Reminder, CFP: Modernist Homelands: Textual Ecologies of World War I, MLA 2017

Please consider submitting an abstract to a special session I am organizing for next year’s MLA annual convention in Philadelphia:

This panel seeks papers on the ecology of home landscape and war zone representations within modernist literature for the 2017 MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia, 5–8 January 2017 (https://apps.mla.org/cfp_detail_8773). The centennial anniversary of World War I has coincided with what seems a critical mass in awareness of the urgency of our sustainability as a species. In looking at the role which that war and the literature it produced has played in structuring the past to our contemporary present—a present marked by ecological instability and crisis—it behooves us to explore how literary responses to World War I employ an aesthetic which can be said to reconfigure the subject in relation to both space and time as ecological. While much discussed modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway will offer fruitful grounds for considerations of the separation and intercession of the spaces of war and home, as well as the trench poets and war memoirists of the period such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, the organizer especially invites inquiries into the works of less discussed authors such as Max Plowman, Rebecca West, and Robinson Jeffers.

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a brief bio statement by March 15 to Molly Hall (molly_hall@uri.edu). (Note: this is a special session and not a guaranteed session).