Flora and Fauna in Fantastic Worlds Conference

Call for Papers

Walking trees and talking animals, anthropomorphised plants and vicious creatures abound in children’s as well as young adult fantasy literature and constitute an integral part of world-building processes. Narrative representations of natural environments and their occupants invite not only ecological readings and ecocritical perspectives but also comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to fantastic texts. Even though descriptions of vegetation and (fantastic) animals often vary in terms of their prominence in the respective stories, they are recurring and often even indispensable narrative features of fantastic worlds that render these worlds much more complex: while Merry and Pippin meet the Ent Treebeard, a ‘shepherd of the forest’, who eventually leads an army of Ents and Huorns into the Battle of Isengard, in Fangorn Forest, Harry is taught Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures at Hogwarts, encounters a Devil’s Snare in his first year and defeats a basilisk in his second year.
The 2019 international symposium of the Inklings Society will take place from 8-9 March at the University of Bonn. We invite academic papers of 20 minutes in English or German en-gaging with representations and potential functions of flora and fauna in children’s and young adult fantasy literature. Papers could explore plant and animal kingdoms in fantastic worlds such as J.K. Rowling’s Potterverse, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Philip Pullman’s mul-tiverse in the His Dark Materials series, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.