CFP: Essayists for the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics

Deadline: 5-7
Contact: Bernard Quetchenbach, Professor, Montana State University, Billings
Email: ecopoetics2020@gmail.com
Phone: n/a

CFP: Essay or collaboration for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics by scholars from, and/ or writing about, South-East Asia, Scandinavia, or Africa.

Please query ASAP to ecopoetics2020@gmail.com with a proposed topic. Indicate what geographic areas, time span etc. your essay would cover and if possible which writers you are interested in addressing. We will respond with a request for an abstract if the topic is of interest and does not duplicate prior commitments. The draft essay of approximately 5000 words will be due January 1, 2022.

The editors, Julia Fiedorczuk, Mary Newell, Christine Okoth, and Bernard Quetchenbach, understand the term Ecopoetics as including innovative approaches to the entanglement of individuals, cultures, and languages with the natural systems that permeate and envelop them. We welcome work on writing which reconceives the relationships linking speaker, language, and culture, and on multidisciplinary, transcultural, and indigenous poetics. Essays on poets who engage disciplinary methods associated with the sciences and who recognize that, like poetry, natural systems operate on various scales and registers are of special interest, as are poets and scholars whose work redefines poetics as a field of inquiry operating in various social and cultural contexts. We begin with the assumption that ecopoetics is not a genre such as ecopoetry or nature poetry, but rather a dynamic field of inquiry, a laboratory for new ways of knowing. The collection will be global in scope, with contributors drawn from a wide range of nations, ethnicities, and gender identities.

The 40-50 essays will address ecopoetics as a field, influences that have contributed to its development, its features and areas of focus, and associated major figures, as well as intersections between poetry and science, critical animal studies, philosophy, ethnobotany, and environmental justice issues. Please email ecopoetics2020@gmail.com to receive the provisional outline of the volume.

Posted on April 21, 2021