CFP: Edited collection on collaborative art and literature of the U.S. quarantine.

We are presently seeking chapter contributions for a collection tentatively entitled Collaborative Quarantine: Critical Essays on Co-created Literature and Art of the American Pandemic. Several major university presses have already shown interest in the collection. We are aiming for Winter 2020 as a deadline for the submission of chapter drafts. Topics covered by current chapters include: collaborative poetry and online poetry communities of co-creation, co-authored creative non-fiction reportage of first-responders during the pandemic, community-authored renegotiations of rental agreements, and co-drawn diary comics of those in quarantine.

We are looking for other essays offering interpretive treatments of co-authored texts or artworks related to any of the following topics:

• masks, ventilators, and testing
• the economy vs. quarantine debate
• presidential and political rhetoric
• economic disparities, federal aid, food banks
• food shortages and meat packing crises
• grief and mourning practices
• reconsiderations of social and urban planning
• representations of raced, gendered, ethnic, and sexualized minorities
• the disabled and the status of disability during the pandemic
• ecocritical and climate concerns
• the proliferation of biomedical and clinical discourses
• constructions of viral forms of communication and contamination
• structures for thinking, feeling, and visualizing home, community, and isolation

All methodological approaches, including interdisciplinary methods, will be considered, with a special interest in chapters tying their particular deployment of collaboration to the rich history of its evocation in literary theory and scholarship. In other words, we are seeking chapters making thoughtful and original claims about collaboration and literature.

We are limiting texts to those by U.S. based artists and writers, but we are open to essays that discuss texts and artworks addressing an audience of global English speakers.  

Abstracts of 300 words are sought by August 1, 2020.

Please email to Michael.chaney@dartmouth.edu