International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Into the Bush: Australasian Fairy Tales
A Special Issue of TEXT
http://www.textjournal.com.au/
Editors: Dr Nike Sulway, Dr Rebecca Anne Do Rozario,
Dr Belinda Calderone

The fairy tale has a long tradition in both oral and literary forms. Indeed, recently Sara da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani have argued, using a phylogenetic analysis of tales in the Aarne Thompson Uther (ATU) index, that some of the tales still told today ‘can be securely traced back to … between 2500 and 6000 years ago’ (8). Such an ancient tradition has left its mark across a range of literary traditions, including those of Australasia. While old and gnarled, the fairy tale is also alive and well, informing contemporary literary practice across a range of forms and genres, in works written for both children and adults.

This Special issue of TEXT, developed in association with the Australian Fairy Tale Society, responds to the challenge of honouring the long-lived traditions of the fairy tale in the Australasian context, of exploring and expanding our understanding of fairy tales and their tellers in a postcolonial context.

This issue seeks to reflect on Australasia’s unique creative and scholarly contributions to this long-lived genre, and seeks submissions that address the growing interest in fairy tale narratives across a range of platforms, particularly those stories set in and around Australasia.

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following:
• Writing about fairy tales and their tellers
• Fairy tales in the Australasian landscape/context
• Fairy tales in the colonial and postcolonial context
• Appropriations and adaptations
• Gender, sexuality and the fairy tale
• Teaching and learning about fairy tales
• Tale types and tropes: critical discussions of the ATU and Propp models, of Dundes’s motifemes or similar schemas
• Other relevant topics and issues

Scholarly papers should be no more than 6000 words in length. Creative works will usually be up to 3,500 words in length, or as agreed by editors.

Creative work must be accompanied by an ERA research statement that clearly explains the submission’s relevance as a research outcome. Peruse any of TEXT journal’s Creative Writing as Research special issues to familiarise yourself with research statements.

Please also contact us with ideas for book reviews.

Please include a brief biography (200 words max, in TEXT style) and ensure that you include your email address for reply. Submissions MUST be in TEXT style and formatting. Please see http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/info.htm for submission guidelines.

Deadline for initial submission: July 29, 2016
Final revised submissions will be due: September 15, 2016
Publication date: April, 2017
Email: nike.sulway@usq.edu.au, rebecca.dorozario@monash.edu, or belinda.calderone85@outlook.com

Compared to film, TV and the novel, science fiction theatre is not a widely discussed topic. But, whilst there is only one book from the 1990s that lists the history of sf plays, there is a long legacy of staging the fantastical, including the importance of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920) in coining the term ‘robot’. With contemporary mainstream plays such as Constellations, The Nether, Mr Burns and X, sf theatre may be experiencing something of a revival. There are an increasing number of sf theatre companies worldwide as well as a new anthology in sf plays.

Foundation seeks articles for a special issue on science fiction and theatre, to be published in winter 2017. Why is sf not analysed as often in theatre than other media? What is lost and what is gained when a text is adapted for the stage? Are there any genre tropes that cannot be staged effectively in theatre? What tropes work particularly well for the stage? All topics and methodologies are welcome including (but not limited to) stage depictions of the future, constructions and representations of sf tropes, performing the non- and post-human, space-time on stage, and adaptations of sf films and novels.

Please send submissions of up to 6000 words by 5th February 2017 to journaleditor@sf-foundation.org, attaching the file in either .rtf or .doc format. For questions about formatting, please see the style guide at www.sf-foundation.org; for all other enquiries, please contact Susan Gray at susan.gray87@gmail.com.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Proposals related to the podcast Welcome to Night Vale are solicited for chapter contributions to an edited scholarly collection to be published by Palgrave.

The editor seeks to include a range of approaches focusing on both form and content. Topics may include but are not limited to:

*      internal themes and allusions

*      genre and influences

*      performance, music, and effects

*      politics and historical contextualization

*      podcast production, distribution, and consumption

*      reception and fandom

*      paratexts, marketing, and merchandise

250-word proposals and abbreviated CV indicating academic position and publications due by June 15th, 2016.

5000-word chapters due by February 15th, 2017.

