Calls for contributions to volumes and special issues of journals – Deadlines January to March 2024

Princes, Monsters, Heroes, Saints: Power, Identity, and the Shining Other in Early English Texts. (Working Title).
Deadline for submission of proposals: 15 January 2024.

Issue edited by Jan Blaschak

Issue theme presentation 

This book idea came from my panel “All that Glitters: Gold, God and the Shining Other in the Beowulf Manuscript and Other Early English Texts,” presented at this year’s Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. In this panel, Alexa Gall, of Cornell University and Kevin Jackson of the University of New Mexico presented exceptional papers which intersected in interesting ways and sparked a lively and productive discussion with the audience.

In this volume, I intend to bring together chapters from a wide range of scholars, from early career and independent scholars to those who are well established in the field. The focus will be to explore how tropes of gold and shining connected with ideas about power and identity in Early English texts. Ideally, these chapters will include everything from material considerations of how gold establishes standing and provides agency, to how this imagery contributes to identity construction from the saintly or heroic to the monstrous other in Early English Texts.

Any theoretical approach, including Thing theory or Affect theory, which may not often have been applied to these tropes, would be welcome. I especially invite papers exploring women’s status, identity and “otherness,” which speaks to ongoing issues, both in understanding Early English culture and literature as well as understanding similar issues today.

Timeline 

We’d like chapter drafts during the summer of 2024.

Contact details

Please email chapter proposals in abstract form to Jan at Blaschak at: eb7549@wayn.edu

Original PDF

(Posted 18 November 2023)


Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia. Special Issue 4/2024: Languages for Specific and Academic Purposes.
Deadline: 15 February 2024.

Special issue information:

This special issue focuses on Languages for Specific Purposes and welcomes papers taking a research, pedagogical or theoretical perspective on the topic.

Language for specific purposes (LSP) is an approach to language education based on identifying the specific language features, discourse practices, and communicative skills of target academic groups, and which recognizes the subject-matter needs and expertise of learners. It sees itself as sensitive to contexts of discourse and action and seeks to develop research-based pedagogies to assist study, research or publication in English. It requires teachers to identify the diversity of disciplinary languages used in the workplace or academy and encourage students to engage analytically with target discourses and develop a critical understanding of the contexts in which they are used. This is probably the most widely adopted approach to language instruction in higher education today, involving thousands of teachers and students across the world.

Students now take a broader and more heterogeneous mix of academic subjects, some of which involve modular or joint degrees and emergent ‘practice-based’ courses such as nursing, management and social work. Further, they now have to deal with a broad range of modalities and presentational forms beyond written texts, and must learn to negotiate a complex web of disciplinary specific text-types, assessment tasks and presentational modes in order first to graduate, and then to operate effectively in the workplace.

This special issue of Studia addresses research on LSP or the application of understandings from it in the classroom. We are not only interested in empirical research but also classroom practices, and theoretical discussions. A point of central importance is that each chapter is directly about specific language instruction, either using English or another language. We are aware that LSP instruction occurs in a wide range of settings, is aimed at learners with various backgrounds (immigrant, foreign language, 3rd language, etc.), operates in various contexts (e.g., genre-based pedagogy, teaching for general or specific academic/occupational purposes), focuses on different modalities (print-based, digital, multimodal, oral), and encompasses a host of teacher activities (e.g., syllabus design, materials development, instructional delivery, provision of feedback, assessment). We are interested in papers covering any topical aspects in these diverse academic contexts.

Manuscript submission information:

You are invited to submit your manuscript at any time before the submission deadline.

In this Special Issue we are interested in publishing full-length articles (6,000-7,000 words including references). All submissions should be in English and relate to the topic of the Special Issue. Please send your papers to the following email addresses:

Please include the following with your submission:

  • Name(s) of author(s), institutional affiliation and bionote
  • Type of submission
  • Working title

For any inquiries about the appropriateness of contribution topics, please contact:

Please refer to the Instructions for Authors to prepare your manuscript: http://studia.ubbcluj.ro/serii/philologia/pdf/Instructions_En.pdf.

Submission deadline: 15 February 2024

More details in the original CFP below:

(Posted 19 November 2023)


Women’s Writing (Taylor & Francis) Special Issue: Unveiling Untold Narratives: Rediscovering the Literary Legacy of Jewish Female Writers and Representations of Jewish Women by Female Writers from the 1700s to the 1920s.
Abstract submission deadline: 28 February 2024.

Guest Edited by Irina Rabinovich and Brygida Gasztold

Description: This compilation seeks to shed light on the often-overlooked voices and hidden gems within the vast tapestry of Jewish women’s writing, as crafted by female authors during a transformative period in history.

Delving into the rich and diverse literary landscape spanning the 18th to the early 20th centuries, this special issue aims to rectify the historical oversight of significant contributions made by Jewish women writers. From the Enlightenment era through the Victorian age and into the early waves of feminism, these women defied societal expectations and challenged the status quo, using the power of the written word to articulate their experiences, dreams, and challenges.

