Books and special issues of journals – Deadlines October to December 2021

Unorthodox Minds: Innovative Exchanges Between Cognitive Studies, Narrative Theory and Contemporary Fiction
An edited collection of essays
Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2021

Edited by Grzegorz Maziarczyk and Joanna Klara Teske

In recent years research on the subject of consciousness, cognition, and the human mind has been constantly gaining momentum. New theories take emotions to be information processing programs which control the work of subprograms responsible for perception, attention or conceptual frameworks (Tooby and Cosmides), construe mental states − our subjective experience − as having no causal power (Dennett), claim that we read the minds of the others by simulating their experience (Goldman), submit that instead of being rational in our actions we simply post hoc rationalize them with the help of the interpreter module, confabulating when needs be (Gazzaniga). These and similar cutting-edge conceptualisations of consciousness and cognition have already attracted attention of both novelists (Peter Watts, Ian McEwan, David Lodge, Tom McCarthy, Julian Barnes) and narrative (postclassical) theorists (Monika Fludernik, Alan Palmer, David Herman, Lisa Zunshine).

In 2016 and 2017 we edited two collections of essays on works of fiction investigating the human mind: Novelistic Inquiries into the Mind (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction (Brill). Though the two volumes have helped to fill an important gap in the literature, they have not exhausted the subject. Contemporary fiction as well as contemporary narrative studies seem to engage more than ever in interaction with cognitive studies and philosophy of mind offering provocative ideas and/or original means of their expression.

We invite proposal submissions for a forthcoming edited collection concerning recent developments in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and their reverberations in narrative theory and contemporary English-language fiction. We are especially interested in innovative theories of mind and equally innovative works of literature, which offer unorthodox representations of the human mind.

We welcome research papers focused on any of the following issues:

•  postclassical analyses of techniques for showing mental states/cognition in narrative fiction,
•  literary responses to narrative theories of the mind,
•  literary reception (in narrative studies and fiction) of phenomenological interpretations of the mindful body/ the embodied mind (rejecting the post-Cartesian dualism),
•  the use of experimental narrative strategies to problematize mental experience (cf. works such as The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway, Woman’s World by Graham Rawle, The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski or The Breathing Wall by Kate Pullinger, Stefan Schemat and babel),
•  unnatural minds of narrative texts: examination of human minds carried out within the framework of unnatural narratology,
•  new interpretations of the role of emotions and affect in contemporary fiction and/or narrative theory,
•  analyses of literary representations of the impact of the Internet and, more generally, contemporary digital culture on the human mind,
•  cultural minds: “fictional” representations of cultural differences between minds,
•  the idea of the constructedness of the self: the role of the imagination in human subjective experience as explored in postmodern (meta)fiction,
•  notions of extended mind and intermental thinking: their use in narrative theory and/or fiction,
•  interactivism as a radically new interpretation of cognition: its reflection in narrative theory and fiction,
•  “fictional” discussions on artificial intelligence and what they can reveal about the nature of the mind,
•  literary discussions on the subject of ethical consequences of recent developments in the theory of mind (ideas such as physical determinism, constructivism, epiphenomenalism),
•  novelistic attempts to anticipate the future evolution of the human mind (posthumanity).

Proposals (250-word abstracts) should be submitted to grzegorz.maziarczyk@kul.pl and joanna.teske@kul.pl by October 01, 2021. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by October 30, 2021. Final papers will be expected by March 01, 2022. We hope to be able to publish the collection by the end of 2022.

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.

Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Associate Professor of Literary Theory
Joanna Klara Teske, Associate Professor of Literary Studies
Institute of Literary Studies
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland

(posted 4 May 2021)

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Literature and peripheries
Polifemo no. 23, 2022
Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2021

The ‘periphery’ has long been the scene for the most pressing wagers of urban, economic and social development: in its various, often unfortunately negative aspects, the periphery constitutes a node of transition and inevitable connection between the ‘centre’ and the ‘outside’ of the city, maintaining opposing characteristics towards both, and acting as an identity-creating workshop for ‘middle-earth society’, where degradation is mixed with opportunities and is redeemed by creative energy.

The periphery is an extremely mobile place, in both time and space: it changes according to epochs and the cities where it is located, seeing that today there are ‘internal’ peripheries, characterised by situations of social marginalisation, cultural and emotional deprivation, and a lack of opportunities.

