Editors: Nathanael O'Reilly, Jean-François Vernay, Robyn Walton
Australian Studies project:
Nathanael O'Reilly, Jean-François Vernay, and Robyn Walton are seeking international submissions on fear and protection, or related topics, within the scope of Australian Studies for an essay collection with the working title Protect Australia Fair: International Perspectives on Australian Culture.
Contributors might wish to consider the following leads, which we’ve provisionally divided into three spatial zones of fearfulness, or explore challenging new ones.
National and International Fears
- Pluralism and multiculturalism fears
- Population and natural resources fears
- Law and authority
- The besieged complex
- Civil unrest, violence, riots
- Terrorism and counter-terrorism
- Xenophobia, past and present
- Invasion narratives
- Immigration: refugees, asylum seekers, detention centres and fear
- Science and technology fears
- Complacency warnings versus ‘Relaxed and comfortable’ lifestyle
Culture, Local, Regional and State level Fears
- Fear and spirituality
- Fear and collective identity
- Fear and indigenous issues
- Fear and critical whiteness studies
- Fear in city, inner-urban and suburban environments
- Fear in regional and country Australia
- Fear in and of the natural environment
- Fear in cinema and literature: the thriller, the horror genre, disaster movies, speculative fiction, dystopias, post-nuclear and post-millennium themes
- Fear and language, communications, media
- Affluence, employment and fear of material loss
- Fear and performance
- Fear and fashion
Individual and Personal Space Fears
- The threatened body
- Selfhood, identity, representation
- Fear and desireFamily and domestic fears
- Homophobia in a heterocentric society
- The paranoid mind
- Psychoanalytic fears
- Self-protectiveness, exposure anxiety
The suggested length for essays is 4,000 words. Essays should be suitable for an interdisciplinary and international readership.
All submissions will be refereed by an international panel of distinguished scholars in the field.
Style guide: refer to the MLA sixth edition.
You may submit your enquiry, expression of interest or finished essay to the editors at the following address: fearozproject@yahoo.com.
Editors' Bionotes:
Nathanael O'Reilly was born in Warrnambool, Victoria and attended Monash University and the University of Ballarat before leaving Australia to work overseas. He teaches Australian literature and writing classes at Albion College in Michigan while completing a Ph.D. at Western Michigan University; his dissertation examines suburbia in contemporary Australian fiction. His articles, interviews, reviews and poetry are published in North American, European and Australasian journals. Nathanael is the Secretary, Newsletter Editor and Webmaster for the American Association of Australian Literary Studies.
Born in New Caledonia, Jean-François Vernay was educated at the Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie and at the Université Toulouse-Le Mirail, from which he holds a PhD. As Founding Editor of Correspondances Océaniennes, a Nouméa-based postcolonial journal focussing on Oceanic cultures, he has been editing articles on postcolonial societies for five years, while regularly publishing articles in refereed journals and collections. His latest publication is a monograph entitled Water From the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch (New York/ London: Cambria Press, 2007).
A doctoral candidate in the English Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Robyn Walton completed her previous degrees at the University of Sydney. She then worked as a book editor and taught at University of Technology, Sydney, for fourteen years whilst also writing fiction. She was awarded the Australian Vogel literary prize in 1986. Her fiction, essays and chapters on utopianism and cultural history have been published in Australia and Europe in several languages. Forthcoming: a chapter on utopianism and post-colonialism in Histoire transnationale de l'utopie littéraire et de l'utopisme (Honoré Champion) and, with Rosaleen Love, a section in Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood).
Due dates:
Date for expressions of interest: end March 2007.
Date for final submissions: end June 2007.
