Organizers: Lucio De Capitani & Alessandro Cabiati

This conference aims to explore the concept of nature/natural in Robert Louis Stevenson’s work, broadly understood as to intersect with several of Stevenson’s intellectual, ethical and artistic engagements: reflections on literary criticism/style, conceptions of gender and sexuality, visions of science, anthropological and psychological notions of the human, and ecological/ecocritical considerations. It suggests the possibility that the Stevensonian ‘natural’ may also, as a matter of course, evoke its other – the ‘unnatural’ – either to uphold the boundary between the two or, perhaps more intriguingly, to cross it. Connected to this, the conference aims to investigate Stevenson both as a writer of dichotomies/dualisms and of their wild transgressions.

Topics include but are not limited to:

  • Theoretical reflections on the idea/concept of nature, the natural, and the unnatural with reference to Stevenson’s fiction and nonfiction
  • Conceptions/visions of the environment, the nonhuman (including animals and plants) and ecology in Stevenson
  • Weird, eerie and unnatural landscapes
  • Stevenson as writer of binaries/dichotomies, Stevenson beyond binaries/dichotomies
  • Ecocritical, posthuman, neo-materialist readings of Stevenson
  • Stevenson and science (positivist or otherwise)
  • Stevenson, Victorian psychology, and theories on double or “multiplex personality”
  • Stevenson and queerness, or Stevenson as queering genre/gender and literary style; queer ecologies in/and Stevenson
  • Normative conceptions of kinship (and their overcoming); queer kinship
  • Fear of/embracing of miscegenation
  • The natural/artificial dichotomy in Stevenson, and/or its overcoming
  • Stevenson and the body/mind duality, and/or its overcoming
  • Transcorporeality in Stevenson
  • Ecophilia and ecophobia in Stevenson

 

Proposals (200-300 words) for twenty-minute papers should be sent to the organisers by November 30, 2025 (alessandro.cabiati@unive.it, lucio.decapitani@unive.it). Please include your email address, institutional affiliation, and a short bionote (100 words)

Please find the FULL TEXT of the call for papers at: https://www.cfplist.com/CFP/45365

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