Category: Call for submissions

Transatlanticism’s Influence on British Literary Study

Transatlanticism is often credited with enriching, and sometimes even correcting, the study of American literature. By de-emphasising the nation and its perceived coherence and uncovering crosscurrents from the British Isles, Europe, and Africa, transatlanticism seems the opposite of American exceptionalism. How, though, has transatlanticism enriched or challenged the study of British literature? The journal Symbiosis invites articles of 5,000 to 7,000 words for a special issue on this topic, to appear in April 2017. Articles may, for example, analyse new authors, texts, genres, readings, or movements highlighted by the transatlantic context; study the influence of American writing on British writing; study how an encounter with American peoples gives shape to British literary styles or forms; analyse the cultural transmission of American discourses in the British Isles; disentangle (or entangle) the impact on ideas of Englishness of postcolonialism, Irish and Scottish studies, and transatlanticism; assess strategies for teaching transatlanticism; or discuss how the transatlantic puts pressure on period or genre designations within British literary study (like ‘Romantic’ or ‘Victorian’). Regardless of the focus, articles should articulate the ramifications of transatlanticism for future studies of British literature. Submissions should be double spaced throughout, prepared (initially) to any recognised humanities style sheet, and addressed or sent as email attachments to both the guest editors (contact information listed below) by July 1st 2016. Please contact the guest editors with queries pertaining to the special issue.

Stephanie Palmer, Senior Lecturer of English, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK. stephanie.palmer@ntu.ac.uk

Erin Atchison, University of Auckland. erin.j.atchison@gmail.com

Clemson University Press is pleased to invite essay submissions of approximately 7,000 words to the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. For the latest updates and to see a complete list of the Annual’s editorial advisory board, please visit www.facebook.com/tseannual. For specific questions or to submit an essay for consideration, please contact John Morgenstern, general editor, at tseannual@clemson.edu. Submissions should be styled according to The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) and follow Merriam-Webster’s current edition for spelling. All submissions must be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 300 words and be received by December 1, 2015 for consideration in the first volume.

Call For Papers

Welcome to a new annual essay competition open to students of any academic level over the age of 18 and living anywhere in the world. It has been inaugurated in honour of the late Patrick Tolfree, author of monographs, avid Hardyan and tireless promoter of Hardy’s life and works within local schools. The essay topic will be broad and will change each year, but must be related to Hardy and his oeuvre.

Reminder: Abstracts due August 15, 2015

The editors invite proposals for essays on the theme of ‘strata’ across English literature in the period 1860-1930. This period saw landmarks in archaeological discovery including the ancient city of Troy in 1868 through to the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. In the early twentieth century, the radiometric dating of strata revolutionised geology, while psychology moved into a laboratory setting, and pioneers such as Sigmund Freud developed ground-breaking techniques to penetrate the unconscious. Thus the era was one in which varieties of depths – both literal and figurative – were explored, their treasures exposed, and their secrets made to impact upon the ways in which both the external world and the internal self were perceived.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Dream, memory, consciousness and subconsciousness
– Archaeological discoveries and sites, ruins
– The artefact or the historical site as a stimulus for psychological experience
– Haunted ruins, tombs or museums
– Geological strata, coastlines, fossils
– The relationship between scholarly literature on geology / archaeology and fictional writing

The editors are particularly interested in essays which marry the two threads of physical (geological / archaeological) and psychological strata.

Essay abstracts (approx. 500 words) and a short biography (up to 100 words) including your name, position and affiliation, should be sent to strataconference@gmail.com by 30 September 2015. Longer outlines or drafts are also welcome at this time. The editors aim to notify selected authors by mid-October, and completed essays should be submitted by January 2016.

Queries are welcome concerning submission topics.

Visit the MLA Commons site dedicated to the development of this volume; you’ll find the book proposal, resources, opportunity to offer comment and feedback, as well as this call and a submission portal:  https://modwomen.commons.mla.org

You are cordially invited to submit articles to the 31st edition of the Postgraduate English Journal, Durham University’s online peer-reviewed literary journal. This is one of the longest-running online postgraduate literary journals in the UK, and in recent years the journal has received reprint requests from academic publishers.
Early-career researchers/academics and postgraduates are invited to submit papers of 5 – 7,000 words (or book reviews of no more than 2000 words) by Saturday, 15th August 2015.
Contributions from any area of literary research are welcome to reflect a wide diversity of interests. If submitting a book review, please contact the editors in advance with details of the book you wish to review.
For queries or further information contact: pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk.

The Archival Turn in Modern Literature

Special Issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy

Editors: Daniela Caselli, University of Manchester and Caroline Patey, Università degli Studi, Milano

This special issue of Textus will explore the ‘archival turn’ in modern literature and criticism. The archive has always been central to literary scholarship, especially in the pre-1900 period. However, the past decade has seen a resurgence of the critical and theoretical importance of the archive for studies of modernity, modernism, and even contemporary literature. At the same time, the motifs of the archive and archival research are increasingly infiltrating the form and structure of creative texts, blurring the boundaries between fictitious literary constructs and documentary writing. Archives and stored memories seem to be a favourite mode of narrative, dramatic or poetic re-visitations of the past and to inform a lot of exciting writing in the modern period (from Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive and Martha Cooley’s The Archivist, from A.S. Byatt to IanMcEwan). This archival passion has also triggered fresh and original approaches to canonical authors (among others, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad) and contributed to the opening of new theoretical approaches (first among them, ‘genetic criticism’).

The discovery of empirical data in criticism has also been portrayed as a new form of knowledge able to withstand the security risks created by cultural and critical theory. Recent uses of the archive have also contributed to the transformation of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century from avant-garde periods into epochs – from intractable critical challenges into historical objects of study. Thus, while contemporary writers increasingly encroach upon and incorporate the archive as an imaginary world, critical interventions have placed the archive at the core of their claims to advance scholarship. We have recently witnessed considerable investment on the part of institutions such as the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in the acquisition of papers by J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace and of Cambridge and Oxford University Press in the publishing of the letters of twentieth-century writers such as Samuel Beckett and Dorothy Richardson. In addition to this, the acrimonious dispute in France over Michel Foucault’s papers was a battle not devoid of irony given that ‘What is an Author?’ is a seminal critique of archive formations. The Digital Humanities are also playing an increasingly strategic role in departments of English literature, while genetic approaches to modern literature are expanding across Europe and North America (see, for instance, the ongoing Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project, or the work done by the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities).

In this special issue we ask: what are the challenges in making sense of the archive in the context of modern literature criticism? How does it work as a cultural phenomenon and as a practice of close reading? What has the practice of ‘archival writing’ to say about the tension between collection and creation? What happens when we encounter letters, or drafts, and we try to read them not only as ‘archival material’ or as ‘documents’ able to tell us something about the author’s intentions or the history of production, but we try instead to read them as texts in their own right? What new questions can be asked about the history of material culture in the modern period? How are these archival matters transformed when they migrate from the library/museum/collection to the writer’s page and become part and parcel of new fictions?

Among the issues that we would like to explore in this issue are:

• new archival findings in modern literature
• archival leanings in modern literature
• archival motifs in fiction and poetry
• the relationship between archival turn and critical theory
• the role of the archive in historicizing modernity
• how archival research affects the personae of modernist artists
• the different uses of the archive in medieval and early modern studies in comparison to

studies of modernity and modernism

• the digital humanities as a cultural phenomenon
• genetic criticism in studies of modernity and modernism
• the manuscript as fetish
• the place of correspondence in the archive
• life-writing and the archive
• the relation between archive and memory
• the neurosciences and the archive

Please send a 300-word abstract to both editors by Friday 24^th July 2015:

Caroline Patey caroline.patey@unimi.it

Daniela Caselli daniela.caselli@manchester.ac.uk

The editors will notify contributors by Friday 7^th August 2015.

The deadline for article submissions (6,000 words) is Friday 13^th November 2015.

Phalansteries, Groups, Circles and Guilds. Modernist Aesthetics and the Utopian Lure of Community. 1880-1940

Special issue of the online peer-reviewed journal Other Modernities/Altre Modernità/Autres Modernités ISSN 2035-7680 (http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/index), edited by Caroline Patey and Laura Scuriatti

Following a very successful panel at the 2014 EAM conference in Helsinki the editors are seeking additional contributions.

Deadline: 1^st December 2015

Authors guidelines: http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Expected publication date: Spring 2016

CFP description:

While Modernism, especially literary Modernism, has long been investigated in the wake of the primary role played by individual voices and authorship, critical studies increasingly investigate the roles played by group artistry in the elaboration of avant-garde and modernist aesthetics and ethics throughout Europe and the United States. Together with the more renown instances such as the Wiener Werkstätte, Bauhaus, the Omega workshops and the groupings which followed the outbreak and success of the Russian Revolution, a number of less known collective experiences (circles, little magazines, theatre companies, guilds) challenged the consolidated idea of authorship and creation and are crucial for understanding the writing practices in the first half of the twentieth century. In many ways, the utopia of new and unfettered forms of expression seems to go hand in hand with the experimentation of unconventional modes of living. Whether institutionalised or informal, most of these groupings, which were housed both in urban and rural surroundings, involved artists, authors and thinkers working together in a collective attempt to reassess/reformulate the fundamental questions about art, creativity and craft in the light of communal practices and choices.

We seek original contributions exploring the diverse communities disseminated throughout Europe, with a focus on literary practices, and the role they played in the emergence of new literary languages, hoping to be able to exhaustively map such efforts.

The following aspects are of particular interest:

1. The ‘prehistory’ of utopian artistry: in the case of Britain, the role played by such people as William Morris and iconic places as he Red House or Kelmskott Manor in disrupting Victorian conventions, existential and aesthetic alike. Investigation of the influence of the Morris constellation onto later utopian experiences, as well as the assessment of the literary output of the rural community gathered around Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe and his militant activity for the rights of homosexuals.

2. Communal living and writing in Britain and Europe.

We aim at drawing a first map of these experiences throughout Europe.

3. Journals, small magazines, salons, theatre groups. We are interested in contributions investigating these collective ventures in cultural capitals or marginal places, where adventurous and ferociously independent periodicals write a special chapter of co-writing and associate editorship. 

4. Authorship between the individual and the collective voice. On the methodological and theoretical side of things, we are interested in issues of signature, authorship, authority, format, visibility, impact and acceptance within the various communal experiences. We also welcome investigations on the episodes of intermediality suggested by the coexistence of diverse forms of artistic expression in the community, and their impact on the aesthetic discourses of the group.

Contributions should aim at: 

1. Filling the white places of our initial map by investigating experiences throughout Europe.

2. Elaborating on the theoretical aspects of authorial identity, agency, originality, subversion.

3. Interrogating the role played by the multiple discourses entailed by an artistic community.

4. Exploring and assessing the cultural and political status of such communities in relation to the societies they are part of.

Editors’ profiles

Caroline Patey has read English and Comparative literature in Paris (Paris III), Dublin UCD and the Università degli Studi, Milan, where she is now professor of English literature. Her research has oscillated between the two poles of Renaissance and Modernist Studies and recently become increasingly comparative in scope and methods, focusing on visual and textual modernity in Joyce, Proust, Ford, Woolf, Conrad and Eliot; following the trail of anthropology and literature, and also concentrating on urban culture and literature, in the works of Henry James, Conrad, Ford, and Isherwood. Among her last investigations, the intersection between museums and literature; in this area of research she has co-edited The Exhibit in the Text. The Museological Practices of Literature (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2009) and edited the Italian translation of Sir John Soane’s Crude Hints towards an History of my House (Per una storia della mia casa, Palermo, Sellerio, 2010). She has also lately promoted the research project on literature and nomadism and co-edited the proceedings of the related conference, Transits. The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2010). In 2010, Caroline Patey has co-organized the conference Provence and the British Imagination. (Proceedings published in Milan, Ledizioni, 2013). In December 2011 she has hosted in Milan an international conference to investigate the inheritance of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in the seventieth anniversary of their death: Parallaxes. Virginia Woolf meets James Joyce (Proceedings published Cambridge Scholar Press, 2014). She has recently co-edited Will the Modernist. Shakespeare and the Historical European Avant-Gardes (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2014) and contributed to the volume with the essay: ‘Beckett’s Shakespeare, or, Silencing the Bard’. 

Laura Scuriatti studied English and German literature at the University of Milan, and holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Reading. Her research focuses on the relationship between literature and the visual arts in modernism and the avant-garde, and on gender theory. She was a teaching assistant at the University of Reading and is Junior Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College Berlin (formerly European College of Liberal Arts), where she has been teaching since 2003. She has published on Mina Loy, Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells, and Sacheverell Sitwells. She has co-edited, with Caroline Patey, the volume The Exhibit in the Text. The Museological Practices of Literature (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2009) and, with Sara Fortuna, Dekalog. On Dogville (London and New York: Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2012).

(THE PEER-REVIEWED YEARBOOK OF THE KATHERINE MANSFIELD SOCIETY)

KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND PSYCHOLOGY

Guest Editor: Professor Clare Hanson (University of Southampton, UK)

In a letter of October 1920, Katherine Mansfield distanced herself from the ‘mushroom growth of “cheap psychoanalysis”’ but in the next breath affirmed her belief that ‘with an artist one has to allow – oh tremendously for the subconscious element in his work’.  As this suggests, her engagement with the models of subjectivity emerging from contemporary psychology was both complex and ambivalent. This volume invites papers that engage with all aspects of the interplay between Mansfield’s fiction and contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

the subconscious and the unconscious                             popular psychology

the psychological novel                                                     Gurdjieff

Freud                                                                                  aesthetics and psychology

Jung

Submissions of between 5000–6000 words (inclusive of endnotes), in Word format and using MHRA style, should be emailed to the Guest Editor for this volume, Professor Clare Hanson, accompanied by a 50 word biography: kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org

A detailed MHRA style guide is available from the Katherine Mansfield Society website:

http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/yearbook-katherine-mansfield-studies/

 

CREATIVE WRITING 

Pieces of creative writing on the general theme of Katherine Mansfield – poetry, short stories, etc., should be submitted to the editors for consideration, accompanied by a 50 word biography: kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 31 August 2015