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Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere. Volume XXXI (2026): Narratives of Crisis in English And German-Language Literatures.
Extended deadline for contributions: 4 May 2026.

Publication presentation

The deepest and broadest meaning of the term ‘crisis’ is illuminated by its origin, now more than ever: the Greek root κρίσις encompasses the ideas of choice, judgement and the critical stage of an illness, and perhaps no other word in our present age holds such urgent significance. At the same time, the idea of crisis is so deeply embedded in the very concept of modernity that it has become an essential category in the cultural reflection of diverse traditions. Modernity has, in fact, been built around the concept of crisis, from the paradigm shift caused by the great scientific revolutions and geographical discoveries that collapsed the ancient episteme between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to the great revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the epistemological rupture of Darwinism and the profound tensions of the late nineteenth century, to mention only the most decisive ones, and literature has consistently interpreted this awareness, particularly from the early twentieth century onwards.

As some sixty years ago, according to Lyotard, postmodernism emerged precisely from a ‘distrust of metanarratives’, from the crisis of the grand narratives of science, religion and history, the link between the diagnosis, awareness and analysis of the crisis and the forms of narration is part of every cultural and artistic attempt to address the crisis as a category and/or paradigm of a civilisation’s development. The relationship between modernity, progress, the philosophy of history and crisis has been at the heart of philosophical debate throughout the twentieth century, from Existentialism to the Frankfurt School, to Reinhart Koselleck’s idea of the perpetual crisis of modern society, as a ‘structural condition of the contemporary world’.

Moreover, the very idea of crisis has always been conceived on different levels – economic, political, social, cultural, religious, humanitarian and environmental – which in turn can influence and generate further crises in terms of identity, values and epistemology. This diversity and constant transformation at the heart of the problematic definition of a ‘modern civilisation’ has fuelled and shaped literature, and continues to be interpreted through literature, as a response to crisis. This apparently commonsensical statement has perhaps not received enough critical attention in terms of the crucial relationships between literary productions and forms of crisis in their manifold articulations and implications, and within various theoretical frameworks. Or, at the very least, it still offers ever-new avenues of inquiry. Literary periods identified as ‘literatures of crisis’—from Decadence to 20th-century European Modernism as the most classic examples—have been followed by other contemporary forms of reflection that have produced narratives of and on the epochal, transformative and ‘perpetual’ crises, aimed at articulating the urgency of an ever-evolving concept generating ever new meanings, though often rooted in history and history-related.

From the literary periods identified as ‘literature of crisis’, from Decadence to twentieth-century European Modernism as the most classic examples, other contemporary forms of reflection that have produced narratives addressing epochal, transformative and ‘perpetual’ crises, aimed at identifying and creating forms capable of articulating the urgency of a constantly evolving concept, while it is often generated and bound by historical roots. Finally, a fundamental dimension of the literary conception of crisis is that of the tension between a ‘conjunctural’ (Gramsci, Williams, Jameson) and a ‘constitutive’, epistemological vision (De Man, deconstructionist readings, but also Rita Felski’s post-critique), to cite just a few references among many.

Building from the various conceptions of crisis as a hermeneutic concept, and of narration as a mode of representing and understanding phenomena across time and space, the critical reflection on the idea and state of crisis in literary production can also focus on the evolution of genres, and on the ways in which literature responds to the crisis of the present and the past, shaping our understanding and definition of it. From this perspective, volume XXXI (2026) of Prospero aims to reflect on the constitutive link between crisis and narrative in English- and German-language literatures, in which the very meaning of crisis is conceived as a hermeneutic process generating forms of representation, and, as such, is absorbed and transformed within the imagination. 

Among the many possible lines of inquiry, the proposed contributions may consider the following areas in English and German literature:

• Paradigms of crisis and historical narratives
• Literary representations of the recursiveness of crisis
• Contemporary pathologies and pathographies of illness as crisis
• Crisis and the critique of justice
• Imago crisis: visual narratives and relationships between literature and the visual arts
• In/from/on the crisis: narratives and retrospective perspectives
• Perpetual crisis between narrativisation and denied closure
• Shipwrecks with spectator
• Intermedial forms and genres of crisis
• The aesthetics of violence as a narrative of crisis
• Critical dystopias and ‘alternative history’ as narratives of crisis

An abstract of no more than 400 words, written in English, German or Italian, must be submitted to the journal’s email address 

• Prosperojournal@gmail.com and to 
• gefter@units.it,
• Marilena.parlati@unipd.it,

by 4 May 2026 at the latest. Notification of acceptance will be sent by the end of May.

Contributions, accompanied by a 350-word abstract in English and ranging in length from 6,000 to a maximum of 10,000 words, must be submitted as a Word attachment by 14 September 2026, in accordance with MLA editorial style; a style sheet guide can be downloaded from the journal’s website.

Website address

https://www.openstarts.units.it/communities/bddf575c-df32-432c-a03d-cba533e93af5

Contact details

• Prosperojournal@gmail.com
• gefter@units.it
• Marilena.parlati@unipd.it

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

(Posted 16 April 2026)

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Text and Texture: Rethinking Materiality in Adaptation Studies.
Deadline for contributions: 30 April 2026.

Edited by Assoc. Prof. Gülden Hatipoğlu

Publication presentation

Across its diverse multidisciplinary landscape, Adaptation Studies has evolved beyond questions of fidelity in intersemiotic practices and expanded its critical purview to explore the material dimensions of adaptation—ranging from the physicality of media formats to the sensory, affective, and technological textures that re/shape how stories circulate across forms. The term “texture” invites us to approach adaptation not merely as a process of transfer or translation, but as an interplay of surfaces, densities, and material registers. What does it mean to read, view, or experience an adaptation as a textured object? How do material practices—as diverse as printmaking, mural painting, sculpture, textiles, costume, installations, 3D printing, projection mapping, biofabrication—inform the production and reception of adaptations? How do material conditions intersect with questions of authorship, embodiment, gender, reception, and technology?

Such questions open onto broader inquiries about how materiality itself shapes adaptive processes and meanings—a dialogue that this collection seeks to extend and deepen. By foregrounding the dynamic intersections of texture, materiality, and mediation, we invite scholars to reconsider adaptation through its tactile, sensorial, spatial dimensions. Hoping to offer renewed critical perspectives on the material turn that continues to redefine the field – and extending the conversation beyond the conventional boundaries of film studies (e.g., S. Murray’s “Materializing Adaptation Theory” [2008] and K. Meikle’s “Rematerializing Adaptation Theory” [2013]) – this collection encourages new ways of seeing how media forms, physical substrates, human and nonhuman agents co-produce meaning. As this framework positions adaptation as a material practice rather than a purely representational one, submissions from artists, curators, and practitioners are also welcome, especially those reflecting on how the act of making transforms, translates, and reimagines textual narratives. 

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Theoretical approaches to materiality, embodiment, and texture in adaptation
• Adaptation and the senses: touch, sound, smell, and the phenomenology of adaptation
• Textile as interface: embroidery, knitting, weaving, and print as adaptation practices  
• Tapestry as medium of adaptation
• Practices of stitching, binding, and mending as modes of textual interpretation
• The poetics of thread, fabric, and fiber as media of storytelling in adaptation
• Costume, set design, and scenography as adaptive material practices
• Recycled media assemblage
• Mural art, public spaces and adaptation 
• Architecture and adaptation
• Sculpture, carved figures, engravings, and other forms of arts and crafts as adaptation
• Objects and adaptation
• Performance, bodies, and adaptation 
• Body art and adaptation
• Ecological or environmental approaches to adaptation and material culture
• Adaptation and the politics of production: labour, craft, and creative economies

The volume will be submitted for consideration to a critically acclaimed international academic Publisher.

Timeline (of the publication process)

• Please submit a 300–400-word abstract and a 150-word biographical note by 30 April 2026. 
• Full essays will be requested following acceptance of abstracts.
• Submit proposals to: Assoc. Prof. Gülden Hatipoğlu, e-mail: guldenhatipoglu@yahoo.co.uk 
• Notification of acceptance: 11 May 2026
• Full chapters due: 1 September 2026

Contact details: Assoc. Prof. Gülden Hatipoğlu, e-mail: guldenhatipoglu@yahoo.co.uk

CFP

For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.

(Posted 9 January 2026)

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Zealos: Studies in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts & Design, Volume 4, 2026.
Deadline for contributions: 30 April 2026.

Publication presentation

Zealos: Studies in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts & Design is an annual peer-reviewed and open-access journal published by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Nicosia (UNIC). 

We are now accepting contributions for the fourth volume of Zealos, which is due to be published in 2026. Zealos welcomes original and previously unpublished articles that fall within the scope of the journal and follow internationally sanctioned scientific standards. Submissions are free of charge. We welcome contributions in Greek or English. 

Zealos is a fully open-access journal issued annually. Each volume is published electronically as a PDF file. All papers are available on the Internet to all users immediately upon publication and free of charge, according to the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Under this licence, authors agree that others can copy and distribute the article free of charge, provided that they give appropriate credit, do not modify the article and do not use it for commercial purposes. 

Aims and Scope 

The journal aims to showcase the empirical, theoretical and practice-based research of scholars and practitioners in the fields of the humanities, social sciences, arts and design. Zealos intends to make its mark on these fields by publishing research papers, essays and creative work, conference and book reviews. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, we aim to contribute to both local and international literature, showcasing the work of academics and practitioners in the process. The journal particularly welcomes submissions on issues related to Cyprus. Special issues focusing on a specific theme and acting as a connecting point between the various disciplines are also planned. We accept papers in English and Greek. All manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review by two experts in the relevant field.

Website address 

https://www.zealos.org

Contact details

shss.zealosubmissions@unic.ac.cy

CFP

For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.

(Posted 22 February 2026)

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A Tribute to William Labov’s Impact on English Phonetics and Phonology.
Deadline for contributions: 30 April 2026.

Issue edited by:

Spoken Englishes – Journal in English Variation Studies will publish its very 1^st issue in 2027. It will be edited by Christophe Coupé-Jamet (CY Cergy Paris Université, France), Quentin Dabouis (Université Clermont-Auvergne, France), Pierre Fournier (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France), Olivier Glain (Université Jean Monnet de Saint-Étienne, France), Véronique Lacoste (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France) & Anne Przewozny (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France), on the topic of William Labov’s Impact on English Phonetics and Phonology.

Publication / Volume presentation

William Labov’s groundbreaking work (from 1966 onwards) revolutionized the study of language variation and change. Labov is often regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics. He challenged traditional linguistic theories by focusing on the social context of language use, and by approaching language variation and change, not as accidental elements, but as fundamental features of language. From its seminal works on the importance of social forces in language change and variation, initiated in New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, to the understanding of African American Vernacular English, or to the development of the Atlas of North American English, Labov’s founding studies in sociolinguistics, phonology, and phonetics, based on rigorous empirical research, revealed how language varies systematically across social groups and situations. He introduced the sociolinguistic interview and quantitative analysis, which then became standard in the field. The principles of language change and variation that he defined, including their life cycle and the role of social factors, have shaped our understanding of how languages change and have spurred many subsequent studies. His work on sound changes (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006) in North American English varieties has equally been impactful from the point of view of our understanding of sound change and has led to different methods of data normalization. Labov’s influence extends beyond the world of academia, impacting education, policy, and public discourse on language diversity and language discrimination. Labov’s pioneering work, methods and theories have inspired generations of linguists.  

This very first issue of SPEN, meant to be a tribute to William Labov, invites submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Interaction between spoken language behaviour and social attributes (age, gender, social class…);
• Labov’s Principles and the “three waves” of variation studies;
• The relationship between sociolinguistics and phonology/phonetics;
• Methods in sociolinguistic data collection (sociolinguistic interview, corpus design, field recording techniques, speaker sampling and selection…);
• Ethical issues (informed consent, personal data collection, anonymization, data management…);
• Issues with discriminating between noise and variation in spoken corpora (e.g. vowel normalization and statistical modelling);
• Phonetic and/or phonological variation in synchrony and sound change in diachrony from a Labovian perspective;
• The concurrent rise in popularity of sociolinguistics and other theoretical and methodological frameworks amongst linguists;
• The evolution of sociolinguistics as a field;
• The influence of sociolinguistics on linguistic theory;
• The role of sociolinguistics in synchronic and diachronic studies;
• The legacy of Labov’s work in contemporary phonological studies.

The list above consists of only a few suggestions and is by no means exhaustive. Submissions dealing with other topics related to English phonetics and phonology will also be considered. Submissions that do not align with the present issue’s scope will be duly considered, but assigned to the Varia section.

Timeline (of the publication process)

• February 2026: Call for papers
• April 30 2026: Deadline for submitting abstracts (to christophe.coupe@u-cergy.fr)
• May 31 2026: Evaluation decisions notified to authors
• October 31 2026: Deadline for submitting papers
• November-December 2026: Proofreading of papers by the evaluation committee
• December 2026: Authors’ corrections
• January 2027: Deadline for sending in final versions of papers
• February 2027: Publication

Contact details

Submissions (abstract and papers) will be submitted to christophe.coupe@u-cergy.fr. Submissions will be anonymously peer-reviewed by a scientific committee composed of specialists in their fields.

Abstracts

Your abstract must be between 3,000 and 6,000 characters (including spaces and references). Please include a title, and five to six relevant keywords.

