Fueling the Nineteenth Century: Energy and Nineteenth-Century French Studies
A special section to appear in Nineteenth-Century French Studies vol. 53 nos. 3–4 (spring–summer 2025)
Submission deadline: 5 January 2024
Publication: May 2025
How did France and the Francophone world conceive of energy in the nineteenth century? As industrialized western countries shifted the forms of energy that they used over the course of the century, writers and artists witnessed and reimagined the physical as well as social changes these transitions brought to their environment and economies. Whether trees or wind, coal or oil, geothermal power or waves, developments in energy shaped the ways people lived, worked, thought, read, wrote, and created. In the fields of British and North American Studies, fuel and extraction have been the focus of much recent work, including books by Karen Pinkus and Elizabeth Miller. Despite Michel Serres’s pathbreaking work on thermodynamics and Bruno Latour’s understanding of networked agency, French Studies has seen fewer critical works on fuel or in the energy humanities more broadly. In response, this special section aims to investigate the ways that conceptions of energy emerged and developed over the course of the nineteenth century in France and the Francophone world, how energy was represented in cultural productions, and how energy came to impact literary style and form.
If we assume that energy also functioned as a key factor in thinking about aesthetic creation, what are the connections between energy and labor? How is colonialism implicated in an extractive energy economy? How does Francophone work in the energy humanities speak with and differ from the work of Anglophone critics? How does the angle of energy enable us to build on previous literary criticism? We welcome proposals for articles that attend to these and related questions concerning French approaches to energy in the nineteenth century.
Submissions may be written in French or in English; quotations in either language must appear in the original, not in translation. All bibliographic formats are permitted upon submission; authors will be expected to convert their accepted article to MLA style by the deadline for final versions, indicated below. All submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review, in accordance with journal policy.
Timeline
Articles of max 45,000 characters with spaces should be submitted by 5 January 2024 to Cary Hollinshead-Strick cstrick@aup.edu and Anne O’Neil-Henry ao358@georgetown.edu
Peer-review: winter and spring 2024.
Editorial decisions: during March 2024.
Revisions: late spring and summer 2024.
Deadline for final versions: 1 October 2024.
After copyediting by the Editorial Board and final revisions, contributions will be corrected in two rounds of page proofs in spring of 2025 for publication in May.
Selected Bibliography
Barak, On. Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization. U of California P, 2020.
Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. L’Événement anthropocène. Seuil, 2013.
Charbonnier, Pierre. Abondance et liberté: une histoire environnementale des idées politiques. La Découverte, 2020.
Clark, Timothy. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Duke UP, 2019.
Duperrex, Matthieu. “Energy humanities, une pensée écologique au miroir des industries carbonées.” Sociétés, vol. 148, no. 2, 2020, pp. 93–101.
Emmett, Robert S., and David E. Nye. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. MIT P, 2017.
Finch-Race, Daniel, and Valentina Gosetti, editors. Special issue “Ecoregions/Les Écorégions.” Dix-Neuf, vol. 23, nos. 3–4, 2019.
Finch-Race, Daniel, and Julien Weber, editors. Special Issue “French Ecocriticism/L’écocritique française.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 57, no. 1, Spring 2017.
Gemenne, François, and Aleksandar Rankovic. Atlas de l’Anthropocène. Sciences Po, 2019.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016.
Goulet, Andrea. “Anthropocene Under Paris? Rethinking the Quarries and Catacombs.” Dix-Neuf, vol. 25, nos. 3–4, 2021, pp. 225–41.
Hollister, Lucas, Roger Célestin, and Eliane DalMolin, editors. Special issue “Frontiers of Ecocriticism 1.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, 2021.
Jarrige, Francois, and Thomas Le Roux. La Contamination du monde: une histoire des pollutions à l’âge industriel. Seuil, 2017.
Latour, Bruno. Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique. La Découverte, 2017.
Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Princeton UP, 2021.
Pinkus, Karen. Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary. U of Minnesota P, 2016.
Posthumus, Stephanie. French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically. U of Toronto P, 2017.
Reno, Seth T. Anthropocene. Routledge, 2021.
Serres, Michel. Feux et signaux de brume. Zola. Grasset, 1975.
Stoekl, Allan. Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer, editors. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017.
Voskuil, Lynn, editor. Nineteenth Century Energies: Literature, Technology, Culture. Routledge, 2016.
Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 2, March 2011, pp. 305–26.