Deadline for proposal submissions: 31st October 2016

Humanities, an international, scholarly, open access journal, and its Guest Editor, Dr Katherine Ebury (University of Sheffield), are seeking proposals for a Special Issue focused on ‘James Joyce, Animals and the Nonhuman’. The Special Issue is scheduled to appear in September 2017, with a manuscript delivery deadline of June 2017.

While ecocritical approaches to Joyce, in particular in ‘Eco-Joyce’ (Brazeau and Gladwin) and ‘The Ecology of Finnegans Wake’ (Lacivita), have recently generated interest in Joyce’s environmental imagination, connections between Joyce and animal studies, or Joyce and the ‘nonhuman turn’, have yet to be explored. In ‘Portrait’, Temple is credited with the idea that ‘The most profound sentence ever written…is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death’. But although excellent critical work on Joyce and animals has certainly appeared, with perennial interests being Tatters of ‘Proteus’, the Blooms’ cat, Garryowen of ‘Cyclops’, and, of course, cattle disease, a sustained volume or special issue certainly seems necessary. Equally, the voice of the printing press, which, Bloom reminds us in ‘Aeolus’, ‘speaks in its own way. Sllt.’ (7: 174–7) has been heard, but not so far in the sense of the ‘nonhuman turn’ which only emerged in 2012.

This Special Issue seeks to offer a space for sustained consideration of how Joyce represents the animal and the nonhuman throughout his works. Contributions that suggest how we might feed Joyce’s example into contemporary conversations about animals and the nonhuman are also sought.

We welcome submissions that interrogate and interpret Joyce’s relation to the world beyond the human and are open to a range of approaches, including theoretical, textual, genetic and historical. We also welcome submissions from both emerging and established scholars.

We seek 250–500 word proposals for original contributions and a 100-word biography (included selected publications) by 31 October 2016; please email both the Guest Editor and the journal, Contact email: k.ebury@sheffield.ac.uk, humanities@mdpi.com
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/joyce