CFP - Machines, Monsters and Animals: Posthuman Children's Literature
CFP - Machines, Monsters and Animals: Posthuman Children's Literature
Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature invites contributions for a special issue exploring the relationship between children’s fiction and posthumanism. From Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies to Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, children’s fiction intervenes into debates about what it means to be human, animal, ‘natural’, or machine. Indeed, children’s fiction has an imaginative history of conceiving alternative modes of being. Human and animal ethics, utopia/dystopia, anthropomorphism, and ecocriticism would be appropriate topics to explore. Areas of thematic interest may include, but are not limited to:
- The alien or monstrous ‘other’
- Animal ethics
- Anthropomorphis
- Artificial Intelligence
- Cybernetic organisms (cyborgs)
- Digital childhoods
- Digital technology and virtual reality
- Dystopia and utopia
- Ecocriticism and nature studies
- Machine animism and robotics
- Wildness and civility
Full articles should be submitted to the editor, Björn Sundmark (bjorn.sundmark@mah.se), and guest editor, Zoe Jaques (zj216@cam.ac.uk) by 1 June 2014. Please see Bookbird's website at www.ibby.org/bookbird for full submission details. Papers which are not accepted for this issue will be considered for later issues of Bookbird.