by Sunday 15 January 2017

An open call for contributions to the following panel session, to take place at the  conference (Newcastle Upon Tyne, 5-7 July 2017):

 ‘Contemporary Women’s Writing: Apocalyptic Narratives’

Session Chair: Fiona Tolan

The contemporary moment, it seems, lends itself to apocalyptic narratives. Environmental damage and extreme weather events; the shifting of the political mainstream to the far reaches of left and right; the financial crash and the exposed vulnerabilities of a globalised economy; the migrant crisis and mass displacement of populations: real world events repeatedly contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety and crisis that is productively explored in contemporary women’s writing. From the commodification of the biosciences in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to the falling birth rate and falling temperatures of Maggie Gee’s The Ice People, contemporary women writers engaged in speculative fictions repeatedly utilise images of crisis and threat to explore political and cultural anxieties.

This panel brings together scholars interested in representations of apocalypse and apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary women’s writing. We invite contributions for papers that address women writers’ figuring of apocalyptic fictions in terms of themes such as (although not limited to):

• Ecological disaster narratives
• Post-humanism and cyborg identities
• Globalisation and financial instability
• New sciences and the reconfiguring of the ‘natural’
• Threats to the body and bodily autonomy
• Narratives of violence and threat
• Reimagining identity politics in unstable futures

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, plus a brief biographical note, to f.tolan@ljmu.ac.uk by 15 January 2017.