Papers

While English is recommended, papers in French are also accepted. There is no page limit; however, all papers should include an abstract (between 3,000 and 6,000 characters) provided in both English and French.

(Posted 1 March 2026)

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Irish Studies: Legacies and Futures. Special Issue 3/2026 of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia.
Extended submission deadline of completed essays: 1 May 2026.

Guest editors:

• Brian Ó Conchubhair (University of Notre Dame) boconch1@nd.edu 
• Erika Mihálycsa (Babeș-Bolyai University) erika.mihalycsa@ubbcluj.ro

Publication presentation

In December 2024, a group of international Irish Studies scholars gathered in Cluj, Romania to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Babeș-Bolyai University’s MA programme in Irish Studies – to this day the only postgraduate degree offering a cross-disciplinary perspective on Irish culture, literature and history at any Central/Eastern European university. When the MA programme, initially designed as Irish Writing and Its Contexts, was created in 1999, Ireland and Central/Eastern Europe were entering a decade of hopes for deeper European integration and democratisation in their regions and worldwide. It was a time that witnessed the rapid globalising of Irish Studies, backed by Celtic Tiger optimism. However, that decade would also bring in far-reaching changes that prompted, in our domains of knowledge and across the humanities, a thorough overhaul of ways of seeing and framing difference. At the start of the Cluj ISMA, global Irish Studies was dominated by postcolonial rehistoricising and recontextualising approaches pivoting on rigorous archival studies. Importantly, the early 2000s saw a definite decline in the understanding of literary culture as part of the anthropological program of “inventing Ireland”, to quote the title of one of Declan Kiberd’s seminal books that to this day underpins our discipline; a transition from culture understood as projecting a shared sense of identity and future, to “after Ireland” (to quote another title by Kiberd), that is, to an understanding of literature as operating in a planetary field, fully enmeshed with other forms and modes of imagining personhood, creaturely life and vulnerability. 

Lego, legare: as the Latin etymon of the first word in our title implies, “legacies” translates as chords binding future developments or meshing their potential unfoldings with that which the past bequeaths, in the sense of both an alignment with existing lines of research and an opening up of fields of inquiry towards future possibilities. In fact, in the quarter century since the Cluj ISMA started, literary and cultural studies – Irish Studies included – have shown a pervasive preoccupation with questions of ethics and biopolitics that cut across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, human and nonhuman geographies and habitats. Consequently, the curriculum taught today is informed by corporeal studies, trauma studies, new materialism(s), different posthumanisms, animal studies, and ecocriticism, whose investigations as a rule reveal the ontological and ethical tangle of literary phenomena with earthly life. 

Irish culture has often been forced by history to experiment with modes of being, ways of transmission and aesthetic forms that widely deviated from established norms and genres, received notions of the status and social role of culture, and canonical aesthetics. Given the rapid, dramatic changes Ireland underwent since the millennium turn, to the exceptionally progressive post-Celtic Tiger state, Irish culture is again among the “first respondents” to the multiple, intersectional crises affecting all earthlings. Irish culture’s public framing has similarly continued to change. An almost symbolic illustration could be the transition from the “greening” of the towering modernist self-exiles, whose names came to adorn Dublin’s contemporary architectural landmarks (the “James Joyce” and “Samuel Beckett” bridges across the Liffey designed by international star architect Santiago Calatrava) to the naming of an offshore patrol vessel participating in UN humanitarian missions after the latter: the LÉ Samuel Beckett, which rescued around 1,000 refugees in the Mediterranean before the pandemic. 

Twenty-five years since the founding of ISMA in Cluj, we invite proposals for essays on any aspect that perspectivises these legacies anew, for a retrospective and prospective re-threading of our thoughts on Irish culture. We seek papers that explore Irish literature and its modes of questioning and provoking putative certainties, of subverting established norms and forms that corresponded to social, political and cultural power structures. Proposals related to these and any other aspects of the multifarious “tense future” ahead of us are also welcome. 

Submissions

Extended submission deadline of completed essays: May 1, 2026. Articles should adhere to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the journal’s stylesheet:

https://studia.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/index.php/subbphilologia/article/view/6341/6042 

and should be sent to the following addresses:

• erika.mihalycsa@ubbcluj.ro 
• philologia.studia@ubbcluj.ro
• boconch1@nd.edu 

CFP

For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.

(Posted 11 February 2026)

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Journal of The Short Story in English (JSSE): “Defiance in 21st–century South African short stories”.
Extended deadline for abstract submissions: 1 September 2026.

Publication presentation 

The short story is the short fiction genre in which South African literature has most consistently excelled. It experienced a literary “renaissance” in transitioning from apartheid to a non-racial South Africa (MacKenzie 2010). However, while short stories of the early 1990s marked the hopeful vision of a ‘rainbow nation, ‘post-2000 short stories reflect increasing generic diversification and a range of aesthetic practices symptomatic of the thwarted promises of the country’s political transition (Sandwith 2022). This special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) will examine the 21st-century South African short story genre through the prism of defiance. How is defiance re-imagined in post-2000 South African writing? Is there a new poetics of defiance emerging in contemporary short stories? How do the shades of defiance, in form and substance, reflect and address the complexities of the country’s cultural, social and political realities?

Full CFP: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4636 

Timeline 

• Abstract submissions: 1 September 2026
• Notification of provisional acceptance : 14 September 2026
• Completed papers: 1 March 2027
• Publication in Autumn 2027

Website address

https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4636

Contact details 

DefianceJSSE2027@protonmail.com

CFP

For further details, please check the original call inserted below.

(Posted 28 May 2025. Updated 10 June 2026)

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Lea – Quaderni di Lea. Transimperial Encounters: Networks of Cultural and Literary Exchange Between India and Europe, 1870-1947.
Deadline for contributions: 8 June 2026.

Edited by Ujjwal Jana (University of Delhi) and Greta Perletti (University of Trento)

Publication presentation

This special issue of the journal LEA seeks to explore the transimperial intellectual, cultural, and political exchanges between India and Europe in the colonial period (1870-1947) by examining the complex, multidirectional flows of ideas, people, and cultural forms across imperial boundaries. While the notion of ‘transimperial encounters’ immediately evokes postcolonial theory and frameworks, the issue also intends to respond to the recent ‘global turn’ of Victorian studies, with scholars advocating for the need to “widen” (Banerjee, Fong and Michie 2021) or “undiscipline” the field (Chatterjee, Christoff and Wong 2020). The special issue Transimperial Encounters builds on such approaches by investigating how exchanges between the East and West – whether through travel, political activism, literary production, philosophical or religious discourse – reshaped anti-colonial thought, cultural movements, and intellectual traditions on both sides of the colonial divide. 