One of the primary goals of this special issue is not only to highlight neglected voices but also to critically examine the representations of Jewish women by female writers during this pivotal period. By doing so, we aim to foster a nuanced understanding of how these representations have shaped and been shaped by cultural, social, and historical contexts. Through a careful exploration of the ways in which Jewish women writers portrayed their own identities, as well as the characters they created, we seek to unravel the complexities of gender, religion, and ethnicity in the literary landscape.

This special issue serves as a scholarly platform to reexamine familiar texts and to unearth hidden treasures, fostering a renewed appreciation for the resilience, creativity, and intellectual prowess of Jewish women writers. We aim to challenge conventional literary canons and invite our readers to join us in reevaluating the historical and cultural significance of these works. As we embark on this exploration, “Unveiling Untold Narratives” becomes a catalyst for reshaping our understanding of the literary contributions of Jewish women, both as authors and as the subjects of representation. Join us in this intellectual excavation, as we illuminate the pages that, for too long, have remained in the shadows, and celebrate the voices that deserve their rightful place in the literary canon.

We welcome essays on:

  • Periodical Culture
  • Poetry
  • All types of fiction and non-fiction

We also welcome suggestions for reviews and reviewers for this special issue of the journal.

Please submit 300-400-word abstracts + up to 6 keywords, and a brief biography for consideration to Irina Rabinovich (Holon Institute of Technology, Israel) irener@hit and Brygida Gasztold (Koszalin University of Technology Poland)  bgasztold@gmail.com by 28 February 2024. Completed articles are expected to be between 6500–8000 words and will be due 31 October 2024.

Contributors should follow the journal’s house style details of which are to be found on the Women’s Writing web site:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0999082.asp.
This is the new MLA. Do note that instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes i.e., place of publication, publisher, and date of publication in brackets on first citation of a book.

(Posted 8 December 2023)


Metamodernist Fiction: Literary Manifestations of the Ongoing Cultural Shift.
Deadline for abstracts: 1 March 2024.

Volume edited by Magdalena Sawa and Joanna Klara Teske

Recent years have witnessed an impressive expansion of the debate on metamodernism and its place in contemporary culture, which started for good after Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen published in 2010 their “Notes on Metamodernism”. Among the most important publications up to date we can list Irmtraud Huber’s Literature after Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies (2014), Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century (2015) edited by David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris, Wolfgang Funk’s The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millenium (2016), Metamodernism. Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism (2017) edited by Robin Van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen, New Directions in Philosophy and Literature (2019) edited by David Rudrum, Ridvan Askin and Frieda Beckman or Josh Toth’s The Passing of Postmodernism (2010) or Truth and Metafiction (2020). Much discussion is conducted on websites, podcasts and youtube channels, which often host important theoreticians of metamodernism. Apart from the vitality of the cultural trend, what is striking is the diversity of its interpretations. Various authors come up with quite different construals of the phenomenon, indeed, at times the same authors over the years substantially modify their interpretation.

Metamodernism is not simply about literature. Metamodernist tendencies have been identified in visual arts, music, architecture, but also in social life and politics. As regards English-language fiction, there are authors who have already been identified as metamodernist – Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Ali Smith, Elif Batuman or Dave Eggers. Still, arguably, if metamodernism has replaced postmodernism as the currently dominant aesthetics, we might expect that in one way or another, the metamodernist convention will be manifest in the works of many other authors, who have not yet been identified as metamodernist.

We would like to collect research papers combining reflection on various models/conceptualizations of metamodernism with analyses of contemporary (21st century) English-language fiction. We hope the resulting collection might contribute to our understanding of the change that is currently at work in our experience and conceptualization of ourselves and the world in which we live.

We welcome submissions offering analyses and interpretations of English-language 21st c. novels and shorter fiction that would consider their metamodernist character, examining any of the following issues but by no means limited to them:

  • moral considerations in metamodernist fiction,
  • spiritual experience in metamodernist fiction, the status of supernatural phenomena in metamodernist texts, metamodernism and postsecularism, metamodernism and rationality,
  • the reconstructive work of the metamodernist reader,
  • metamodernist response to ecological crisis, the digitalisation of social life, current political crises; metamodernist social commitment,
  • metamodernist search for life’s meaning,
  • the shape of metamodernist fiction (its use of metafiction, irony, playful language, intertextuality etc.),
  • metamodernist dialogue with postmodernism and pre-postmodern movements,
  • the complex relationship between metamodernism and other contemporary artistic and cultural movements such as transmodernity, digimodernism, performatism, postsecularity,
  • metamodernist view on humans (self, individual, subjectivity) and human relations with each other and with non-human beings,
  • metamodernist focus on experience (as contrasted with abstract speculations),
  • metamodernist self-reflexivity (how it differs from postmodern self-reflexivity),
  • metamodernist sensibility – the sense of hope, optimism, enthusiasm, “as if” engagement, sincerity, authenticity.

Please send your questions and proposals (250-word abstracts) to 

by March 1, 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by April 01, 2024. Final papers will be expected by September 31, 2024. We hope to be able to publish the collection in a first-rate academic publishing house by the end of 2025.

We would like to ask the authors to follow the MLA stylesheet (8th edition) and use British English spelling. Please attach a brief biographical note to your abstract.

More details in the CFP below.

CFP

(Posted 17 November 2023)