Call for Papers for a panel session at Tenth Biennial ANZAMEMS Conference, to be held at the University of Queensland on the 14–18 July 2015:
The Land and Landscapes of Emotion in War
The thematic relation of war to ideas of ‘the land’ is surpassingly long-lived: from the Medieval through the Romantic periods, war can – and must – be read in the natural landscape. In numerous medieval and early modern literary and historical texts, the ravages of war are recorded in descriptions of the wasteland: the land laid waste, or its agricultural potential futilely ‘wasted’, by the effects of war. Land itself can become a record of war, and a space in which war’s emotions can be inscribed and interpreted. We invite contributions of 20-minute papers to a session on the land and landscapes in war writing, focusing on the ways in which land represents, commemorates, or even rejects the desolation and destruction of war. We invite papers that pay particular attention to textual associations of the land with emotional affect, whether before, during or after wartime. In what ways might the emotions of war and the effects of violent conflict be written and read in the landscape? How and where can land itself be said to emote? What is the relationship between the physical land and earth, death or burial; or idealised land as patria, yearned for and lamented, as well as fought over or on?
Papers may wish to consider these or other aspects of the land and emotion in literary and historical records of war, from the medieval period up to the eighteenth century, and might include medieval or early modern versions of the classical and early medieval associations of land and war; or might approach the subject in post-1800 ‘medievalist’ or ‘early modernist’ texts, including, but not limited to, poetry, novels, theatre and film.
Wider topics linking war and land could address:
- War in Georgic and Pastoral traditions
- War burial and commemoration
- ‘Waste’ and ‘wasted’ land: war and agriculture
- ‘Grim war’ and ‘smiling peace’: land, embodiment and personification in war
- Dispossession, depopulation and trauma in war
- Bleeding earth: the land in civil war
- Exile and nostalgia in war
- Viewing the land at war / in war
- War, nature and ecology
- Weather, seasons and the ‘atmosphere’ of war
- The cartographic / topographic imaginary of war
- ‘Ownership’, use and possession of land in war
- National landscapes of war
Please submit a 200-word proposal and brief biographical note (not more than 50 words) by Friday, October 24 to:
andrew.lynch@uwa.edu.au; stephanie.downes@unimelb.edu.au; or katrina.oloughlin@uwa.edu.au
Conference website: http://anzamems.org/?page_id=186
ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/research/research-projects/the-emotions-in-medieval-war-literature.aspx