Edited collection: Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

full name / name of organization: 
Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils

We invite proposals for the first collection of essays to consider the "ecogothic" in nineteenth-century American literature.

The ecogothic is an emerging area of ecocriticism, materializing as a provocative category of analysis in EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester University Press, 2013), as well as in a special issue of Gothic Studies, "The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century," edited by David Del Principe and devoted to British, Irish, and Italian literature (May 2014). These two collections, along with the work of Simon C. Estok on "ecophobia" and Tom Hillard and Jenny Bavidge on "gothic nature," constitute the principal existing scholarship on the ecogothic that we seek to extend in our collection.

We hope that each essay will offer a distinct and provocative intervention in thinking broadly about the ecogothic (taking careful account of both the "eco" and the "gothic), doing the work of defining as well as shaping diverse formulations of the ways in which "nature"—the environment, species, and varieties of nonhumans—becomes uncanny, monstrous, haunting.

We are casting our net widely, looking for proposals that take up any aspect of ecogothic, including ecophobia (fear and dread of nature), discourses of extinction and ecological crisis, narratives of (un)natural anomalies, and accounts of environmental injustice. We are interested in the "long" nineteenth century, so essays that take in late eighteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature are welcome, as are essays that consider relatively unknown writers (along with the better-known).

Ashgate Publishing has expressed strong interest in this collection for their series in North American Literature and Environment, 1600-1900. After we have selected contributors, we will submit a full proposal for Ashgate's consideration.

Please send your abstracts of around 500 words and a short biography to Dawn Keetley (dek7@lehigh.edu) and to Matthew Wynn Sivils (sivils@iastate.edu) by July 31, 2015. We are anticipating a tentative due date for full essays of May, 2016. Queries before the deadline for abstracts are welcome.