Call for Abstracts/Essays: Food and Feasting in Post-1700 Outlaw Narratives

We are soliciting abstracts for a proposed collection on food and feasting in post-1700 outlaw narratives.

While outlawry has its formal origins in the Middle Ages, the outlaw is a figure and trope present in many modern, post-1700 texts, especially American, Native American, African American, and Australian outlaw narratives. Food, its preparation, and its consumption are presented in outlaw narratives as central points of human interaction, community, and fellowship, providing readers with opportunities to examine and analyze agricultural practices as well as trade, economics, and the social standing of its producers and consumers. Feast scenes perform a wide variety of functions, serving as a cultural repository of manners and behaviors, a catalyst for the adventure, or a moment of regrouping and redirecting the narrative, for instance.

This collection will consider the presence and function of food and feast in outlaw narratives, with an eye to considering whether and how instances of food preparation and eating in these tales can be said to display, to develop, or to subvert the conventional ideas of community and fellowship most commonly associated with foods and feasts in literature. This collection is unique in a number of ways. It builds upon a growing body of scholarship on outlaw studies and food studies, which in recent years has seen a number of important analyses from such scholars as Allison Carruth, Stephen Knight, Susan Leonardi, Anita Mannur, Thomas Ohlgren, and Helen Phillips. Indeed, some twenty-five years after Leonardi's landmark 1989 PMLA article, "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," scholars are less ambivalent about the status of food studies. It seems that now is the opportune time for an examination of the transgressive world of outlaws within the context of one of life's basic necessities, food.

A publisher has expressed interest in the collection. We ask that 300-500 word abstracts and brief biographies be sent, by July 1, 2016, to Alex Kaufman (akaufman@aum.edu) and Penny Vlagopoulos (pennyvlag@yahoo.com).

Essays for accepted abstracts will be due by December 1, 2016, and should be 6,000-8,000 words in Chicago style.

CFP: IARHS and Leeds 2016

CFP: IARHS and the IMC, Leeds, 4-7 July 2016

The IARHS is proposing two sessions for next year's Leeds, whose conference theme is "Food, Feast, and Famine."

Leeds will only consider fully formed sessions. Please send 300-word abstracts for either proposed session by 15 September 2015 to Lesley A. Coote (L.A.Coote@hull.ac.uk) AND Kristin Bovaird-Abbo (Kristin.BovairdAbbo@unco.edu).

"Food and Feast in Medieval Outlaw Texts"
The romances of medieval England are full of scenes of feasting and eating. Food, its preparation, and its consumption are present as central points of human interaction, community, and fellowship, providing opportunities to examine and analyze agricultural and mercantile practices as well as trade, economics, and the social standing of its producers and consumers; and feast scenes perform a wide variety of functions, serving as a cultural repository of manners and behaviors, a catalyst for the adventure, a “cute-meet” for the lovers, a moment of regrouping and redirecting the narrative, a testing ground for the chivalric and courteous skills of the attendees, an occasion on which some important revelation is made, and a culminating moment of narrative resolution, for instance. But what about in medieval outlaw tales? How important are food and feasting in the tales of Robin Hood, Gamelyn, Hereward the Wake, Eustache the Monk, and Fouke le Fitz Waryn, for example? This session will consider the presence and function of food and feast in medieval outlaw tales, with an eye to considering whether and how instances of food preparation and eating in these tales can be said to display, to develop, or to subvert the conventional ideas of community and fellowship most commonly associated with foods and feasts in secular medieval literature.

"Ecocritical Outlaws"
At an ICMS session in 2015, a panel posed the question "What Can Medieval Studies Bring to Ecocriticism?" Although the responses were diverse, none touched on the specific subgenre of outlaw literature, and this absence is reflected in much of the published ecocriticism scholarship. This panel seeks to initiate conversations about ecocritical issues in various outlaw tales, including but not limited to Robin Hood, Gamelyn, Fouke Fitz Waryn, and Án Bow-Bender. Given the liminal spaces which these tales occupy, as well as their frequent movements from greenwood into urban spaces, these tales are rich for ecological study. What do these stories reveal about medieval forest practices or perspectives towards animals (and their relationships and/or kinships to humans)? To what extent do these tales critique medieval ecological beliefs or offer alternative perspectives (that is, do they reveal a plurality of attitudes towards nature co-existing during the medieval period)? Given that Rebecca Douglass, in “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” argues that “[E]cocriticism is . . . informed by a desire to understand past and present connections between literature and human attitudes regarding the earth,” what does the study of medieval outlaw tales offer to ecocritical studies? This panel welcomes a variety of approaches, including ecofeminist perspectives, cultural ecology, deep ecology, animal studies, ecolinguistics, and other innovative approaches.