Call for Contributors: Romantic Ecocriticism

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Please see below for a call for contributors for a new essay collection on Romantic ecocriticism.

Romantic Ecocriticism:
Origins and Legacies
Dewey W. Hall, Editor
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Call for Papers

Romantic Ecocriticism invites article-length papers that examine the influence of cultural factors on seminal writers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example, William Wordsworth read Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne; Samuel Taylor Coleridge derived metaphors from the lectures by Humphrey Davy; Mary Shelley derived the basis for Frankenstein from the vitalism debate initiated by John Abernathy and William Lawrence.

Suitable topics might include:

•Scientific culture: natural history (e.g. botany, meteorology, chemistry, geology) or natural philosophy (e.g. materialism, vitalism, electricity, etc.)
• Aesthetic culture: the picturesque, topography, and cartography, especially William Gilpin, Adam Sedgwick, and William Mudge
• Religious culture: natural theology (e.g. divinity and nature), especially William Paley and William Whewell
• Environmental culture: Romantic naturalism, anti-industrialism, and the open space movement leading to the National Trust (e.g. John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Hardwicke Rawnsley, and Octavia Hill)
• Transatlantic American culture: From Romantic naturalism to American early and modern environmentalists such as Ralph W. Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, John Muir, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson
• Ecological culture: Romantic influence upon Arne Naess’s deep ecology movement (e.g. ecosophy, biocentrism, biodiversity, sustainability, etc.)

Submissions must include a title, abstract (200 word limit), CV and bio and, if possible, a draft of a paper (15-25 pages).  These should be sent to dwhall@csupomona.edu by the 31st of October for consideration.