Calls for Manuscripts

Below is a current listing of calls for manuscripts that have been sent to us. If you would like to post a call here, please send relevant information to the ASLE Managing Director. Deadlines are in bold.

Those interested in journal and book publication should also consult the following pages:

List of Ecocritical Journals
List of Ecocritical Presses
Book-Publishing Wisdom (from C. L. Rawlins)

Posted April 7, 2013.  Ecocritical Theory and Practice Book Series, Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.  Series Editor: Douglas Vakoch, California Institute of Integral Studies, USA.

Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists. Works that explore environmental issues through literatures, oral traditions, and cultural/media practices around the world are welcome. The series features books by established ecocritics that examine the intersection of theory and practice, including both monographs and edited volumes. Proposals are invited in the range of topics covered by ecocriticism, including but not limited to works informed by cross-cultural and transnational approaches; postcolonial studies; ecofeminism; ecospirituality, ecotheology, and religious studies; film/media and visual cultural studies; environmental aesthetics and arts; ecopoetics; and animal studies. Please send proposals to the series editor, Douglas Vakoch, at <dvakoch@ciis.edu>.

Submission period May 15-Dec 15. The Fourth River edition on Women and Nature.  In honor of the 35th year since the publication of Susan Griffin's eco-feminist classic Woman and Nature: the Roaring Inside Her, The Fourth River announces a 2014 themed issue on Women and Nature. We are looking for poetry and creative nonfiction, written by women, inspired by the natural world or addressing environmental concerns. Although we will accept lined poems and traditional essays, we are most interested in seeing prose poetry or lyric essays.

In the words of Adrienne Rich, who reviewed Griffin's book, we are looking for any work that "demands of us activity, not passivity; which enlarges our sense of female presence in the world; . . . which uses language and sensual imagery to impart a new vision of reality, from a woman-centered location; . . . which expands our sense of the connections among us in the bonds of history; . . . which drives us wild, that is, helps us break out from tameness and repetition into new trajectories of our own." -- Adrienne Rich, New Woman's Times Feminist Review.

Submission period is May 15-Dec 15. Check the Fourth River website for more details on submissions. We will also be accepting material for a general issue so please make sure that you identify your submission as for the "Women and Nature" issue. http://fourthriver.chatham.edu/index.php/submit

May 31, 2013.  Natura Vocare: Lived Experience and the Ecological Ethic.  This special issue of "Phenomenology and Practice" seeks to explore how the human sciences speak to our embodied connectedness to the world. Phenomenology allows for an understanding of how we are in the world that moves the focus to our situated-ness and emphasizes the importance of engagement, encounter and the practices of living. How might phenomenology bring us a new awareness for how we are embedded in a network of relations and interactions through which our lives continually unfold? Andy Fisher says a turn to the experiential requires us to pay attention "not only to our experience of nature, but to the nature in our experience." What can phenomenology, with its emphasis on the relational and the corporeal, add to ecological discourse?

We invite contributors to consider also how we are to understand the "world" as comprised of living others imbued with intentionality, or what the Greeks called, "physis." Physis is that which unfolds and emerges of and from itself, while continually returning back into itself - those things that disclose themselves from out of their own concealed abundance. Worldly things have their own inwardness and the very condition for their appearing meaningful is related to having their own complexity, mystery, intentions which invite us into some kind of relation. How do we experience an entity, either living or seemingly inanimate, as not merely an object, but as some-thing with which we share a reciprocal relationship, so that despite our dependency on it, we may learn to tend it and conserve it, rather than exploit it? How may we, as suggested by Heidegger, come to poetically "dwell" and truly "in-habit" our places with respect and restraint? David Abram asks if the relatively new ecological ethos that includes our "co-evolved embedded-ness within the terrestrial web of life" can help us to truly understand that all which we do and think is "secretly dependent on, and constrained by, our immersion in this earthly world..."

We invite articles that explore the reciprocal, interactive, dialogical nature of our earthly embeddeness and the deeply relational nature of what it means to sustain ourselves and flourish in our places. How does careful attention to lived experience, as individuals, and across a range of professional practices such as pedagogy, counselling, health studies, psychology, social work, among others, allow for the creativity and awareness inherent in the felt meaning of human existence, to deepen understanding of experiencing a world with its own mystery and intentionality? In what ways can our lives and our professional practices inform our relationships with a world that sustains us and surrounds us? How can these practices orient us to a dialogue that must also grow and develop if life is to go on? 

For more information on Phenomenology and Practice:  www.phandpr.org

June 15, 2013.  EDITED ANTHOLOGY, Energy in Literature: Essays on Energy and Its Social and Environmental Implications in Twentieth-Century Literary Texts (edited by Paula A. Farca).  Call for papers on energy and energy sources in twentieth-century literary texts (any genre, any country). Scholars of all disciplines are encouraged to submit. TrueHeart academic, an independent academic publisher on people and environment, based in Oxford UK, is publishing a series entitled "Bridging Disciplines," and has expressed interest in this project.

While answers and questions to most controversial energy questions have invaded social media, academic journals, and magazines, talks on energy issues in literary texts have been almost absent from critical essays. The connection between energy and literature is important because as other social narratives, literature participates in global energy debates and could potentially illuminate some of the challenges and possibly alternatives to environmental, social, and cultural energy problems. Energy in Literature proposes to show connections in twentieth-century literary texts among energy, society, and environment. More specifically, this edited anthology will explore how authors of twentieth-century literature present energy sources ranging from coal and oil to solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, hydropower and how these sources affect local and global communities and the environment.

Energy in Literature strives to address the following questions:
What are the most common energy sources in literary texts? What are the environmental, social, political, cultural, and economic ramifications of these energy sources?
How do authors present energy issues such as production, consumption, and conservation? Do new energy sources help or hurt communities? What problems do certain energy sources create or solve and for whom? For instance, how do constructions of dams or the effects of carbon emissions impact communities and families?
How do the authors of literary texts show the balance between people’s need for energy and their duty to preserve the environment? How do authors address pollution problems?
What ethical choices do protagonists of literary texts make about energy?
How do issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class intersect with energy issues in twentieth-century literary texts?

Contact info:
Dr. Paula Farca (LAIS, Colorado School of Mines), pfarca@mines.edu
Please submit your abstracts and short biographical notes to pfarca@mines.edu by June 15th 2013. Completed papers will be due in October 15th, 2013.

July 31, 2013.  Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, Edited by Robert McKay & John Miller (University of Sheffield, UK) .

The window blind blew back with the wind that rushed in, and in the aperture of the broken panes there was the head of a great, gaunt gray wolf (Bram Stoker, Dracula)

Wolves lope across the gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to the human, they become, in the figure of the werewolf, liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal: humans in animal form and animals in human form. They are metonyms of forbidding landscapes, an unsettling howl in the distance; more intimately, their imposing fangs and gaping mouths threaten a monstrous consumption.  The gothic wolf is singular, anomalous but gothic wolves form a demonic multiplicity, a pack.  Wolves and werewolves function as a site for working out or contesting complex anxieties of difference: of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality; but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long demonized and persecuted in their declining habitats across the world.  Wolves, then, raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic.    

We welcome proposals for chapters on any aspect of wolves, werewolves and the Gothic on page or screen in any historical period for a collection of essays to be submitted to The University of Wales Press series of Gothic Literary Studies. We are particularly interested in proposals that seek to read gothic wolves in the context of material histories of (for example) human/animal relations; environmental development; empire and globalization; and gender and sexuality.  

Please send chapter abstracts of 500 words along with a short biography to Robert McKay (r.mckay@sheffield.ac.uk) and John Miller (john.miller@sheffield.ac.uk) by July 31st, 2013. Completed essays will be 6500 words in length and will be commissioned in September 2013 for delivery in the autumn of 2014. 