The issue is especially interested to explore transimperial cultural movements like feminism, radicalism, vegetarianism etc. (Gandhi 2006; Selbin 2024), as well as transimperial literary genres like science fiction, spiritual autobiographies, realism etc. (Joshi 2002; Boehmer 2015; Gibson 2019). We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines, including literary studies, history, intellectual history, cultural studies, and transnational studies. In addition, we aim to bring together scholars working on different national and linguistic contexts to explore how anti-colonial and cultural networks functioned beyond the Anglo-Indian binary. We thus encourage also contributions that examine less-explored East/West connections (e.g., between India and Italy, France, Germany, etc.), as well as the role of multilingual and cross-cultural literary production.

We invite proposals that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes: transimperial intellectual networks and literary genres; religious and philosophical exchanges; transimperial perspectives on  feminism and the ‘New Woman’; Anti-colonialism and radical thought in India and the West; models of education and pedagogy across empires; theoretical perspectives on transimperialism.

Timeline 

• Article ready for publication (no longer than 6,000-7,000 words in length) should be submitted by 8 June 2026
• Accepted articles (following double blind peer reviewing) will be published in February 2027.

Website addresses

Call for Papers – FUP Journals
Transimperial Encounters – Call for Papers

Contact details

• Dr. Greta Perletti, greta.perletti@unitn.it
• Prof. Ujjwal Jana, ujana@english.du.ac.in 

CFP

For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.

(Posted 4 October 2025)

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Representations of Reality in The Post-Millennial Novel in English, 2001–2025.
Deadline for contributions: 30 June 2026.

Monograph edited by: Bożena Kucała and Robert Kusek (Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków)

Publication presentation

Although most readers have an intuitive understanding of what realism is, in literary theory it has been an increasingly problematic concept to define – partly because of its contingency upon shifting ideas about reality and changing literary methods of rendering it. Chris Baldick signals some of its most contentious aspects when he defines realism as “a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or ‘reflecting’ faithfully an actual way of life” (2004: 212). The apparent verisimilitude is, of course, a matter of literary conventions rather than a transparent mirror held up to reality. Following the twentieth-century linguistic turn, the question of representation appears much more complex. However, in her 2003 book Realism Pam Morris still asserts the viability of realist literature in the context of the perceived disjunction between language and reality; in Morris’s formulation, literary realism is “any writing that is based upon an implicit or explicit assumption that it is possible to communicate about a reality beyond the writing” (2003: 6).

Despite its many antagonists, including modernist or postmodernist experimentation and ontological uncertainty, realism has survived and even proved receptive to certain new techniques. A number of different types of realism have emerged (Holland 2020: 31–32); however, as Mary K. Holland argues, there is “an important continuity running through all of these forms of realism: their belief in and commitment to representing a material world that is primary and defines human experience” (2020: 255). In her view, realism prioritises “the real, material, and physical over language and representation” (Holland 2020: 40), choosing descriptions of the empirical world over fantasy, idealisation, escapism, utopia, dystopia, and the supernatural. It also focuses on an intersubjective, communal, socially-made reality, “rather than splintering [human experience] into a compendium of subject positions” (Holland 2020: 256). 

Krystyna Stamirowska argues that, despite being accused of naïveté and lack of sophistication, realist narratives “are – paradoxically – perhaps most significant through their acceptance of the major challenge – that of justifying their own role in the pattern of human life, and a refusal to be consigned to the status of a game or irrelevance” (1992: 9). Even though science and philosophy provide effective ways of describing reality, the uniqueness of literature, in Stamirowska’s words, resides in its capacity to offer “a product of an individual experience of the world, transformed by imagination” (1992: 8). More recently, Timothy Bewes has echoed this approach by asserting “the singularity of literature” as “a form whose truths and insights seem ever less transferable to, or comprehensible within, standard historical, scientific, or political vocabularies” (2012: 160).

The planned volume, Representations of Reality in the Post-millennial Novel in English, 2001−2025, will be a tribute to the late Professor Stamirowska’s scholarship, and a continuation of her work on contemporary realism. Her 1992 monograph, Representations of Reality in the Post-war English Novel 1957–1975, analysed selected fiction in relation to the social and cultural context of postwar Britain. The editors of Representations of Reality in the Post-millennial Novel in English, 2001−2025 invite articles on 21^st-century fiction in English that seeks to represent the experience of living in the contemporary world, in a mode that may be broadly described as realistic. Suggested topics include:

• legacies of 19^th-century realism in contemporary fiction
• precursors of contemporary realist fiction – realism after realism(s)
• genres and modes of contemporary realism
• historical events and their 21^st-century representation 
• class struggles, gender troubles, and racial tensions
• global crises, local responses, and  their social implications
• migration, exile, and intercultural encounters
• self and community in contemporary fiction
• ecological catastrophes and health hazards – Anthropocene realism and pandemic fiction
• technological developments and new modes of communication

Timeline (of the publication process)

Please send a 300-word proposal and a short bio to 

• robert.kusek@uj.edu.pl or 
• bozena.kucala@uj.edu.pl 

by 30^th June. 

Completed articles will be expected by 15^th December 2026. 

The monograph will be published by the Jagiellonian University Press (Kraków) or another internationally recognised publisher.

Contact details

• bozena.kucala@uj.edu.pl
• robert.kusek@uj.edu.pl 

CFP

For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.

(Posted 28 February 2026)

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Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST): 2026 Fall Issue: Science Fiction and the American Imagination.
Deadline for full-text submissions: 15 July 2026.

Edited by: Dr. Firuze Güzel

Publication presentation

The guest editor of this themed issue of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey seeks original, previously unpublished manuscripts that examine science fiction novels, short stories, collections, films, TV series, as well as games, comics, and graphic novels, within the American context. Aside from the keywords given below, interdisciplinary and comparative studies of SF literature and media alongside analyses by sub-genre, era, or author are also welcome to be included in this issue.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Theoretical and Critical Discussions of the SF Genre
• Posthumanist, Transhumanist, Metahumanist, and Antihumanist Discourses
• Artificial Intelligence and Human-Machine Interactions
• Techno-Scientific Dystopias/Utopias
• Gender and Body Politics 
• Representations of Race and Ethnicity 
• Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurisms, and Latinx Futurism  
• Constructions of Religion and Belief Systems 
• Philosophical Dimensions / Thought Experiments
• Moral and Ethical Quandaries
• Envisioning the Other: Robots, Aliens, Monsters, etc.  
• Ideology, Politics, and Governmental Control 
• Postapocalyptic Narrations and Precarity
• Cyberpunk and Its Offshoots
• Space Opera, Space as Frontier, and Space Colonization
• Climate Fiction and Environmental Concerns
• Space, Architecture, and Urbanism 
• History as Future / Future as Present

Contact details

Correspondence should be directed to: Dr. Firuze Güzel, Guest Editor 

firuzeguzel@yahoo.com
iruze.guzel@ege.edu.tr

For general questions or problems about JAST, please contact Dr. Nisa Harika Güzel Köşker, Editor-in-Chief
nkosker@ankara.edu.tr

(Posted 22 January 2026)

“Rivers and Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes”, edited volume.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 1 November 2023.

