cfp.english.upenn.edu

Only two days remaining! Proposals still welcome for chapters focused on fandom and material culture, gaming, new media, comics, and graphic novels, as well as adult and juvenile literature, both novel and short story.

Call for Contributors

Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming (collected essays)

The frontier has long been framed as a landscape of life and death, but few scholarly works have ventured into the realm where the two become one, to explore portrayals of the Undead in the West – the zombies, vampires, mummies, and others that have lumbered, crept, shambled, and swooped into the Western from other genres. This sub-genre, while largely a post-1990 phenomenon, traces it roots to much deeper hybrid traditions of Westerns and horror or science fiction, and yet, also shows ties to the recent Western renaissance.

This volume, a companion to our forthcoming Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, will focus on the blending of the Western genre and the undead in media other than film: comics, graphic novels, gaming, new media, and literature. Scholarly explorations of material culture and fandom will also be considered.

Some questions to consider:

- What happens when traditional frontier figures, settings, symbols, and ideologies encounter these characters that defy the laws of nature?
- How are Western archetypes subverted or accentuated when confronted by the undead?
- How do zombies, vampires, and the like, affect our understandings and interpretations of the West, and vice-versa? Might these hybrid Westerns function as the new anti-Western, or do the undead facilitate a return to tradition?
- In what ways do undead Westerns consciously use the undead elements of the plot to comment on the nature of traditional Western heroes and villains?
- In what ways do these genre mash-ups revitalize the Western for a new generation of audiences and fans?

Please send your 500-word abstract to both co-editors, Cindy Miller (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu) and Bow Van Riper (bvanriper@bellsouth.net).

Publication timetable:

June 15, 2012 – Deadline for Abstracts
July 15, 2012 – Notification of Acceptance Decisions
Dec. 1, 2012 – Chapter Drafts Due
March 15, 2013 – Chapter Revisions Due
April 15, 2013 – Final Revisions Due
May 1, 2013 – Delivery to Publisher

Acceptance will be contingent upon the contributors' ability to meet these deadlines, and to deliver professional-quality work.