CFP - Writing Home: Battlefront and Homefront, Children's Literature of the First World War

Call for Submissions
WRITING HOME: BATTLEFRONT AND HOMEFRONT, CHILDREN’S LITERATURE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

This special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn invites submissions focused on children’s literature of the First World War from a variety of international perspectives. Among other things, essays could focus on:

• Constructions of “home” and “front” as made by civilians and soldiers in poetry, prose, and illustrations
• The role of the coming centenary in modern reconstructions of the First World War
• The significance of local and national borderlands and boundaries, including conceptualizations and reconceptualizations of “no man’s land”
• Intersections of childish/adult patterns of language in the war poetry of young soldiers such as Robert Graves, David Jones, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon
• Collisions and explosions of memory and experience in experimental writing
• Responses to the war in the children’s literature of neutral countries
• American representations of the Great War, both before and after April 6, 1917
• Escape narratives written by or about children
• Child heroism narratives, including propaganda narratives of domestic heroism such as participation in victory gardens and scrap collection efforts
• Limitations of language in writing about “unspeakable events” for children, particularly in the nonfiction texts that have been marketed to popular audiences or to classrooms
• Visual representations of the First World War in graphic novels, including work by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Pierre Verney, Joe Sacco and Adam Hochschild, Wayne Vansant, Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun
• The reshaping of personal and national memory and identity in children’s war narratives
• The influence of militarism and pacifism on war narratives and propaganda narratives at different stages of the war

Essays should be approximately 8,000 words in length. Please email your essay as a Word attachment to Dr. Jacquilyn Weeks at weeksj@iupui.edu by July 1, 2016. Accepted essays will appear in the 2017 issue. Or, if you prefer, you can mail a hard copy to Dr. Weeks at: Department of English, Cavanaugh Hall 502L, IUPUI, 425 University Blvd, Indianapolis, IN 46202. For further information regarding publication details, particularly with regard to the use of illustration, please contact Dr. Hazel Sheeky Bird at hazelsheekybird@gmail.com.