Volume edited by Dr. Doaa Omran

Volume theme presentation 

Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” This perhaps epitomizes the concept of my forthcoming edited book on “Rivers and Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes.” This project explores literary works that depict how we embark on such journeys to lose ourselves, to find ourselves, and sometimes, maybe, to be transformed into someone else somewhere else for a while. We travel across these liminal spaces to nourish our souls and, in some bleaker instances, to cross to the other world. A river forms a calmer, less-stormy frontier than a sea, a zone where one has the leisure to speculate and reflect on oneself even when stepping out of one’s comfort zone. If on a riverboat, the journey is relatively slow as river waters are shallow, and the ship needs to maintain a specific speed limit. Because the land is visible on both sides, one feels secure looking at the banks even when temporally not treading on them. This sense of assurance makes journeying across rivers a convenient trope for self-discovery. The physical and psychological liminalities experienced along rivers have inspired authors from multiple cultures.

I have received some abstracts, but am looking for a few more contributions. I am looking for essays that cover riverine journeys on almost every continent. I am particularly interested in abstracts that read riverine works on the Seine, the Volga, Rhein, Danube, etc. A paper on Olivia Laing’s To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface would also interest me. In addition to drawing upon canonical works journeying along rivers, I am also looking for less-known works exploring traveling along these waterways. I want to invite scholars to engage in comparative analyses of different river journeys across the globe––an essential literary trope that has been ignored. 

Timeline 

• The Abstract submission deadline is November 1^st, 2023. 
• Submit Book Proposal to Publisher by December 31^st, 2023.
• Chapters are expected by May/June 2024. 

Website

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/05/10/rivers-and-journeys-discovering-new-selves-and-new-tropes

Contact details

Domran@unm.edu

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Lingvisticae Investigationes: Fuzziness, vagueness and underdetermination in reference.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 10 November 2023.

Issue edited by

Laure Gardelle & Frédéric Landrangin

Presentation 

The act of reference links a linguistic expression, called a referring expression, to one or more entities that belong to the extralinguistic world or to a mental representation of a possible world. Most referring expressions, in their context of use, allow for the precise identification of a referent. But in a number of cases – which will be the focus of the present issue – it is not clear which referent(s) are really involved in the act of reference. This concerns, among others, the phenomena sometimes described as a case of fuzzy, vague or underdetermined reference, such as plural referents, evolving referents, human impersonal pronouns.

With these examples, the very nature of fuzzy reference challenges the principle of an absolute search for the exact referent. Why can we say ‘the Gauls invented many Celtic cosmetic instruments and products’, when it was not the same Gauls who invented each of the instruments or cosmetic products? Why choose ‘it’, not ‘them’, even though the referent is clearly in several pieces, and why is it that some languages, such as French, do not license a personal pronoun in an exact translation? Why does the language offer so many possibilities to switch from singular to plural (‘Paul bought a Toyota because they are sturdy’, Kleiber 2001), from part to whole (‘Brussels’… ‘the European Commission’), from a given referent to a near-identical one (Recasens et al. 2010), from several referents to resumptive anaphora capable of regrouping and recategorizing? Above all, why do these cases of vagueness and imprecision pose no problem at all for the recipient (Sanford et al. 2008), who interprets the message without wondering whether he/she has identified the referent(s) precisely and accurately?

Timeline 

• Deadline for submission: 10 November 2023
• Notifications to authors: 20 December 2023
• Submission of final versions: 10 February 2024
• Publication: the second half of 2024

Website

https://www.lingvisticae-investigationes.org/

Contact details

laure.gardelle@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

frederic.landragin@ens.psl.eu

CFP

(Posted 12 March 2023)

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European Journal of English Studies (EJES), Volume 29 (to be published in 2025): “Wasted Lives in Contemporary Fiction: Bodies That Do Not Matter”.
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2023.

Guest editors: Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz (University of Málaga, Spain) and Simonetta Falchi (University of Sassari, Italy)

In one of his seminal works, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (2004), Zygmunt Bauman defines the idea of “wasted lives” as a ripple of modernity creating the figure of “the outcast.” According to him, the production of “human waste” – or more precisely, wasted lives, the “superfluous” populations of migrants, refugees, and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernisation. The concept of wasted lives deconstructs the impact of this transformation. Coping with “human waste” provides a key to comprehending otherwise incomprehensible aspects of our shared life, from the strategies of global dominance to the most intimate human relationships. Contemporary and past societies believe themselves to be paragons of civilisation and progress. Yet a growing population of “undesirable people” has invaded public life and culture and represents a threat to class values. This situation is reflected in numerous literary and visual works created during the last few decades.

On the other hand, stigma has become a prominent indicator of contemporary and historical populations that have been subjected to discrimination for social and political reasons. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, stigma can be defined as “a mark of disgrace or infamy; a sign of severe censure or condemnation, regarded as impressed on a person or thing; a ‘brand.’” In light of this concept, Imogen Tyler reflects on how stigma changes the ways in which people think about themselves and others in Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality (2020): this concept represents an assault on human dignity through its technologies of division and dehumanisation. Compassion, hope, and solidarity are destroyed, since stigma, as a form of power, is embedded in social relations linked to colonialism and patriarchy, as well as to inequalities of class, race, gender, and sexuality written on the body of “the other.” Stigma always happens in historical contexts where violence, discipline, and punishment coalesce to produce devastating effects on people’s health and well-being. Social organisations frequently portray the disenfranchisement and distress of people living in poverty as the result of their poor behaviour, lack of discipline, and shamelessness.

There are many instances of contemporary literature and culture whose aim is to recover the voices of stigmatised people whose lives are considered wasted. Their bodies have stigma inscribed onto them because of their alleged lack of humanity. However, stigma can also be viewed as a mark of resistance in both historical and contemporary societies, and this is reflected in a number of these literary and cultural works that represent an attempt to reconstruct the lives of marginalised people.

We welcome proposals that deal with cultural and literary productions that are concerned with stigma, wasted lives, and bodies that do not matter in the context of past and contemporary societies. Essays can cover a range of approaches and methodologies, including linguistic, stylistic, and philological ones, as well as theoretical-critical and translational elements of contemporary literary texts and their audio-visual re-mediations. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The disposable bodies of the poor, refugees, and migrants as superfluous populations in cultural productions
• The lives of outcasts, criminals, “deviants,” and prostitutes as carriers of stigma in literature and visual culture
• Disabled and sick bodies and the lack of humanity attributed to them in past and contemporary societies
• The role of disease and contagion in the spread of social evils in literary and visual representations of marginalised individuals
• The idea of modernity as a false mirror of civilisation and progress in the face of “undesirable people” 
• The portrayal of poverty and fate as resulting from a lack of discipline and shamelessness and the violent stigmatization of populations in contemporary and past contexts

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max.100 words) should be sent to both editors by 30 November 2023: Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz, mirr@uma.es and Simonetta Falchi, sfalchi@uniss.it 

EJES operates in a two-stage review process.

1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by  30 November 2023.
2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a late spring 2024 deadline.
3. The full-length essays undergo a second round of review, and a final selection for publication is made. Selected essays are revised and then resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2024 for publication in 2025.

EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html and https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current

CFPs for Vol. 29

(Posted 8 April 2023, Updated 18 April 2023)

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European Journal of English Studies (EJES), Volume 29 (to be published in 2025): “The Poetics and Politics of Gender, Mobility and Migration in the New Anglophone Literatures”.
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2023.

Guest Editors: Nadia Butt (University of Giessen), Radhika Mohanram (Cardiff University) and Michelle Stork (University of Frankfurt)

This special issue sets out to address the poetics and politics of gender in the New Anglophone literatures of mobility and migration. Considering the “mobilities turn” in the humanities (Sheller and Urry 2006, 207-226; Aguiar et al. 2019, 4) and its connection to migration, this issue aims to investigate how Anglophone literature by writers of diverse cultural backgrounds provides new perspectives on gender. The major objectives of the special issue are to examine both gender and the literary interrogations of Europe’s cultural encounters, as protagonists travel, move and migrate between cultures and continents, both literally and metaphorically. 

Focusing on writers working in English, the special issue interrogates how mobility and migration not only shape and transform the genre of the novel, prone to generic overlaps with travel literature, the epistolary novel, the memoir, the Bildungsroman, narratives of displacement or exile, journey or quest narratives and refugee narratives, but also facilitate our understanding of culture, nation, gender and identity in relation to various forms of movement. According to Aguiar et al., mobility “operates at multiple scales of meaning, any and all of which constitutes society’s mobile culture” (2019, 2). Likewise, migration is a “continual” and “multidirectional” (Ahmad 2019, xxvii) experience. Not only may gender propel movement in the first place, but “[e]ach journey takes the unmistakeable imprint of gender” (Siegel 2004, 9). 

In light of current research, we seek approaches to mobility and migration in the New Anglophone literatures from feminist, queer and transgender perspectives showing how gender shapes the experience of movement “across the lines” (Cronin 2000; Klooß 1998). We are very much interested in representations of gender with reference to mobility and migration as perceived by writers of the ‘Global South’, whose works are deeply engaged with global cultural entanglements. 

We are keen to address the following questions in this issue:

1. Why is it important to investigate the poetics and politics of gender, mobility and migration in the New Anglophone Literatures?
2. How can we grapple with the poetics and politics of gender in narratives of mobility and migration in the face of global modernity?
3. How do the New Anglophone Literatures bring out the dynamics of gender, mobility, and migration in relation to the Global South and the Global North? How useful is it to speak of “gendered racism” to allude to the racist oppression of migrant women “as structured by racist and ethnicist perceptions of gender roles” (Castles et al. 2014, 62; Essed 1991, 31)?
4. What is the role of transcultural and transnational relations in examining the nexus of gender, mobility and migration?
5. What is the role of diaspora, nomadism, exile and forced migration in shaping the poetics and politics of gender in a literary work? 

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to both editors by 30 November 2023: Nadia Butt, Nadia.Butt@anglistik.uni-giessen.de, Radhika Mohanram, MohanramR1@cardiff.ac.uk, and Michelle Stork, m.stork@em.uni-frankfurt.de. 

EJES operates in a two-stage review process:

1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2023.
2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a late spring 2024 deadline.
3. The full-length essays undergo a second round of review, and a final selection for publication is made. Selected essays are revised and then resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2024 for publication in 2025.

EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html and https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current.

CFPs for Vol. 29

(Posted 18 April 2023)

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“The Politics of Home” – A Special Issue of Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power.
Deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2023.

Guest Editors: Kristin Aubel and Sarah Heinz (Wien)

The notion of home, while often associated with warmth, security, and personal sanctuary, is inherently intertwined with broader socio-political dynamics. It therefore encompasses more than a physical space, and it is never neutral, private, or simply ‘ours’. It is where inside and outside, private and public, as well as built forms, affective ties, and cultural imaginaries intersect in a politics of home. At their core, such politics of home encapsulate the intricate interplay between individuals, communities, and the broader structures and institutions of power that shape our lived experiences. This special issue seeks to explore the various ways in which ideas and ideals of homes are constructed, contested, and negotiated within the complex tapestry of society, highlighting the pivotal role played by political, cultural, artistic, and historical contexts. It therefore seeks to cover the multiple forms and functions that a politics of home can have, as well as the multiple forms in which literatures, the arts, media, activism, or concrete home-making practices negotiate and grapple with the diverse manifestations of such politics of home and their impact on individuals and communities.

Understanding home through the politics attached to it opens up a discussion about practices, selves, and relationships within, through, and beyond the home. Via objects put into specific places and their use, through activities like decorating, cooking, or playing, as well as through the social relations that these practices create or inhibit, the feelings they elicit, and the memories they amass, home is created, lived, and imagined, enabling the person performing these activities to experience, ‘feel,’ and remember home as a place, as social relations, and as a site for individuality and selfhood. This process can have positive and negative outcomes, it can be liberating and constricting, but it is never static, whole, or fixed. It is related to and produced by the interplay between public and private processes as well as chosen and imposed social relations. In effect, home is always already shaped by the power structures of a given community, because it is produced and re-produced within what Doreen Massey calls the flows of the power geometry between homes and other places (1991: 25).

Accordingly, transdisciplinary research of home has outlined that home is a multidimensional term that may refer to physical structures like a house, social units like a family, a place of origins, concrete practices, or affective ties. It is assessed as a place, a practice, an imaginary, a feeling, or a sense of self, sometimes all at the same time (Mallett 2004: 62-89). Home is also a scalable concept that may start with the mind or body as home, a house as home, and end with a nation or even the globe as home (Marston 2000; Marston 2004). These multiple scales and dimensions of home can explain the terminological and conceptual vagueness of the term, but they can also account for the relative effortlessness with which common-sense understandings of home as well as political rhetorics often conflate house and home, home and homeland, or home, family, and forms of (national) identity.

In consequence, the notion of home is a kaleidoscope of dimensions, scales, and meanings. Nevertheless, what many associations and definitions share is their seeming stability and boundedness and their sense of home as a positive place of belonging or becoming (Fox 2016: 2-4). In these understandings, home is the centre of the self and a place where meaning is made. It is thus seen as an essential setting for the grounding of one’s identity. In this perspective, home enables the grounded self to extend its selfhood into the outside world, as claimed by Heidegger and Bachelard in their respective phenomenologies of home (Heidegger 1993; Bachelard 1994). As Bachelard famously writes: “[…] by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves” (Bachelard 1994: xxxvii). The logical flipside of such organic notions of home is, however, that “all forms of mobility, which ‘disembed’ individuals from their local communities, have been seen to undermine social cohesion” and have been associated with danger, pollution, and destruction (Morley 2017: 59). In this logic, modernity and modern forms of building are seen as a threat to organic forms of dwelling. Modernity is thus judged as leaving the human subject existentially homeless (Dovey 1985).

Such conceptualisations of home as integrating one’s life into an existential whole have not remained unchallenged, most crucially due to their lack of attention to the implicit power politics attached to home. They have been criticised for their romanticisation (especially of gender roles and unpaid labour within the home), their static and masculinist underpinnings (Young 1997), and for their lack of understanding of how experiences of dwelling cannot be separated from social structures and often discriminatory institutions that make and shape our experiences of home. Seeing both individual and communal experiences of home as entangled with issues of power outlines how home can be threatening rather than integrating for some groups, e.g. for women, asylum seekers, or people with disabilities (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 14). Home has therefore been explored as indeed central “for the construction and reconstruction of one’s self” (Young 1997: 153), but the focus on home as a positive, integrative site for (implicitly white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, or heterosexual) identity formation has been amended by the study of home as a site of potentially violent, constricting identifications, e.g. of gender, sexuality, or ‘race’, to name but a few (see for example Back et al. 2007; Gorman-Murray 2006; Pink 2004). These explorations have included more recent phenomena like the Covid-19 lockdowns and the governmental imperative to ‘stay at home’, more established analyses of the logics of imperialism and colonialism, as well as assessments of the securitisation of nation-states along the lines of a home in need of defense in what William Walters has termed “domopolitics” (2004). 

In effect, a focus on politics of home and home-making makes visible that “[h]ome does not simply exist, but is made” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 23). A look at concrete imaginaries, practices, and forms of home can make explicit different, concrete uses made of such politics of home and outline how artists, activists, and other practitioners across different fields have made visible how politics of home shape how people and communities can or cannot co-exist. 

In this special issue of Coils of the Serpent, we want to address the variety of forms and functions of politics of home and the different engagements with these politics across the arts, disciplines, and historical contexts. We welcome contributions that engage with politics of home and their representation and contestation in the areas of cultural and literary studies, (human) geography, urban studies, anthropology, or sociology, to name but a few. We are inviting contributions on topics that include (but are not limited to)

• narrating and representing politics of home across periods, genres, and media,
• forms of community and social relationships enabled or restricted within the home,
• home as a site of inclusion and/or exclusion,
• the politics and political rhetorics of home and homeland,
• home and home-making practices as sites of resistance,
• domestic violence and the home as a site of threat,
• the home as a prison,
• the politics of homelessness and its regulation, management, and representation,
• economies of home and the role of paid/unpaid labour,
• diaspora, migration, transnational mobility and their re-assessments of politics of home,
• planetary and environmental perspectives on politics of home,
• politics of home in urban planning and gentrification,
• the politics of specific sites of home, e.g. the suburb or the owner-occupied house-as-home,
• the body politics of home and bodyless homes (e.g. in cyberspace).

Please send an abstract of approximately 500 words and a short bio to the editors Kristin Aubel and Sarah Heinz (kristin.aubel@univie.ac.at & sarah.heinz@univie.ac.at) by 30 November 2023. Abstracts should include a title, topic outline, and information on the kind of text (essay, statement, scholarly article) as well as the approximate length of the planned text. Submissions can be in the form of a traditional journal article, but this is not a requirement. Submissions can also be more creative, of a personal nature, and/or experimental. The editors will get back to you by 22 December 2023. Full articles will be due 31 May 2024. The special issue is scheduled to be released in winter 2024. Please read the journal’s submission guidelines: https://coilsoftheserpent.org/submissions/

Works Cited (see the attached CFP)

CFP

(Posted 14 July 2023)

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Novel Media / Media Novel: Theorising Digital Media Cultures in the Contemporary Novel.
Deadline for expressions of interest/abstracts: 1 December 2023.

Contemporary novels are marbled with representations of digital media. Despite the notable attention to digital technologies already present in post-war literature, the twenty-first century has witnessed the unprecedented integration of digital media into everyday lives, where digital objects and systems are shaping social and cultural paradigms anew. Contemporary writers, in and through their writing, actively engage with the digital media experience of the twenty-first century. In Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) the protagonist grapples with her personal history of trauma through the short form of tweets and in Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2023) the world of game design structures the protagonists’ experiences of the world from early childhood to middle-age. Such writing complicates the configuration of digital media and traditional print form and engages in innovative and experimental ways with how digital cultures shape our human experience. This special issue seeks contributions about ‘the digital’ in ‘media novels’ – that is novels “in which media other than writing appear as a thematic or structural element” (Punday 2012: 3). From the daily routine of email writing to social media browsing, from Twitter politicians to Big Data surveillance, and the effects of a digital landscape made up of platforms: our contemporary digital economy has changed the habitual and political aspects of everyday life in which we find our minds and bodies structurally repurposed and affectively mobilised. These shifts in our media culture are made visible when digital media find their way into literary narratives, when the technicity and politics of the digital meets its poetics. 

Rather than reading the contemporary novel as mimetic in nature, we invite papers which explore to what extent novels can function as a vital source of theorising the digital media cultures of our times. What are the societal contexts of staging digital media forms in literary writing in which the presence of digital media is not only the background for everyday life but plays a central role in the formal make-up of the narrative? Could we go as far as announcing that some of the contemporary novels featuring digital experience constitute the ‘novel of digital ideas’ as a new configuration of the ‘novel of ideas’ (LeMahieu 2015)? What, if any, is the symbolic function of digital media in contemporary writing? And how can interdisciplinary readings of contemporary literature contribute to innovative ways of theorising media and literature? Therefore, instead of limiting contributions to readings facilitated by current approaches within media studies, we are looking for critical contributions that develop ways to theorise digital media cultures through, with, and in contemporary fiction. Contemporary fiction, in our understanding, thus serves as a vehicle for theory formation, or even the formation of entirely new scholarly fields (cf. Rimmôn-Qênān 2004; Mack 2014).

