subjects may include, but are by no means limited to:

1. Eco-horror and the ecoGothic: theory and distinctions

2. Ecocriticism and horror literature/ media

3. Ecocriticism and Gothic literature/ media

4. Gothic nature/ecophobia

5. Global eco-horror/global ecoGothic

6. Environmental activism and horror/ the Gothic

7. Human nature vs. nonhuman nature

8. Rural Gothic

9. Landscapes of fear

10. Legends of haunted nature/Gothic nature and mythology

11. Monsters in nature/natural spectres

12. Climate change and Gothic nature

13. Environmental apocalypse

14. Animal horror

15. Gothic nature in art through the ages

If you are interested in submitting a piece for our inaugural issue, please send an article of 6-8,000 words (Harvard referencing), along with a brief biography to gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com by April 15th, 2018. Please feel free to contact either Elizabeth Parker (parkereh@tcd.ie) or Emily Bourke (bourkee2@tcd.ie) with any informal queries you may have.

Please do get in touch, too, if you are interested in serving on the editorial board or contributing to the work on our website.

CFP Metaphor of the Monster Conference (7/1/2018; Mississipi State U 9/21-22/2018)

From the MEARCSTAPA List: 
 
The Metaphor of the Monster
Friday, September 21 - Saturday, September 22, 2018
Deadline for abstract submission: Tuesday, July 1st, 2018

Mermaids, giants, gorgons, harpies, dragons, cyclopes, hermaphrodites, cannibals, amazons, crackens, were-wolves, barbarians, savages, zombies, vampires, angels, demons… all of them inhabit and represent our deepest fears of attack and hybridization, but also our deepest desires of transgression. Frequently described in antithetical terms, monsters were frequently read in the past as holy inscriptions and proofs of the variety and beauty of the world created by God, or as threats to civilization and order. These opposing views on the monster show the radically different values that have been assigned to monsters since they started to permeate the human imagination in manuscripts, maps, and books.

Their hybridity challenges natural order and escapes taxonomy, thus problematizing our epistemological certainties. Inhabiting the margins of society, monsters also police social laws and show the consequences of transgressions on their own deformed bodies. Moreover, they are pervasive in nature and metamorphose into something else in different historical periods in order to embody the fears of that age, never to disappear from our imagination.

The 2018 Classical & Modern Languages and Literatures Symposium focuses on the concept of monstrosity as a cultural construct in literature, science, and art, and the ways in which the monster has been shaped, used, and interpreted as metaphor by scientists, writers, and artists in order to depict otherness, hybridization, threat to hegemonic order, and transgression.

We accept submissions in English that explore monstrosity from various disciplinary or interdisciplinary angles. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Representation in literature/art of different forms of monstrosity
• Gendered- or queer-focused studies of monstrosity
• The depiction of the Other as monster, and the depiction of marginalized communities
• Hybridity, miscegenation, and the problem of categorizing
• Cartography, margins of civilization
• Books as monsters
• Transgressive subjects as monsters
• The medicalization of the monster: monstrosity in medical discourse; monsters within: parasites, viruses, and illness
• Ecocritical approaches to the topic: humans as "parasites" and "predators"
• Dystopian depictions of the urban space as a monstrosity
• The monster as spectacle, freak shows
• Deconstructing monstrosity through inclusion
• Teaching monstrosity

To submit an Individual Proposal, fill an application through our website: https://www.cmll.msstate.edu/symposium/proposal/index.php
All proposals are due on July 1st, 2018.

• Paper title
• Name, institutional affiliation, position or title and contact information of the presenter including e-mail address and phone number.
• Abstract for an individual paper: up to 300 words for a single paper
• Brief (2-4 sentence) scholarly or professional biography of the presenter.
• Indication of any audiovisual needs or special accommodations.

To submit a Panel Proposal, each presenter must submit an Individual Proposal, and note the name of the Panel Chair on the appropriate box of the application.

Publication of Peer-Reviewed Selected Proceedings

After the conference, all presenters will be eligible to submit their papers for publication consideration.

Registration fees

Early registration by July 1st:

• $100.00 U.S. academics (faculty)
• $75.00 foreign academics and U.S. graduate students

Late registration fee (after July 1st):

• $125.00 U.S. academics (faculty)
• $100.00 foreign academics and U.S. graduate students

If you have any questions please contact Silvia Arroyo at SArroyo@cmll.msstate.edu.

CFP Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses Eight (expired) (Alabama, 6/21/-24/2018)

Sorry to have missed posting this much earlier: 

CFP: Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses Eight
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/05/10/cfp-slayage-conference-on-the-whedonverses-eight

deadline for submissions: 

January 8, 2018

full name / name of organization: 

Whedon Studies Association

contact email: 

slayage.conference@gmail.com

Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies, the Whedon Studies Association, and conveners Stacey Abbott and Cynthia Burkhead invite proposals for the eighth biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses (SCW8). Devoted to Joss Whedon’s creative works, SCW8 will be held on the campus of the University of North Alabama, Florence, Alabama, June 21-24, 2018. The conference will be organized by Local Arrangements Chair Cynthia Burkhead, along with Slayage alumns Anissa Graham, Stephanie Graves, Jennifer Butler Keeton, and Brenna Wardell

We welcome proposals of 200-300 words (or an abstract of a completed paper) on any aspect of Whedon’s television and web texts (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Dollhouse,Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.); his films (Serenity, The Cabin in the Woods, Marvel’s The Avengers, Much Ado About Nothing, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, In Your Eyes); his comics (e.g. Fray; Astonishing X-Men; Runaways;Sugarshock!; Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Nine, and Ten; Angel: After the Fall; Angel & Faith Season Nine and Ten); or any element of the work of Whedon and his collaborators. Additionally, a proposal may address paratexts, fandoms, or Whedon’s extracurricular—political and activist—activities, such as his involvement with Equality Now or the 2016 US elections.  Since Florence, Alabama is one of the four cities making up the Shoals, and the area is rich in music history (the Muscle Shoals Sound, W.C. Handy) as well as Native American History, we look forward to papers addressing these subjects as they relate to the Whedonverses. Multidisciplinary approaches (literature, philosophy, political science, history, communications, film and television studies, women’s studies, religion, linguistics, music, cultural studies, art, and others) are all welcome. A proposal/abstract should demonstrate familiarity with already-published scholarship in the field, which includes dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and over a fifteen years of the blind peer-reviewed journal Slayage. Proposers may wish to consult Whedonology: An Academic Whedon Studies Bibliography, housed with Slayage at www.whedonstudies.tv.

An individual paper is strictly limited to a maximum reading time of 20 minutes, and we encourage, though do not require, self-organized panels of three presenters. Proposals for workshops, roundtables, or other types of sessions are also welcome. Submissions by graduate and undergraduate students are invited; undergraduates should provide the name, email, and phone number of a faculty member willing to consult with them (the faculty member does not need to attend). Proposals should be submitted online through the SCW8 webpage at http://www.whedonstudies.tv/scw8--2018.html   and will be reviewed by program chairs Stacey Abbott, Cynthia Burkhead, and Rhonda V. Wilcox. Submissions must be received by Monday, 8 January 2018. Decisions will be made by 5 March 2018. Questions regarding proposals can be directed to Rhonda V. Wilcox at the conference email address: slayage.conference@gmail.com.

Last updated May 11, 2017
This CFP has been viewed 1,098 times. 

CFP Haunted Heritage: Confronting a Culture of Specters Graduate Conference (2/15/2018; Rutgers 4/14/2018)

CALL FOR PAPERS: "Haunted Heritage: Confronting a Culture of Specters"
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/11/12/call-for-papers-haunted-heritage-confronting-a-culture-of-specters

deadline for submissions: 

February 15, 2018

 

full name / name of organization: 

Rutgers University, Camden / English Graduate Student Association 

 

contact email: 

egsa2018conference@gmail.com

 

 The EGSA is pleased to release the call for papers for our fifth annual graduate conference to be held on Saturday, April 14th 2018. This year's conference theme is "Haunted Heritage: Confronting a Culture of Specters."

Haunted Heritage: Confronting a Culture of Specters

Rutgers University, Camden Graduate Conference

We inhabit a haunted culture, surrounded by specters of every sort. From digital culture, the political mainstreaming of ideas once thought past, to the domination of popular culture by zombies, apocalypses, and nostalgia, our cultural moment is consumed by spectral presences.   Everywhere we turn, there is a haunting to comprehend and confront. Even language, our primary mode for understanding all of these various specters, is haunted.

Understanding our cultural hauntings, and our haunted selves, empowers us to begin the struggle of overcoming, living with, or even appreciating the specters surrounding us. This conference explores the past, present, and future of our cultural situation and the ways we learn to live with the knowledge of an other-worldly, forgotten, or translucent presence. We seek papers and presentations that explore presences felt but invisible, otherworldly, esoteric, uncanny, monstrous, and/or mysterious.

The English Graduate Student Association, is pleased to invite papers from graduate, and exceptional undergraduate, students within literary studies, literary theory or philosophy, digital studies, film studies, game studies, creative writing, literacy studies, linguistics, rhetoric & composition, and childhood studies for our fifth annual conference on April 14, 2018. 

Papers and presentations might include (but are not limited to):

• Histories, of any kind
• Identity 
• Materialisms
• Digital Content and Spaces
• Exile and Migration
• Colonialism
• Post/Trans-Humanism, Animal Studies
• Modernity and Post-Modernity
• Mysticisms, Religion 
• Hauntologies
• Affect
• Popular Culture

Keynote Speaker: TBD

Submission Deadline: Proposals should be submitted to egsa2018conference@gmail.com by February 15th, 2018. 

Submission Guidelines: Please submit a 350 word abstract proposing an 8-12 page paper. Abstracts should be added to the email submission as an attachment with no identifying information present. In the body of the email, please include your name, affiliated institution, area of study, and contact information. 

For questions, email egsa2018conference@gmail.com. 

Last updated January 22, 2018
This CFP has been viewed 2,701 times. 

CFP Supernatural Studies Conference Spring 2018 (expired; New York 3/23/2018)

Sorry to have missed this:
 
EXTENDED! Supernatural Studies Conference Spring 2018

deadline for submissions: 

January 9, 2018

 

full name / name of organization: 

Supernatural Studies Association

 

contact email: 

supernaturalstudies@gmail.com

 

The Supernatural Studies Association (www.supernaturalstudies.com) invites submissions for the inaugural Supernatural Studies Conference, to be held at Bronx Community College on Friday, March 23, 2018.

Call for submissions

The Supernatural Studies Association invites submissions for the inaugural Supernatural Studies Conference, to be held at Bronx Community College on Friday, March 23, 2018. Horror scholar and author of a series of zombie novels Dr. Kim Paffenroth of Iona College will deliver the keynote address.

The conference welcomes proposals on representations of the supernatural in any form of text or artifact, such as literature (including speculative fiction), film, television, video games, social media, or music. Submissions regarding pedagogy and supernatural representations will also be considered. There is no restriction regarding time periods or disciplinary and theoretical approaches (examples include literary, historical, and cultural studies approaches).

Abstracts of 300 words maximum should be sent to supernaturalstudies@gmail.com by January 9, 2018, and decisions regarding acceptance will be communicated by January 20, 2018. Faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars are welcome to apply.  Please note that, due to location and funding, we do not have an associated conference hotel and cannot offer travel support.

Last updated January 2, 2018
This CFP has been viewed 2,226 times. 

CFP From Carmilla to Drusilla: Vampires Across Popular Culture (2/15/2018; Romania 6/7-10/2018)

From Carmilla to Drusilla: Vampires Across Popular Culturehttps://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/11/08/from-carmilla-to-drusilla-vampires-across-popular-culture

deadline for submissions: 

February 15, 2018

full name / name of organization: 

Seton Hill University

contact email: 

arnzen@setonhill.edu

Call For Papers: International Vampire Film and Arts Festival  - 7-10 June 2018

The third annual International Vampire Film and Arts Festival will take place in Sighisoara in Transylvania, Romania, on June 7th-10th, 2018. To celebrate their popular fiction dual degree collaboration, WRITE TOGETHER--in which students earn an MA studying at Edinburgh Napier University for one year, then transition to a low residency program to earn their MFA from Seton Hill University--faculty from both universities are teaming up to curate this year’s exciting call for papers. 

Keynote Speaker:CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN (bestselling author of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Watcher's Guide, Of Saints and Shadows, Ararat, Seize the Night, & more)

Sponsoring Faculty: Dr. Michael Arnzen and Nicole Peeler (Seton Hill University)

Mr. David Bishop and Ms. Laura Lam (Edinburgh Napier University)

Conference Theme: From Carmilla to Drusilla: Vampires Across Popular Culture

The IVFAF, in association with Seton Hill University and Edinburgh Napier University, calls for papers by scholars interested in presenting their researched essays on vampire literature and film in the academic symposium that runs alongside the festival in Transylvania.

We will divide this year’s academic symposium into two days of programming:

• One day will be devoted to situating the vampire as a figure of fascination across popular culture.
• One day will focus on the vampires of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe, including its many spin-offs and tie-ins and source materials.  

The significance of the "Buffyverse” (which in 2017 celebrated its 20th Anniversary since first airing on television) will be emphasized in this second day.  While drawing from an original 1992 horror comedy film, the quirky YA television series developed the characters and the supernatural world of Sunnydale into a long-running series (and a popular spin-off, Angel), generating a cult following that continues to this day in comics, novels, and more.

Both sessions invite papers in genre theory & history, popular fiction, media culture, television theory, adaptation, comic studies, the transformative arts and other areas of film, literary and cultural studies in order to explore and expand the significance of both the vampire, in general, as well as the "Buffyverse," in popular culture and around the world.   

Proposals for single 20-minute papers or pre-constituted panels (of 3 x 20-minute papers) on the conference theme are now welcomed from scholars.  Possible topics for the first day may include (but are not limited to) the following:

+The Impact of Popular Culture or Non‐Gothic Genres on Dracula, Varney, Carmilla and Other Classic Vampire Texts

+Vampire Fiction as Subgenre (Comedies, Romances, YA literature, Graphic Novels)

+The Vampire’s Role in Genre Evolution

+The Vampire as Metaphor

+Vampires as Signs of Cultural Change

+The Popular Vampire in the Literary Mainstream

+The Evolution of Sex and Religion in Vampire Literature

+The Influence of Cinema on Literary Vampires (and vice‐versa)

+Vampiric Tropes in Social Networking, Internet Memes and New Media Culture

+Popular Vampire Fiction/Film in the Non‐Western World

+Pedagogical Applications of Popular Vampire Texts

+Gender and the vampire and/or the vampire hunter

+Vampires and the depiction of alternative sexualities

+Other Cultural Studies Applications of the Vampire Icon

And possible topics for the second day may include (but are not limited) to the following:

+ The Impact of historical vampire literature (Dracula, Varney, Carmilla etc.) on the Buffyverse.

+ Cultural themes in Joss Whedon's work.

+ Buffy's influence on contemporary vampire cinema or YA literature.

+ Gender issues and sexuality  in Joss Whedon's Buffyverse.

+ Spike, Angel and vampiric masculinity.

+ Fan Culture and the Buffy series.

+ Buffy in Social Networking, Internet Memes and New Media Culture

+ Teaching with Buffy

+ Generation X and Millennial Audience Receptions of Buffy

+Is Buffy feminist?

A particular desire will be to select papers that examine the vampire in Young Adult literature and teen dramas, which would offer a wider context for situating Buffy scholarship or otherwise expanding our scholarly understanding of the appeal of the vampire in youth culture. We also want to support undergraduate scholarship: any current UG students interested in attending IVFAF would be eligible for special, 10-15 minute presentation panels to facilitate their participation in an international conference at the undergraduate level. 

Submit abstracts (500 words maximum) via email only to arnzen@setonhill.edu no later than February 15th, 2018.  If submitting a full panel proposal, include all three proposals along with a summary statement (50 words maximum) of the panel's title and central topic written by the moderator.  Acceptance of a proposal is a commitment to present a finished written paper in a talk lasting approximately 20 minutes.  Accepted submitters must confirm their commitment to travel, attend and present their own original work at the conference in Sighisoara, Romania. Presenters must register by purchasing an Academic Delegate ticket.

For more information on conference registration and location, visit http://ivfaf.com

Last updated November 8, 2017
This CFP has been viewed 2,684 times. 

CFP In the Shadows: Illuminating Monstrosity in Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture (2/28/2018; British Columbia 5/11-12/2018)

In the Shadows: Illuminating Monstrosity in Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/01/29/in-the-shadows-illuminating-monstrosity-in-childrens-and-young-adult-literature-and

deadline for submissions: 

February 28, 2018

 

full name / name of organization: 

University of British Columbia Master of Arts in Children's Literature program

 

contact email: 

ubc.conference.2018@gmail.com

 

In the Shadows:

Illuminating Monstrosity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture

Call for Paper Proposals

Deadline for submission: February 28th, 2018 

A peer-reviewed graduate student conference on children’s literature, media, and culture

University of British Columbia - Friday May 11th - Saturday May 12th, 2018 

In the Shadows: Illuminating Monstrosity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture is a two-day conference on May 11th - 12th 2018 showcasing graduate student research in children’s literature. You are invited to submit a proposal for an academic paper that contributes to research in the area of children’s and young adult literature, media, or cultural studies. Submissions of creative writing for children and young adults are also welcome. We are particularly interested in research and creative work that draw on the broadly interpreted theme of monstrosity--including research on narratives that feature monstrous figures and the monstrous side of humanity.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Literature from the genres of horror, gothic, mystery, or science fiction
• Post-humanism/trans-humanism
• Narratives of physical or emotional trauma, scars, disfigurement, etc.
• Themes of fear, captivity, empathy/apathy
• The uncanny and the sublime
• Narratives focussing on the duality of human nature
• Themes of survival, lost innocence, or childhood innocence
• Experiences of marginalized groups, otherness, and social outcasts
• (Mis)representations of people as “monsters”
• Government atrocities, tragedies, and other perspectives on historical events
• Analyses of monstrosity from critical or theoretical perspectives (e.g. psychoanalysis, post colonialism, feminism, etc.)
• Adaptations, bringing a narrative to life in a new story or medium
• Stories of real-world monsters, such as bullies or personal, inner demons
• Narratives featuring monsters, vampires, werewolves, zombies, ogres etc.
• Villains and beasts from fairy tales, folktales, or mythology
• Friendly monsters or imaginary friends (e.g. Pokémon, The BFG, Monsters Inc.)
• The allure and romanticism of monsters (e.g. Twilight)
• Papers related to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in honour of the 200th anniversary of publication 

The topics above are a guideline for the proposals we would like to see, but we are eager to receive paper proposals on any facet of monstrosity in children’s and young adult texts. 

Academic Paper Proposals
Please send a 250-word abstract that includes the title of your paper, a list of references in MLA format, a 50-word biography, your name, your university affiliation, email address, and phone number to the review committee at submit.ubc.conference@gmail.com. Please include “Conference Proposal Submission” in the subject line of your email. 

Creative Writing Proposals
Submissions of creative writing for children and young adults in any genre are welcome, including novel chapters, poetry, picture books, graphic novels, scripts, etc. Please send a piece of work no longer than 12 pages double-spaced. (Anything shorter is welcome-- poetry, for example, might only be a page). The submission should include the title of your piece, a 150-word overview of your piece (describe age group, genre, and links to the conference theme), a list of references in MLA format (if you have any), a 50-word biography, your name, your university affiliation, email address, and phone number. Please send your submission to the review committee at submit.ubc.conference@gmail.com. Please put “Creative Conference Proposal Submission” in the subject line of your email.

Out of Province/Country Submissions
For those who may need extra time to plan their travels please put “Travel” in the email subject line and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
 

For more info, please contact ubc.conference.2018@gmail.com or visit https://blogs.ubc.ca/intheshadows/.  Join our mailing list at http://eepurl.com/dht7_z.

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you this spring!

Last updated January 31, 2018
This CFP has been viewed 252 times. 

CFP Monsters and Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature (1/15/2018)

Call for Submissions: Monsters and Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/12/07/call-for-submissions-monsters-and-monstrosity-in-nineteenth-century-anglophone

deadline for submissions: 

January 15, 2018

 

full name / name of organization: 

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 

 

contact email: 

literary.monsters@gmail.com

 

Call for Papers

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies

Special issue on “Monsters and Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature”

Guest editors: Gero Guttzeit and Natalya Bekhta

Anglophone literature in the nineteenth century abounds in monsters that continue to horrify even in the present: vampires, mummies, doppelgangers, ghosts, and zombies as well as Frankenstein’s monster, the Jabberwock, Helen Vaughan, and the Invisible Man. Our aim in this special issue of Anglistik is to remap this monstrous abundance in light of the emerging field of monster studies (Mittman 2016). Monster studies, also termed ‘monster theory’ (Cohen 1996) or ‘teratology’ (Picart and Browning 2012), “use[s] the monsters themselves as theoretical constructs” (Mittman 2016, 9), conceptualizes “monstrousness […] as a mode of cultural discourse” (Cohen 1996, viii), and understands monstrosity as an imposed narrative rather than an intrinsic feature of certain social appearances and behaviours (Wright 2013, 3). Since the nineteenth century has been crucial to the development of monster studies, particularly with regard to the monstrous body (Youngquist 2003), the vampire (Auerbach [1995] 2006) and Frankenstein’s creature (Baldick 1987), a dedicated publication on “Monsters and Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature” will bring together fresh considerations of this historical period and the theory it inspired.
We aim to reconsider monsters and monstrosity within nineteenth-century literary narratives as well as to rethink monstrosity through nineteenth-century literature. Such a project might draw on a variety of influential theoretical approaches connected to the field of monster studies (Kristeva [1982] 2010; Haraway 1992; Carroll 1990; Halberstam 1995; Cohen 1996; McNally 2011; Mittman 2016). We are looking for contributions that revisit but also go beyond the traditional pinnacles of the 1816 Lake Geneva ghost story writing contest and the fin-de-siècle Gothic to ask the interconnected questions as to why the nineteenth century has such a peculiar affinity with monsters and monstrosity and which new impulses it can give monster studies today.

Issues and questions to be discussed include but are not limited to:

Periodization and historicization: Can events such as the “sudden population explosion of monsters” in the Romantic period (Burwick 2015, 176–77) be used to periodize the nineteenth century? Is a chronological structuring in monster studies “messy and inadequate” because a narrative of progress is unsuitable for describing monsters (Cohen 1996, ix) or do monsters have a recurring representational purpose and, like Gothic productions, mark comparable historical moments in the cycles of capitalist accumulation (Shapiro 2008, 30-31)?

Nation and disability: How can we extend and critique contemporary ideas of monstrosity from Britain, the US, and other Anglophone countries such as Emerson’s description of “[t]he state of society [as] one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters” (Emerson 1971, 53)? Can genres such as nineteenth-century Gothic sustain a critique of the monstrosity of impaired bodies (Anolik 2010)?

Gender and sexuality: While popular conceptions of monstrosity in early modern England very often took the shape of monstrous female bodies (Brenner 2009, 165), what can the relative marginality of female monsters in the monstrous pantheon of the nineteenth century tell us about redefinitions and readjustments of gender conceptions in the period? Which metaphors other than spectrality (re)define emergent notions of homosexuality (Castle 1993)?

Class and race: What can “capitalist monsterology” (McNally 2011, 2), which focuses on the monstrous forms of the lived experience of capitalism, tell us about the period when the current world-economy established itself? How do monsters such as Frankenstein’s creature and the zombie reinforce or rewrite experiences of slavery and categories of race (as suggested by Young’s (2008) work on black Frankenstein)?

Intertexuality, intermediality, and metaliterary meanings: What can different intermedial versions of monsters, for instance Frankenstein’s creature, tell us about the system of nineteenth-century literature and other media? What is the specificity of nineteenth-century variations of older, mythological monsters such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Kraken” (1830)? How does monstrosity work as an instrument of the metaphorization of literature and its production, distribution, and reception, as present, for instance, in Henry James’s early twentieth-century dismissal of certain nineteenth-century novels as “large loose baggy monsters” (James 1909, 477)?

‘Monstrous theory’: How can nineteenth-century monsters be used to rethink assumptions in what might be termed today’s “monstrous theory” connected, for instance, to the spectral turn, the posthuman turn, and the animal turn? What are conceptual alternatives to the so-called “anxiety model” of the Gothic as critiqued by Baldick and Mighall (2000)?

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies (ISSN: 0947-0034) is the journal of the German Association for the Study of English (Anglistenverband). Further information on the journal can be found here: https://angl.winter-verlag.de/ Full contributions of 5,000 to 7,000 words with MLA formatting will be due by October 1, 2018, and the final issue will be published with open access in late 2019.
Please submit a 500-word abstract (excluding bibliography) with a brief biography to the guest editors Gero Guttzeit and Natalya Bekhta at literary.monsters@gmail.com by January 15, 2018.

Last updated December 8, 2017
This CFP has been viewed 2,007 times. 

Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference Schedule Online

From the official Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference site:
http://stokercon2018.org/the-convention/ann-radcliffe-academic-conference/

The Second Annual Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference will be presented at the Third Annual StokerCon, March 1 – 4, 2018 held at the historic Biltmore Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island (http://www.providencebiltmore.com/). We are pleased to announce here the full conference program, and we hope to see you in Providence!

StokerCon info and tentative schedule at:  http://stokercon2018.org/.

Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference Schedule

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Panel 1: Gender Studies / 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

• Bridget Keown, “The Symptoms of Possession: Gender, Trauma, and the Domestic in Novels of Demonic Possession”
• Elsa Carruthers and Rhonda Joseph, “When We Are the Monsters: Female Monsters and the Subversion of Patriarchy”
• Maya Thornton, “’1, 2 … Freddy’s Coming for You’: Freddy Krueger as Manifestation of Teenage Societal Anxieties”
• Holly Newton, “Coming Out and Coming Home: Reading Silent Hill Homecoming’s Alex Shepherd as Queer”

Panel 2: Monster Studies, Eurasia / 11:45 AM – 1:15 PM

• Emily Anctil, “‘Not a Bedtime Story’: Investigating Textual Interactions Between the Horror Genre and Children’s Picturebooks”
• Naomi Borwein, “Monster Studies, Monster Anthropology, and Australian Aboriginal Horror Literature”
• Frazer Lee, “Koji Suzuki’s Ring – A World Literary Perspective”
• Amanda Trujillo, “Contagious Curses: Identifying the Characteristics and Origins of a Horror Trope”

Panel 3: Horror Studies / 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM

• Khara Lukancic, “Ethics in Horror Movies: An Analysis of The Bye Bye Man”
• Nicholas Diak, “Lost Nights and Dangerous Days: Unraveling the Relationship Between Stranger Things and Synthwave”
• Daniel Holmes, “Horror, Terror, and the Homeric Uncanny”
• Caitlin Duffy, “This Mansion of Gloom’: Visualizing Edgar Allan Poe’s Atmospheres of Horror”

Panel 4: Myth and Monsters / 3:45 PM – 5:15 pm

• Anthony Gambol, “The Genesis of Myth”
• Mathias Clasen, “Fear for Your Life: Evolution and Horror Fiction”
• Shawn Pendley, “Modal Confusion Meets Moral Insensibility in Fox’s Lucifer
• Michele Brittany, “Mummies in Comics 101”

Friday, March 2, 2018

Panel 1: Gender Studies / 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

• Deirdre Flood, “Under the Mask: Slasher Villains in Pre and Post 9/11 Horror”
• Rocky Colavito, “Trans Fatal(e): Body Horror, Trans(un)fixion, and Walter Hill’s The Assignment”
• Jennifer Loring, “The Dark Heart of Human Nature: The Necessity of Extreme Horror”
• Johnny Murray, “’Gelatinous Green Immensity’: The Sublime – Grotesque in Weird Fiction”

Panel 2: Gothic, Folklore & Villains / 11:45 AM – 1:15 PM

• Danny Rhodes, “’When the Cage Came Up There Was Something Crouched A-Top of It’: The Haunted Tales of LTC Rolt – A Contextual Analysis”
• Michelle Reinstatler, “Western Culture’s Adversarial Relationship with the Revenant: Tragedy and the Haunted in Dead Crossroads”
• Douglas Ford, “Of All Nights in the Year: Walpurgis Night and Young Goodman Brown”
• Erica McCrystal, “Jekyll and Hyde Everywhere: Inconsistency and Disparity in the Real World”
• Renee DeCamillis, “The Power of Sympathetic Villains of Literature and Screen Pulses Through Music”

 Panel 3: Zombies, Ghouls and Other Monsters / 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM

• Michael Torresgrossa, “Arthurian Monster Mash: The Undead in Camelot from The Awntys off Authure to the Fiction of Today”
• Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., “Night of the Living Dead, or Endgame: Samuel Beckett and Zombies”
• Kent Pettit, “Medieval and Modern Godfathers of Ghouls: William of Newburgh and George A. Romero as Subversive Sages for Turbulent Times”
• Allison Budaj, “Melancholy and The Walking Dead”

Panel 4: 20^th Century Horror Literature / 3:45 PM – 5:15 PM

• John Tibbetts, “The Mystery of Marjorie Bowen”
• Adam Crowley, “Roadway to Hell: The Divided Line and the Concept of Evil in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space”
• Gavin Hurley, “Richard Laymon’s Rhetorical Style: Minimalism, Suspense, and Negative Space”
• James Anderson, “Four Quadrants of Success: The Metalinguistics of Author Protagonists in the Fiction of Stephen King”

Organizing Co-Chairs

Michele Brittany & Nicholas Diak
Email: AnnRadCon@gmail.com

About the Ann Radcliffe Conference and Stokercon

The Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference is part of the Horror Writers Association’s Outreach Program. Membership to the Horror Writers Association is not required to submit or present, however registration to StokerCon 2018 is required to present. StokerCon registration can be obtained by going to www.stokercon2018.org. There is no additional registration or fees for the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference outside StokerCon registration. If interested in applying to the Horror Writer’s Association as an academic member, please see www.horror.org/about/ .
StokerCon is the annual convention hosted by the Horror Writers Association wherein the Bram Stoker Awards for superior achievement in horror writing are awarded.