CfP: VTU Review special issue on Representations of Nature and Economy

This special issue of VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences is to address the question of the massive and long-ranging transformations overtaking the Anglo-American world in the course of the long nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Proposed topics should ideally converge on the intersection of nature and economy (work, technology) as represented in literature, film, television, and the digital media.

Call for papers for a special issue of VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences on the topic of Transformations: Representations of Nature and Economy in Modern Anglo-American Culture.
Guest Editor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Submission deadline: 18 January 2021

We invite contributions that would probe the historical and current concerns arising at the cusp of historical and social changes that define our late modernity. We especially encourage topics that tease out the longitudinal tension, in Anglo-American culture, between nature, technology, progress, and social change. A comparative approach to the topic(s) is very welcome.

Possible topics may include, but are not restricted to:

  • North-American, transatlantic, and transnational imaginaries of nature;
  • nature (landscape) and the idea of national identity;
  • postcolonial interventions (“provincializing” Europe and the west);
  • natural stasis vs. the dynamics of progress and development (“the technological sublime”);
  • the ideology of progress and its detractors (e.g. romantics and transcendentalists);
  • the idea of uneven development and its fictions (“The First World”/ “The Third World”);
  • literature of (social) reform;
  • representations of work across time;
  • society and the individual in the era of the fourth industrial revolution;
  • technology and nature from an eco-critical perspective.

For editorial style and submission details please consult the journal’s website: http://journals.uni-vt.bg/vtureview/eng/

All queries should be addressed to Jelena Šesnić (jsesnic at ffzg.hr) and Ludmilla Kostova (l.kostova at ts.uni-vt.bg).