Call for papers: Nature strikes back!
Genres of revenge in the anthropocene – extension of submission deadline
Special issue of “Australian Humanities Review”, due for publication 2014 Edited by Dr Catherine Simpson and Dr Nicole Matthews 300 word abstracts should be sent to [email protected] with the subject line ?Nature Strikes Back? by Feb 14, 2014.
Full papers should be submitted by March 15, 2014. Cli-fi (or climate fiction) has recently emerged as a new subgenre describing tales of imminent disaster as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change. If Rachel Carson?s Silent Spring invoked nature extinguished, passive or defeated, these narratives of environmental change present an unexpectedly feral, unpredictable world where an aggressive nature runs rampant. In this special issue we hope to excavate the resources of popular genres for talking about risk, causality and the unintended consequences of human action. This issue will interrogate the ways we narrate non-human agency. How do these stories revisit the spectacle and power of the sublime? Can popular culture help us re-imagine environments, objects and non-human animals in a time of rapid ecological change? What is the affective potentiality of narratives of hubris, revenge and fear? And how are whiteness, colonial politics of ?natives? and ?non-natives?, and border policing restaged across these diverse and composite bodies? We invite theoretically, empirically and/or textually grounded articles and welcome articles that locate Australia in comparative or international contexts. Topics might include: · Comedy, tragedy, farce? Genres of revenge and reaction · You couldn?t make it up: fiction, non-fiction and environmental horror · Animals: dangerous, vulnerable, feral, vengeful? · Storying the human biome · New formations of the disaster movie: back to the 1970s? · Zombies, whiteness and climate disaster · Actor-network theory and pulp fictions · Climate change war stories · The non-human point of view in documentary · Cycles of destruction: reassuring mythologies of ecological renewal? · Gaia and global catastrophe · Frightening the children: apocalyptic children?s tales Papers should be 5-7,000 words in length and should be in MLA format (the AHR styleguide is here: http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/about.html#submission ) . All papers will be subject to peer review and will be published at the discretion of the AHR editors.
