Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to contribute to the thematic issue 2/2023 of Colloquia Litteraria entitled:

Ecoreadings. Literary Representations of the Natural World.

The guest editors of this issue are Associate Professor (dr hab.) Joanna Zajkowska and Dr. Łukasz Kucharczyk.

Submission deadline: 31st May 2023

The perspective of the new, non‑anthropocentric humanities, grounded in the ethics of solidarity and respect for all forms of life and redefining the human mode of “being‑in‑the‑world”, today inspires reinterpretations of established readings of both contemporary and historical literary works. This is the direction we wish to encourage.

Ecocritical methodology assumes that every — or almost every — text can be read in an ecologically engaged way, as it consciously or implicitly addresses, in some form, the relationship between humans and nature. Ecocriticism, based on relational thinking focused on the mutual interdependence of human and environmental, human and non‑human beings, offers a mode of interpretation that brings to the foreground the issue of the relationship between human beings and their natural environment.

We would like to invite you to publish in this issue of our journal, which will be devoted to broadly understood “ecoreadings” — that is, all interpretations and reinterpretations addressing the coexistence of humans and the natural world, or of humans in the natural world.

We propose considering the following topics present in literature:

• The history of ecocritical research in Poland and worldwide;
• Ecocritical readings of historical and contemporary works;
• “Ecological” metaphors, symbols, images;
• Nature as a sign of memory;
• Nature as a reflection on time and space;
• Animal characters in literature;
• Nature in dystopian and post‑apocalyptic literature;
• Anthropocentrism and biocentrism in literature;
• Nature and posthumanism;
• Flora‑ and fauna‑related topos;
• Nature in children’s literature – taken for granted or newly proposed?

Colloquia Litteraria is a scholarly, peer‑reviewed semiannual journal in literary studies, affiliated with the Faculty of Humanities at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. Since 2006, it has been published in thematic issues devoted to various fields of literary scholarship and to interdisciplinary topics. The journal is indexed in: BazHum, CEJSH – The Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, IC Journals Master List, and PBN – the Polish Scholarly Bibliography. It has been awarded 20 points on the Polish Ministry of Education and Science list of ranked journals. Thanks to funding from the Ministry (within the “Science Dissemination Activities” module), five special issues containing selected archival articles from Colloquia Litteraria translated into English have been published.

We will be accepting submissions until 31st May 2023. Before that, by 15th April 2023, please send the title of your article along with a short proposal (approx. 1,000 characters).

Information on editorial requirements and additional elements for submitted articles can be found on our website: www.czasopisma.uksw.edu.pl

Please send submissions to: beatabohsulecka@wp.pl

Associate Professor (dr hab.) Joanna Zajkowska, Dr. Łukasz Kucharczyk