{"id":5175,"date":"2024-03-24T16:59:45","date_gmt":"2024-03-24T16:59:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5175"},"modified":"2024-03-24T17:00:58","modified_gmt":"2024-03-24T17:00:58","slug":"georgic-gothic-ecogothic-antipastoral-and-global-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5175","title":{"rendered":"Georgic Gothic: EcoGothic, Antipastoral and Global Horror"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Essay collection proposed for International Gothic Series, Manchester University Press.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their most recent overview of ecoGothic research, William Hughes and Andrew Smith note the prevalence of  \u2018intersecting and fruitful links between animals, plants, and food\u2019 and that \u2018Gothic engagements with food have become a significant area of investigation\u2019 in recent studies. Agriculture is also filled with risk, personal and existential. Tales of horror arise from fear of nonhuman nature overpowering the human. These fears collide at the agricultural interface \u2013 the field, the wood, the cow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EcoGothic can provide ways of questioning assumptions about human actions and lifestyles, even when they appear positive, and this interrogation can help to change the relationships between human, nonhuman, or more than human Others. Climate breakdown increases pressure on farmers, especially those striving for some alleviation through agriculture itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Environmental studies have recently come to revisit the georgic mode, by which agriculture and its labour can be depicted. In Virgil\u2019s long poem, the Georgics<\/em>, there is an insistent recognition that farm labour is \u2018relentless\u2019, often with meagre reward, and that both practice and politics of land ownership can be dangerous. However, Virgil also detailed the intimate, reciprocal relationship with nonhuman, and how hope was an ever present impulse to further endeavour. Novels, paintings and now films and digital media add to earlier poetic genres, offering new perspectives on ancient combinations of hope and misery. Unease permeates agricultural writing: farming hurts \u2013 there are well known examples such as Thomas Hardy\u2019s Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles <\/em>(1891) \u2013 hard labour alongside brutal machinery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EcoGothic offers a way of way of examining the balance between hope and experience, Virgil\u2019s \u2018Fate\u2019, ally and enemy in one. \u2018Staying with the trouble\u2019, as Donna Haraway has explored, can be a way of working through disaster. At the beginning of her text, Haraway includes the georgic impulse to recreate through the earth: \u2018we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles\u2019. Compost \u2013 decay \u2013 renews the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This essay collection seeks contributions that investigate the connections between gothic and georgic which are not limited to the downsides of darkness, but explore how the mysterious, uncanny and disruptive provoke responses in their ability to influence minds and behaviours in order to improve multispecies engagement. Contributors can source material from<\/strong> any nation or period: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, film and digital<\/strong>. Of particular interest is farming beyond the UK, for example in Ireland and Australia, Africa and Asia, places that nourish their own ecoGothic elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please direct enquiries and send abstracts as Word docs (400 words plus short bio) to Sue Edney<\/strong> (sue.edney@bristol.ac.uk<\/strong><\/a>) by 31st<\/sup> May 2024<\/strong>. If accepted, you will be invited to submit a draft chapter of up to 7000 words by 6th December 2024.          <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Themes can include and are not limited to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n