Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre and Jean Mitchell
University of Toronto Press
In recent years, the matter of nature has been the subject of much contested debate and theoretical innovation across disciplines. While multiple romanticisms have informed L.M. Montgomery’s passionate views of the natural world, her complex descriptions show her writing both of and for nature. This complexity extends as well to the depiction of cultural and gendered mores (domesticity, friendship, faith, community, biological determinism) as both natural and cultural. In all its forms, nature situates binary relationships that are often represented as hierarchical and oppositional: nature and culture; child and adult; animal and human; female and male; emotion and reason; body and mind; traditional and modern; raw and cooked; wild and domestic; rural and urban.
The University of Toronto Press has expressed interest in publishing a collection of essays entitled L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature, using papers presented at the ninth biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute as a starting point. We invite the submission of papers that consider these issues in relation to Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, life writing, photographs, and scrapbooks, as well as the range of adaptations in the areas of film, television, theatre, tourism, and online communities.
Possible questions include:
- What are the effects of the representations and images of nature that are crafted and circulated in Montgomery’s work?
- How do Montgomery’s narrations of nature shape children and adults within and across cultures?
- How do particular constructions of nature work in fiction, across such differences as gender, race, culture, and class?
- What are the cultural and historical contingencies surrounding nature in Montgomery’s work?
- What does it mean to consider Montgomery as a “green” or proto-ecofeminist writer?
- What do Montgomery’s provocative readings of nature offer us at a time of environmental crises and ecological preoccupations?
- How does the notion of “nature” impact some of the most central preoccupations in Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, and life writing (the nature of war, of mental illness, of cultural inheritance, of conflict, of same-sex friendships, of heterosexual marriage, of cultural memory, of national ideologies)?
Papers of 18-22 double-spaced pages (including endnotes and bibliography) should be submitted electronically as Word files to the volume editors: Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre (ben@roomofbensown.net) and Dr. Jean Mitchell (mjmitchell@upei.ca) by 1 September 2010. All citations should be given in endnotes and accompanied by a bibliography of references; for more information, consult chapters 16-17 of the Chicago Manual of Style.