ESC: English Studies in Canada invites submissions for a Special Issue on "Childhood and Its Discontents," guest edited by Nat Hurley.
No figure more fully embodies the paradoxical demands of civilization than the child. At once beloved and overdetermined, the child figures nothing less than our most treasured cultural fantasies and so also becomes the repository of our worst fears. Scholars across the fields of children’s literature, queer theory, gothic studies, critical pedagogy, gender studies, and critical race studies increasingly highlight the ways children—and representations of them—exceed (and so flag the limits of) the utopianism governing their very conceptualization. In effect, childhood has become a fascinatingly unruly object of study.
To the extent that discontentment indexes a dissatisfaction with prevailing social and cultural conditions, this special issue on Childhood and Its Discontents invites essays that reflect on childhood’s unruly resistance to the norms, genres, and cultural regimes that aim to normalize it. In the same spirit in which Freud brought to light the counterintuitive instincts that underwrite and undermine the very idea of civilization, so too do we seek essays for this volume that highlight the central tensions at the heart of childhood and its representations.
ESC invites papers for this special issue on “Childhood and its Discontents” from scholars, writers, artists, and activists with an interest in the historical conditions, theoretical implications, and emergent potentialities of the concept of childhood. We accept submissions from any geographical location. The journal seeks to publish a diversity of historical, national, and theoretical perspectives. We warmly welcome interdisciplinary approaches to this topic and are happy to consider essays informed by critical race studies, feminist theory, ethnographic studies, philosophy of education, film studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, political economy, critical pedagogy studies, and ecocriticism as well as relevant others.
Deadline for submission of articles (maximum of 8500 words) is 18 June 2012.
Note to contributors: ESC normally accepts black and white images, up to a limit of six per article. Contributors are responsible for securing permissions.
Please forward completed essays, in MLA format, along with a 100-word abstract and a 50-word bio to Nat Hurley, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Please send electronic submissions to nhurley@ualberta.ca. The journal’s style sheet is available at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc/submit.php.
ESC: English Studies in Canada is a quarterly journal of scholarship and criticism concerned with the study of literature and culture. Recent special issues include “Traffic” (Eds. Cecily Devereux and Mark Simpson), “Guilt” (Ed. J. Faflak), “Sound/Poetry/Event” (Eds. L. Cabri, A. Levy, P. Quartermain), and “Skin” (Ed. J. Emberley).
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries/ submissions: nhurley@ualberta.ca
Website: www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc
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