Inquires and proposals to Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock at Jeffrey.Weinstock[at]cmich.edu

The recent rise of the interdisciplinary subfield of “Energy Humanities” as a prominent critical endeavor has seen an efflorescence of academic and cultural production from around the world focusing on the crucial topic of energy resources. A major spur for this work is, of course, the pervasive anxiety of late environmentalism in the face of anthropogenic climate change, a phenomenon in which energy use plays a central role: as both cause and possible solution. A variety of critical thinking around past, present, and future energy scenarios is motivated by what has been called the contemporary “energy trilemma”: how to balance energy security, equality, and sustainability on a world – and indeed planetary – scale? This question starkly confronts humans as we seek to configure a means to a less environmentally precarious future. The trilemma is further stressed by the contradiction between a seemingly inexorable rise in global demand and the fact that the world-system remains stubbornly beholden to a toxic carbon economy. As post-oil culture either mourns or celebrates the passing of cheap and easy oil it speculates on the elevation of its potential alternatives. Despite the unprecedented degree of consensus over the findings and pronouncements of climate science and despite an abundance of technological innovations, engineering skill and infrastructural promise, we still find ourselves at somewhat of a general impasse preventing transition to another, “cleaner” energy regime.

So what chance cultural production? What role does Humanities scholarship play, in breaking what has been called the techno-social-lock-in of oil-driven modernity? How preposterous is it to ask how cultural work can “save the future”? In fact Humanities scholars have been contributing in novel ways to the issues and concerns around energy for some time. An insistence on energy forms and their related infrastructures as social phenomena has sparked new research exploring the long – and sometimes unconscious or under-determined – inter-relation between energy and culture, registering in literature, visual art, film and media, philosophy, performance, design and many other fields. As well as asking fundamental questions of the Humanities’ responsibility and relation to crisis-ridden issues of power, politics, and the environment, this work is also asking fundamental questions of critical practice, genre, form and periodization.

The genres of science fiction (SF) and the fantastic have considerable salience here. Given the future-orientation of energic concerns as a significant strand in the Energy Humanities’ trajectory, we should expect work in the speculative mode to feature strongly. Novel systems and radical visions proliferate in SF/F, offering futures of resource scarcity and eco-apocalypse or, alternatively, of “free” and “abundant” energy forms; alternative and even “inconceivable” fuel supplies. Fantastic, desirable and “impossible” forms of mobility are presented in countless examples of “alien” infrastructures or post-human, after-earth scenarios of dwelling, moving, producing and consuming. Questions and opportunities proliferate throughout SF/F as to how we might envisage an alternative energy world; model a post-oil scenario; employ a utopian or dystopian vision of the future to orient and overcome the present lock-in. Yet they remain somewhat embedded within critical outlooks that still tend to regard energy and power resources as background features at best. Work already begun in this evolving area has insisted that sf is the cultural genre best placed to realize, communicate, and extrapolate the issues and concerns of the Energy Humanities in innovative and exciting ways. An alternative energy imaginary – involving both “powered-up” and “powered-down” visions – is prolific across the histories and genres of SF/F. It only awaits critical extraction and empowerment. This call for papers seeks essays that will deepen and heighten this engagement.

Topics for submission may include, but are not limited to:

• SF/F and petroculture: visions of enduring petroworlds, peak and post-oil imaginaries in literature, television, cinema, and art
• Energy Utopias / Dystopias
• Theoretical readings of SF/F as an energy-bound genre
• Past and present energy resources as SF/Fantasy (fossil fictions of surplus and/or “magic” sources and solutions / electro-SF/F / thermodynamics / magnetism)
• Narrating / Narratives of “Low-Carbon” living and/or “Sustainability” in SF/F
• SF and “Renewables”: solar/wind/hydro/bio/geothermal readings
• SF and extractivism
• History of fuel / power / energy in SF/F’s historical registrations of energy use / forms / infrastructures / machines
• Political / ecocritical theories/readings of SF/F as a means to system change/ model climate change scenarios
• Nuclear SF/F
• ‘Monstrous’ and/or alien and/or “magic” energy systems
• SF and alternative dwelling / design
• Post-autopia? Mobilities of the far future – transport infrastructures / travel / imagining new affective “energic” embodiments
• Energy Retrofutures and Counterfactuals
• SF media / digital paradigms related to the energy crisis.
• Science / Technologies of Energy in SF

Research articles should be approximately 8000 words in length, including references and a short bibliography. Submissions in languages other than English are welcome. Submissions should comprise of:

•    Abstract (250 words)
•    Full-length article (8000 words)
•    Author information (short biographical statement of 200 words)

The deadline for submission is 1st July 2016.

The special collection, edited by Dr Graeme Macdonald and Dr Caroline Edwards is to be published in the Open Library of Humanities (ISSN 2056-6700). The OLH is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded open-access journal with a strong emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering board. Unlike some open-access publications, the OLH has no author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an international consortium of libraries.

Submissions should be made online at: https://submit.openlibhums.org/ in accordance with the author guidelines and clearly marking the entry as [“POWERING THE FUTURE,” SPECIAL COLLECTION]. Submissions will then undergo a double-blind peer-review process. Authors will be notified of the outcome as soon as reports are received.