To that end, we invite contributions with a critical perspective from literary studies, media studies, cultural studies, philosophy, gender and queer studies, comparative studies, postcolonial studies, educational studies or any other relevant cognate disciplines. Possible topics for contributions include but are not limited to: 

• The representation and structural incorporation of digital media forms (social media, emails, video games etc.) in novels 
• Digital media as a symbolic form or a cultural logic 
• The role of fiction in negotiating the interface of digital media and human experience The limitations of print within the novel form 
• New formalism and digital media 
• The novel vs/and digital short forms (Tweets, captions, text messages etc.) 
• E(-)pistolary narratives 
• Digital media and (post) pandemic experience 
• Key figures of digital culture (hackers, programmers, users etc) 
• The ‘digital divide’ and/or discriminatory and emancipatory aspects of digital media The role of digital media in forming online identities and communities 
• Young adult fiction and the formative role of digital media during adolescence 

We would particularly like to encourage early-career researchers and researchers from underrepresented backgrounds to consider submitting an expression of interest. Additionally, we strongly encourage submissions that showcase awareness of issues related to diversity and inclusivity and contribute to promoting works by authors from underrepresented backgrounds. If you are interested in contributing to this special issue, please submit your 300–500-word 

abstract (+bibliography), or an equivalent expression of interest in your preferred multimedia format to novelmedia@st-andrews.ac.uk. We are also commissioning book review essays (circa 3000 words) which critically engage with recent scholarship on the relationship between the novel and digital cultures. We are open to receiving suggestions for books you would like to review; however we also have a list of possible books for review available upon request. 

Deadline for expressions of interest/abstracts: 1 December 2023 

Bibliography 

• LeMahieu, Michael. ‘The Novel of Ideas.’ In The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945, edited by David James, 177-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 
• Mack, Michael. ‘Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths.’ In The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, edited by Barry Stocker and Michael Mack, 429-41. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 
• Punday, Daniel. Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 
• Rimmôn-Qênān, Šûlammît. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London/New York: Routledge, 2004.

Please do not hesitate to contact us at novelmedia@st-andrews.ac.uk if you have any questions.

CFP

(Posted 20 October 2023)

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Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities: Imagination Today: Between Theory and Practice of Phantasia.
Deadline for abstracts: 1 December 2023.

This special issue of the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities in 2026 will delve into the challenging debates abundant in 20th and 21st-century continental philosophy about the place of imagination not only in aesthetics, but also in metaphysics, epistemology, and practical philosophy, as well as its importance in the separate, yet intricately connected domains of literary theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and the behavioral sciences.

Since the history of the concept of imagination can be traced back to the archaic times of Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle, and later to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the ground-breaking treatment of phantasia and imagination in those works surely invites us to go back in time in search of origins. However, to reconsider the value imagination still holds in theoretical – and why not – in practical areas of the human experience, focusing on interpretations mostly related to the traditions of modernity will be a small attempt to narrow our analysis in the vast sea of ongoing discussions about the nature/structure/role/purpose of imagination.
We propose, therefore, a specific return to the traditions of Kant and the school of German Idealism though probing those philosophical contributions from the vantage point of modern and contemporary continental philosophy and the relevance of these traditions for the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. With a look at the Kantian “transcendental imagination” in the groundbreaking Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787) and the role of imagination in the Critique of Judgment (1790), and later the Fichtean “productive imagination,” we would get the sense of preoccupation that Kant and the philosophers after him rightfully ascribe to imagination, not besides, but together with reason. Once the metaphysical and ontological importance of imagination is secured, it will be Nietzsche who will disrupt the status quo that, it might be argued, had been preserved for too long, in order to replace the revered concepts of truth, the good, and reason in the Western tradition with the poetic, the visionary, the Dionysian in the very end of the long 19th century. Europe would react to the Nietzschean revolution not just as a gesture of philosophical dissent, but as an epochal marker of what we call ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’. The long shadows of those philosophers will later re-emerge in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, to name just a few.

While the German tradition in philosophy is an impressive, challenging line to adopt in the approach to the concept of imagination, the rest of Europe provides just as many interesting contributions to consider: philosophers as different as Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Ricoeur, Bachelard and Bataille, Foucault and the extremely impressive post-1970 tradition in French philosophy are matched by diverse voices in sociology, anthropology, and literary theory who explore in various ways the role of imagination in their works. But then again, if we limit the scope to the philosophers, we would have omitted equally important psychoanalysts like Freud, Klein, Lacan, and Kristeva who find a combination of the metaphysical, the ontological and the embodied at work in the patient’s ‘imagines’ and imagination.

We invite papers which significantly engage with the works of the modern European thinkers, from Kant onwards, on the topic of imagination, but, at the same time, we would like to see papers which discuss the important re-interpretations which the 20th and 21st-centuries contribute to the analysis of the role of imagination in the humanities and in the production of cultural artefacts.

Please send an abstract (up to 500 words) and a current cv to artemis.r@unic.ac.cy by 1 December 2023. Notifications of accepted proposals will be sent by 5 January 2024. Complete papers (approx. 9,000-10,000 words) will be due by 1 November 2024. For further inquiries, please contact Prof. Rossie Artemis at the email above. Subject to approval by the responsible editor, special issues of Angelaki are republished 9-12 months after the issue as hardback books in the Angelaki: New Work in the Theoretical Humanities series.

CFP

(Posted 15 November 2023)

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Lingvisticae Investigationes: Fuzziness, vagueness and underdetermination in reference.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 5 December 2023.

Issue edited by Laure GARDELLE & Frédéric LANDRAGIN

Issue theme presentation 

The act of reference links a linguistic expression, called a referring expression, to one or more entities that belong to the extralinguistic world or to a mental representation of a possible world. Most referring expressions, in their context of use, allow for the precise identification of a referent. But in a number of cases – which will be the focus of the present issue – it is not clear which referent(s) are really involved in the act of reference. This concerns, among others, the phenomena sometimes described as a case of fuzzy, vague or underdetermined reference, such as plural referents, evolving referents, human impersonal pronouns.

With these examples, the very nature of fuzzy reference challenges the principle of an absolute search for the exact referent. Why can we say ‘the Gauls invented many Celtic cosmetic instruments and products’, when it was not the same Gauls who invented each of the instruments or cosmetic products? Why choose ‘it’, not ‘them’, even though the referent is clearly in several pieces, and why is it that some languages, such as French, do not license a personal pronoun in an exact translation? Why does the language offer so many possibilities to switch from singular to plural (‘Paul bought a Toyota because they are sturdy’, Kleiber 2001), from part to whole (‘Brussels’… ‘the European Commission’), from a given referent to a near-identical one (Recasens et al. 2010), from several referents to resumptive anaphora capable of regrouping and recategorizing? Above all, why do these cases of vagueness and imprecision pose no problem at all for the recipient (Sanford et al. 2008), who interprets the message without wondering whether he/she has identified the referent(s) precisely and accurately?

Timeline 

• Deadline for submission: 5 December 2023
• Notifications to authors: January 2023
• Submission of final versions: 10 February 2024
• Publication: the second half of 2024

Website

https://www.lingvisticae-investigationes.org/

Contact details

• laure.gardelle@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
• frederic.landragin@ens.psl.eu