ecocriticism and environmental studies

In her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway suggests that the way beyond the anthropocene and capitalocene is “making oddkin” which is “always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly.” For this panel we seek readings that explore the relationship (or kinship) between subject and object, body and environment, the self and the landscape. Posthuman ecology and new materialism may collide in texts that blur the self and her environment (both natural and social).  This phenomenon may particularly manifest in texts where human subjects occupy Othered identity positions, such as women, non-white, and immigrant subjects who inscribe how their environments mark their bodies and their lives.

I am currently seeking chapter submissions for an edited volume celebrating the centenary in 2026 of A. A. Milne’s The World of Pooh.  As classics from the “golden age” of children’s literature, Milne’s Pooh stories have received considerable attention from critics and fans over the years; however, less critical attention has been devoted to the continuing relevance of the Pooh phenomenon in contemporary children’s culture.  As recent critics have discussed, the Pooh stories are complex and multifaceted, written in many different modes and employing a vast array of different narrative styles and techniques; they have also undergone transformation and adaptation into a plethora of related cultural artefacts. 

This panel aims to use the framework of oceanic studies to interrogate Victorian sea fiction. We welcome work on nineteenth-century writers across the Anglophone world, though could be open to works in other languages. We are particularly looking for works that do not fall into traditional nationalist canons of literature or works that epitomize transnational networks of culture, empire, and economics.

there is no singular ‘nature’ as such, only a diversity of contested natures; and that eachsuch nature is constituted through a variety of socio-cultural processes from which such natures cannot be plausibly separated.

Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. (1998), Contested natures

POP SOUTH: CONSUMING THE REGION (South Atlanta Modern Language Assocation, November 3 -5, 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia)