MLA 2022 CFP: “Transnational Migration and Empire”
Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2021
A Small Boy and Others: Henry James and the Child
Henry James Society
Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2021
Dickens and Decadence (rescheduled)
Stockholm University
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2021
Poetry in Transatlantic Translation: Encounters Across Languages
Bangor University, Wales, UK
Deadline for submissions: November 15, 2021
Call for Essays: “Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women Travelers”
Editor: Misty Krueger, Ph.D.
I seek essay proposals for a collection in development entitled Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women Travelers. This collection will examine long eighteenth-century (approximately 1650-1830) accounts written by or about British, American, European, African, and/or Caribbean women who have traveled the Atlantic. While scholars have examined at length the travels of men who have crossed the Atlantic for religious, economic, and political reasons, few address in detail those of their female counterparts in the Atlantic World. This book aims to contribute to the fields of transatlantic and oceanic studies by focusing particularly on an aspect of both long eighteenth-century travel writing and transatlanticism that needs more scholarly attention: transatlantic women’s experiences. Inspired by formative studies in eighteenth-century transatlanticism by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, which devote chapters to women writers, the proposed collection intends to provide insight into the different experiences women face, as compared to men, as they travel the seas, as well as when and where they land. Such experiences are the direct result of women’s marital statuses, class, race, age, genders, and/or sexualities. While the collection may include male writers’ accounts of transatlantic women travelers, the primary goal of this collection is to show how women portray transatlantic travel through either first-hand accounts, or through fictional narratives about transatlantic women travelers. Ultimately, the collection aims to include scholarship about 1) women writers and artists engaging in the travails of a transatlantic crossing, and 2) women depicting themselves or other women crossing the Atlantic, as well as the aftermath of these travels.
Topics for essays may address, but are not limited to, the following:
Proposals of approximately 500 words and a brief CV should be sent to Misty Krueger at misty.krueger@maine.edu by February 28, 2017. Contributors will be notified in March if their proposals have been accepted. Completed essays of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by August 28, 2017. A university press has already expressed interest in the collection, and the submitted volume will undergo the peer-review process.
Special Issue of Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations
Transatlantic Franzen
The journal Symbiosis (http://www.symbiosistransatlantic.com/) invites articles of 5,000 to 7,000 words for a special issue on Transatlantic Jonathan Franzen, to appear in October 2018. While the following list is not prescriptive, articles may, for example, offer comparative analyses of Franzen’s representations of US and European culture; look at Franzen’s incorporation of or allusion to British or other European authors; assess the critical reception of Franzen’s work in Europe (perhaps, comparing this to US responses); or consider whether British or other European authors have published material that engages with or responds to Franzen’s fiction. More ‘general’ comparative pieces, reading Franzen alongside or against contemporary British / European fiction are also welcome. While we welcome essays that discuss European literature not written in English, contributors should provide translations of any passages that they cite. Regardless of the focus, articles should generally seek to articulate the ramifications of transatlanticism for future studies of Franzen’s fiction.
Submissions (abstracts in the first instance) should be double spaced throughout and prepared (initially) to any recognised humanities style sheet.
Complete papers to be received by December 1st 2017.
In the first instance, please address abstracts, queries or expressions of interest to the editors of this special issue:
Dr. Sophie Vlacos, University of Glasgow (sophie.vlacos@glasgow.ac.uk)
Dr. Chris Gair, University of Glasgow (chris.gair@glasgow.ac.uk)
Where realism was the signature feature of earlier Victorian fiction, mid-to-late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers increasingly embraced fantastic modes. Rosemary Jackson, in her 1981 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, inaugurated the now-ubiquitous truism of literary studies that late Victorian fantastic narratives frequently hold strong – and often covertly revolutionary – metaphorical relations to social concerns. Supernatural and symbolic texts are ideal sites for encryption of radical queries and pervasive anxieties related to gender, sexuality, religion, medicine, science, ethnicity, substance abuse and colonialism (to name a few).
This is an especially persistent trait – one manifested and developed in many directions in the Edwardian and early Modernist fantastic. In supernatural thrillers, ghost stories, science fictions, and amorphous fantasias, counter-cultural angsts find substitutive satisfactions and conflated expression. The uncanny effects of fantastic literature enable this; indirection, obscuration and innuendo are ideal mediums for saying-not-saying things. Indeed, whatever energies crescendo in fantastic literature are exactly those that realism – by default – tends to eclipse, reduce, or normalize. Experiments in form and language, from aestheticism to Modernism, only add to the covert power of fantasy.
Given the substantial scholarship dedicated to non-realist representations written by male writers, this book project will specifically explore women-identified writers’ uses of the fantastic from 1860-1930. Writers like Ouida, Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Mary Butts, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sylvia Townsend Warner used narratively polymorphous fantastic sub-genres to dramatize their particularly activist arguments and ideas. This provided the flexibility to explore not only the darkest corners of the external world, but also the deepest subterranean secrets of the mind. For not only did women-identified writers wield these forms’ easy strategic cover to subvert the status quo, but they also used them to explore the gendered psyche’s links to imagination, pathology and creative, personal and erotic agency. In addition to providing dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, these texts also illuminate intriguing and complex relationships to key moments in gender(ed) history.
This collection will be submitted to an already-enthusiastic selective academic press.
We invite submissions that engage in any related issues, including the following:
•Fantastic figures (ghosts, mummies, werewolves, vampires)
•The evolving genre and forms of the fantastic/supernatural
•Occult communication networks: Annie Besant, Emma Hardinge Britten, Helena Blavasky, and the women of the Golden Dawn
•The shifting meaning/purpose of the female fantastic from mid-century (Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marrayat, Charlotte Riddell) to the fin de siècle to the 20th-century
•The transatlantic, global, or colonial supernatural
•The role of the fantastic or otherworldly in conceptualizations of gender and sexuality
•Nationhood, the “fantastic” other, race, and empire
•Nationalism, Fascism, Socialism and other political movements
•Pacificism, war, and trauma
•The fantastic in periodical and print culture
•Visualizing or depicting the fantastic through illustrations, art, performance, photography and film
•Science, pseudo-science, psychoanalysis, medicine, and the supernatural
•Mental illness, Addiction, and Social Deviance
•Relations of Fantastic to Aestheticism, Decadence, Symbolist, Surrealist, Modernist or other movements
•Female-authored sources for and/or reactions to more “canonical” fantastic literature
•Female academic influences on the Classical and/or “Oriental” imagination (Jane Harrison and Margaret Murray, for example)
Abstracts should be 500 words, exclusive of a selected bibliography and brief author’s bio. Final papers should run between 4,000 – 6,000 words (inclusive of endnotes and works cited) and be formatted in current MLA style. Revisions may be requested as a condition of acceptance. Please send all queries to the editors (Dr. Elizabeth McCormick, Dr. Jennifer Mitchell, and Dr. Rebecca Soares) at FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com.
Submissions Guidelines and Timeframe
By February 15, 2016:
Send one electronic copy of your 500-word abstract toFemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com. Include a selected bibliography of 10 sources and a brief bio of less than 250 words.
By March 15, 2016:
We will notify applicants of our decisions.
By July 15, 2016
Full papers are due.
A special issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Spring 2017
Guest editors: Derek Pacheco and Michael Demson
In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne famously derides Brook Farm’s utopianism by likening it to Charles Fourier’s outlandish prophecies of seas-transmuted-into-“limonade à cèdre.” For all its satire, however, the novel is positively awash, so to speak, in British and European literary, social, and intellectual currents—from pastoral aesthetics, to prison reform, to fantasies of agricultural improvement, to name a few. For example, Hawthorne’s wry allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey’s unrealized utopian Pantisocracy opens up questions about the extent to which he understood his own experience of Brook Farm in terms of the agrarian thought permeating transatlantic Romanticism. Indeed, that such preoccupations would drift across the Atlantic ocean’s temporal and geographic expanses exemplifies what Elisa Tamarkin has called the “irreducible ‘fluidity’ of the Atlantic world.”
We hope for a broad range of engagements with this topic, from the transcendental to the material, from the circulatory to the rhizomatic. Topics might include, but are not limited to
Blithedale’s reviews/reception/
circulation/reputation in Europe
Radicalisms
Anarchism and the commune
Transatlantic idealisms
Transatlantic feminisms
Transatlantic topography
Cottage, farmstead, and plantation
Labor: divisions, subordination,
and violence
Peasants, farmers, landowners
Pastoral, anti-pastoral traditions
Sustainability and/or primitivism
Revolutions of 1848 revised
Participants at Brook Farm
Abstracts of approximately 300-500 words by 15 March 2016 with a two-page cv (please send to demson@shsu.edu). Full essays (6,000-9,000 words) would be due by 15 July 2016.
Please address any questions to dpacheco@purdue.edu ordemson@shsu.edu