47th Annual Mythopoeic Conference

Omni Colonnade – San Antonio, Texas

August 5-8, 2016

Faces of Mythology: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern

Author Guest of Honor: Midori Snyder
Midori Snyder is an American writer of fantasy, mythic fiction, and nonfiction on myth and folklore. She has published eight novels for children and adults, winning the 2001 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for The Innamorati (2000), a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian “Commedia dell’Arte” tradition. Snyder’s first novel, Soulstring (1987), is a fairytale fantasy loosely inspired by the Scottish legend of Tam Lin. This was followed by an imaginary world trilogy: New Moon, Sadar’s Keep, and Beldan’s Fire (1989–1993). The Flight of Michael McBride (1994) is a work of mythic fiction set in the old American West, drawing upon Irish-American, Mexican, and indigenous folklore. Hatchling (1995) is a children’s book set in the world of Dinotopia. Hannah’s Garden (2004) is a contemporary fantasy for young adult readers about fairies, folk music, and family dynamics, set in rural Wisconsin. With Jane Yolen, Snyder co-authored the novel Except the Queen (2010), a contemporary urban fantasy featuring two fey who are banished to the World as elderly women, where they find themselves embroiled in a much larger struggle for power. Her short stories have appeared “The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror,” as well as numerous adult and young adult anthologies. Her nonfiction essays on fairy tale and folklore have appeared in folklore anthologies, magazines, and the Journal of Mythic Arts online. In addition to writing, she co-directs the World Fantasy award winning Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts with Terri Winding.

Scholar Guest of Honor: Andrew Lazo
Andrew Lazo co-edited Mere Christians: Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C.S. Lewis and has contributed articles and reviews on C.S. Lewis and other Inklings to several books and journals, including Mythlore. More recently, he transcribed and edited the landmark “Early Prose Joy,” which has definitively corrected the accepted dating of Lewis’s conversion to Theism. Lazo regularly speaks in Houston and around the country and has taught Lewis in both Oxford and Cambridge. He also teaches English and a course on Lewis at Houston Christian High School and is currently researching and writing a book on Till We Have Faces. This is his first appearance at Mythcon.

CONFERENCE THEME
Faces of Mythology: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern
Inspired by the 60th anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and The Last Battle, this year’s theme focuses on the mythology that has shaped and “given faces” to so many of our beloved characters, ranging from the myths of the Ancient Greeks to the legends of the Middle Ages and even to the modern mythology of the American Southwest. Similarly, this mythological influence is also evident in the works of many of our favorite mythopoeic authors, from J.R.R. Tolkien to J.K. Rowling, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Alan Garner, and many, many more.

Papers dealing with the conference theme are especially encouraged. We also welcome papers focusing on the work and interests of the Inklings (especially J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams), of our Guests of Honor, and other fantasy authors and themes. Papers from a variety of critical perspectives and disciplines are welcome. Papers from graduate and undergraduate students are encouraged; we offer an award for “Best Student Paper.” See details here.

Each paper is generally given a one-hour slot to allow time for questions, but individual papers should be timed for oral presentation in 40 minutes maximum. Participants are encouraged to submit papers chosen for presentation at the conference to Mythlore, the refereed journal of the Mythopoeic Society. Paper abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with contact information, should be sent to the Papers Coordinator at the address below (e-mail preferred) by May 15, 2016 (a further extension to May 30 may be possible; please contact Papers Coordinator Jason Fisher). Please include your A/V requirements and the projected time needed for your presentation. You will be notified if your paper is accepted after that date.

Participants are encouraged to submit papers chosen for presentation at the conference to Mythlore, the refereed journal of the Mythopoeic Society. All papers should conform to the MLA Style Manual.

All paper presenters must register for the conference; please see the Mythcon 47 web page for information and rates.

Jason Fisher
Mythcon 47 Papers Coordinator
visualweasel@yahoo.com

The Mythopoeic Society is an international literary and educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and mythopoeic literature. We believe the study of these writers can lead to greater understanding and appreciation of the literary, philosophical, and spiritual traditions which underlie their works, and can engender an interest in the study of myth, legend, and the genre of fantasy. Find out about the Society’s activities at: www.mythsoc.org.

AQUATIC ANIMALS AND MONSTERS OF THE NORTHERN SEAS: IMAGINATION, KNOWLEDGE, EXPLOITATION, FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1600

Utopia at the Border

The fourth symposium of the Imaginaries of the Future Research Network
University of Regensburg, 20-22 September 2016

‘There was a wall. It did not look important…’ – Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed