Menu
News Archive from 2013


Call for Papers: Baptism of Fire
Posted on July 17, 2013

Baptism of Fire: The Birth of Modern British Fantasy in World War I · Ed. Janet Brennan Croft · The Mythopoeic Press


In Great Britain, the post-World War I years saw a flowering of fantasy written by authors who had lived through its horrors. Tom Shippey observed in Tolkien: Author of the Century that the originators of what we would consider the “late twentieth-century fantastic mode” were in many cases “traumatized authors” who had survived combat and other experiences of the war. Janet Croft, in War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, notes psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers’s observations that his Great War patients processed their experiences through both dreams and writing. This essay collection will examine the fantasy fiction, poetry, and potentially art of authors affected in one way or another by the Great War and its lasting legacy.

Some authors we may consider are: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, E.R. Eddison, Kenneth Grahame, A.A. Milne, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mervyn Peake, James Stephens, David Jones, G.K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling; see First World War: Prose and Poetry for more possibilities.

Projected publication date: Fall 2014
Deadline for abstracts: September 1, 2013
Deadline for finished papers: April 1, 2014
Please contact Janet Croft at mythlore@mythsoc.org.




Content copyright 1967- The Mythopoeic Society All rights reserved