It is a mutable ‘object’ and for this reason continually eludes evaluations: if, on the one hand, it is defined by subtraction in relation to the terms of reference with which it is compared, on the other hand, it is now finding its place in the imagination as an accumulation of the multiple meanings acquired over time. The metaphorical (and re-semanticised – in an anthropological, linguistic and cultural sense) use of the term therefore makes use of different connotations, seen as values or as disvalues, depending on the diaphasic contexts and, above all, on the internal or external gaze of those who narrate the peripheries.

Nowadays, the periphery is a theme that has been so well covered by the arts (literature, the visual arts, music) and by the humanities in general (social, linguistic, anthropological and historical sciences) that it has now acquired a classic status, which must now attempt to find an interdisciplinary epistemological structure.

This thematic issue of Polifemo will welcome the work of researchers from the various disciplines – literary and other arts – who are studying the theme proposed.

Among the topics that may be developed, we can mention by way of example:

• the role of language and literature in the formation of the concept of ‘periphery’ with reference to some specific cases;
• the metaphor of the periphery and its connotations;
• the peripheries of literature (the noir genre and others);
• the literature of the peripheries;
• the condition of young people in the peripheries.

Other proposals for study on the subject put forward by those intending to collaborate in the publication will be examined by the Scientific Committee, in order to widen the field of exploration undertaken in this issue of the Magazine. Contributions will be accepted in Italian, English and French.

To this end, the Editorial Board proposes the following deadlines: a preliminary and essential step is the sending, to redazione.polifemo@iulm.it, of an abstract (min.10/max.20 lines), keywords and a brief curriculum vitae of the proposer, by 1st October 2021 (absolute deadline). The Editorial Office will confirm to the authors the acceptance of the contributions by 15 October 2021. The deadline for submission of contributions is 15th February 2022.

All contributions will be subject to double blind peer review. The issue, edited by Prof. Giovanna Rocca and Prof. Marta Muscariello, will be published in June 2022.

(posted 5 May 2021)

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The ‘Edge’ of Sylvia Plath Critical History: A Reappraisal of Plath’s Work 60 years after
A special issue of E-Rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone
Deadline for abstracts: 15 October 2021

Edited  by:

• Nicolas-Pierre Boileau (Aix-Marseille Université, France)
• Carmen Bonasera (University of Pisa, Italy)

Sixty years after the publication of The Bell Jar (1963), her semi-autobiographical and only novel, and, also, sixty years after her untimely death, Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose continue to attract attention from scholars and readers worldwide, as seen in the constant re-publishing of her works in English and translation. For many decades, her trailblazing career was overshadowed by the emotional response of critics and readers alike to her suicide. This gradually resulted in constructing Plath either as an iconic martyr or as a melodramatic cliché, all of that perpetuating a distorted reception of her posthumous oeuvre, as if her works mirrored her tragic life.

The year 2023 seems the appropriate occasion to add a further tile to the mosaic of Plath criticism. Far from being exhausted, the critical interest in Plath’s life and writing has adopted various approaches. This heterogeneous critical response was not only caused by different critical trends and cultural contexts, but it was also partly due to a fragmentary publication history. While alternative readings regularly emerged in the 1990s^[1], often in response to edited or newly discovered material, a decade of near silence followed the publication of the most significant critical studies (The Cambridge Introduction, 2006, and The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, 2008, both edited by Jo Gill), suggesting that the matter could have worn out.

In light of the resurfacing of previously unpublished writings, this special issue of E-Rea aims to engage with the challenging questions put forth by the latest contributions by and about Sylvia Plath: Plath’s correspondence (The Letters of Sylvia Plath, volumes 1&2, eds. Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil, 2017-18), recent trends in Plath studies (Sylvia Plath in Context, ed. Tracy Brain, 2019), and the latest biography (Heather Clark’s Red Comet, 2020). Given the recent resurgence of interest in her life, works and legacy, we would like to attract established and emerging scholars to discuss the upcoming issues of reading Plath in the 2020s. Specific attention will be devoted to essays that delve into Plath’s construction of her persona in poetry and life writing, in order to discuss which Sylvia Plath we have been constructing these past sixty years, and to promote fresh commentaries about one of the most electric poetic voices of the 20th century.

Original textual readings and essays featuring a comparative scope are especially encouraged. Moreover, papers on topics as diverse as (but not limited to) the following are welcome:

• Plath and life writing
• Plath’s self narrative between poetry and prose
• