‘Pastoral: Past, Present, Future’
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism is the journal of ASLE-UKI (the UK-Ireland branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). It is a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor and Francis and supported by Bath Spa University and the University of Worcester. Green Letters explores interdisciplinary interfaces between humans and the natural and built environment. Submissions (by abstract) are invited for our themed winter 2016 issue.
Pastoral has recently been undergoing one of its periodic transformations. The papers from two conferences are about to be published: ‘The Afterlife of Pastoral’ in Australia and ‘Pastoral: the Poetics and Politics of Place’ in France. A further conference on ‘Pastoral Sounds’ has recently taken place in France. Irish pastoral has suddenly come to the fore in books by Oona Frawley (Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature, 2005), Tim Wenzell (Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature, 2009) and Donna Potts (Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, 2011). A recent edited book Eco-Joyce (2014) has three chapters engaging with pastoral. Renaissance studies have been enlivened by ecocriticism, as in Ken Hiltner’s What Else is Pastoral? (2011), as has eighteenth century studies (e.g. David Fairer’s work on ‘Eco-Georgic’). Yet, ecocritics have often dismissed classical pastoral texts without actually engaging with their complexities. Essays such as Charles Martindale’s ‘Green Politics: The Eclogues’ in his Cambridge Companion to Virgil (1997) remain to be followed up by ecocritics, while the tradition of Georgic literature has been almost entirely ignored within ecocriticism. What, though, is clear is the scope for reading pastoral, anti-pastoral and post-pastoral cultural texts through the perspectives, for example, of material ecocriticism, ecofeminism, environmental justice, biosemiology, communications studies, green media and cultural studies, and eco-musicology.
Accordingly, in an attempt to do justice to the full range and ecological interest of pastoral we invite proposals on any topic that attempts to re-think the broad pastoral tradition from a broadly ecocritical perspective. Without prejudice to other submissions, we would be particularly interested in papers on:
– the Georgic tradition
– contemporary Georgic
– pastoral and sound
– pastoral and environmental communication
– the complexities of classical pastoral literature
– ‘dark’ pastoral and pastoral theory
Each article will be accompanied by an abstract, a brief biographical note, and keywords. Manuscript length should be between 4000 and 6000 words and authors are asked to follow the journal’s ‘Instructions for Authors’ which can be found at the web address given below. Eventual submissions will be made via the Scholar One submission system, information on which will be provided on acceptance of the abstract. Please note that it is important that articles should have a broad ecocritical flavour and be informed, to some degree, by ecological theory.
To have a submission considered please send an abstract (maximum 500 words) to both John Parham (the co-editor of Green Letters) and Thomas Pughe, co-guest editor of this edition. Their e-mail addresses are [email protected] and [email protected]. The abstract should specify the envisaged word length of the finished article. It should be sent as an anonymous attachment in Word document format along with a covering email giving your name, address and institutional affiliation. The deadline for abstracts is 5th January 2015. A decision as to which articles will be commissioned will be made by the start of February 2015. Please note, though, that the deadline for first draft submissions – 13th April 2015 – is tight.
For more information about Green Letters, see our website at http://tandfonline.com/loi/rgrl20.