Topics and approaches may include, but are not restricted to: Lycanthropy/metamorphosis; Real and imaginary wolves; Animal ethics and the anthropomorphic imagination' Monstrosity; Fangs, mouths, the oral and the abject; Lupine presences and gothic spaces; Wolves and the Postcolonial Gothic; Captivity/escape; Wolf to Man – gothic politics from Plautus to Hobbes to Agamben; Gothic wolves, capital and globalization; Sublimity; Natural and unnatural histories; Wolf packs/lone wolves: multitudes and singularities; Ecocritical readings; Zoonosis; She-wolves, he-wolves and gender criticism; Wolfish appetite; Howling and gothic soundscapes; Queer readings; Dogs/wolves, ferity/ferocity; Wolves in sheep’s clothing; Wolves and psychoanalysis from Freud to Deleuze and Guattari; Reforming the Gothic: comic (or teen) werewolves.

September 30, 2013. Call for Papers: Ecozon@ Special Focus: Autumn 2014: Northern Nature.  Guest editor: Werner Bigell (Finnmark University College, Norway).  It’s cold. This is often the first reaction to the Arctic and the North, followed by connotations of emptiness, hostility, and impermanent human settlements, in the form of gulags, oil towns, and exploration camps. North in this context means the seascape of the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding landscapes of northern Scandinavia, northern Russia, northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland. The North has in many ways been a marginal part of the world, a frontier without mass migration, where European and native peoples coexist. From a national perspective the North is a hinterland, but seen from a Northern and an ecological viewpoint it is a crossroads, linked by the nomadic movements of traditional reindeer herders, by the trade routes of the sea, and recently by new institutional arrangements such as the multinational Arctic University or the cooperation of the Barents region.

The pastoral framing that characterizes much of Western nature perception does not resonate in the North, where protection against adverse conditions is a daily practice (although this does not mean nature perception is stuck in an infinite naturalist loop). The spiritual landscape of the North is multilayered: there are elements of shamanism and the sublime. Human beings have always been perceived as vulnerable in the North, but it is now clear that vulnerability links humans to an ecosystem which is marked by slow regeneration and threatened by resource extraction.

The environmental humanities can be seen in relation and in response to the social constructivism that has dominated academic discourse in recent decades. Environmental psychology now maps human reactions to natural and built environments, and materiality is rediscovered in cultural studies. How do the impermanence of the permafrost soil, the contrasts of light and temperatures, the distances measured in flight time, and the continuing imperative of solidarity in adverse conditions translate into behavioral, aesthetic, social, and cultural patterns? Can we speak of a Northern identity without being accused of determinism and essentialism?

The North is part of a global cultural inventory of imagination. What draws people to the North? Wassily Kandinsky once described its main color: “White, therefore, has this harmony of silence, which works upon us negatively… It is not a dead silence, but one pregnant with possibilities. White has the appeal of the nothingness that is before birth, of the world in the ice age.” The Northern imaginary is seen in painting, photography, literature, in the polar journeys and explorations, and also in tourism. Gazing at and imagining the North, however, is reciprocated: people in the North imagine the South, and in Norwegian the term for this imaginary South is “syden”—people can speak about their latest trip to syden without disclosing whether they mean Thailand or Tenerife.
http://www.ecozona.eu

Contributions to this issue of Ecozon@ may provide perspectives from or on the North, with a thematic focus on landscape (spiritual, sea, ice, etc.), geopolitics, resources and ownership, climate, tourism, literature, environmental psychology, polar exploration, and art. Preference will be given to essays that are interdisciplinary (and that link particular analyses to a bigger picture in the field of the environmental humanities).

For questions, please contact Werner Bigell, wbigell[at]gmail.com. Five-hundred word abstracts should be submitted via email to Werner Bigell, by September 30, 2013. Authors will be asked to upload to the Ecozon@ platform their completed manuscript (6000-8000 words) by Jan. 15, 2014, which must comply with the guidelines indicated on the platform (including English and Spanish abstracts and keywords, and MLA-style citation). Abstracts and articles will be accepted in English, German, and Spanish.

September 30, 2013.  "The lifting of an environment to expression": American Representations of Place, A special issue of Miranda, a peer reviewed on-line journal 

(http://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/miranda/)
(http://www.miranda-ejournal.fr/sdx2/miranda/index_anciensnumeros.xsp)

Miranda will take up the provocative question of the relation between places and their representations in American culture. It will be scheduled for publication in 2014. Papers should be submitted by September 30, 2013.

Please send inquiries to the editors of this special issue:
Wendy Harding, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (harding@univ-tlse2.fr)
Gretchen Murphy, University of Texas-Austin (gretchen@austin.utexas.edu)

Speaking of his long poem Paterson over fifty years ago, W.C. Williams described his poetic practice as "an attempt, an experiment, a failing experiment, toward assertion with broken means but an assertion, always, of a new and total culture, the lifting of an environment to expression." This tentative articulation of the ongoing project of putting words to the experience of American space raises a number of questions. Is the English language, shaped in a small island on another continent, able to translate the American experience? Must a new idiom be found, or is language itself bound to fail in the struggle to account for reality? Are other means of representation more promising? After what Whitehead has called “the great bifurcation” how can we “moderns” reconnect with the land through cultural media? Underpinning Williams’s declaration is the suggestion that without the work of mediators to elevate it into a meaningful system, the land is lowly matter that remains mute and invisible. By contrast, a number of ecocritics argue that the land shapes the expressions that translate or respond to it. To what extent is the relationship between the environment and those who give it expression vertical, unidirectional, or causal? Could vertical hierarchies be abandoned in favor of the horizontal interactions favored by empirical theories in which cultural expressions involve multiple actors in complex and unpredictable configurations?

The Miranda stylesheet can be found online: http://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/miranda/files/2009/05/Download-the-stylesheet-for-Miranda17.pdf

October 20, 2013.  Southern Literary Journal Spring 2014 Special Issue: Literatures of Gulf Souths, Gulf Streams, and their Dispersions, Edited by Keith Cartwright and Ruth Salvaggio. 

We seek papers for a special issue of the Southern Literary Journal to be devoted to literatures all along and extending from the Gulf of Mexico--from before Cortes and De Soto to after the dispersants of British Petroleum, and from geographies connected by the Gulf as it flows from and into wider Atlantic and Caribbean currents. Our purpose is to address conceptual and disciplinary "gulfs" in the study of a significant and often vexing body of deeper southern literatures and cultures-gulfs that not-so long ago were nigh-invisible or seemingly impassable. Scholarly, creative, and inventive essays are welcome-essays that work within and transgress disciplinary boundaries, essays that engage canonical, understudied, and forgotten oral, performed, and literary works of the Gulf and that reconnect the North American South with its porous historic geography and watery extensions. We encourage work that engages gulf-entanglements all along the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf Stream -- its loop currents and flows of trade and diaspora: the literatures that took shape under Spanish and French and British conquest and that resurface in Texas and Louisiana and Gullah/Geechee coastlands in counterpoint to "City-on-a-Hill" modernity; their pre-contact roots and continuing transformations in indigenous symbologies and poetics, their myriad African shapings all along the Black Atlantic; literatures that range from the Bahamas to Mexico and throughout the Latin Gulf and Caribbean; swamp and marsh writings; Creole and Mestiza aesthetics; the literatures of contact zones such as Veracruz and Biloxi, New Orleans and Havana, Honduras and Florida; Cajun and Vietnamese Gulfs; Gulf engenderings of bodies and ecologies; female/feminine incarnations and incantations throughout the Gulf; literatures of the Mississippi and the Rio Grande; engulfments of trauma, Gulf abjection, the Gulf sublime; Gulf sexualities and spirit worlds; engulfments of tourism; Gulf water rituals, floods, hurricanes, and the deep horizons of Gulf oil ruptures.

Deadline for Submissions: October 20, 2013
Inquiries welcomed: Ruth Salvaggio, salvaggi@email.unc.edu; Keith Cartwright, kcartwri@unf.edu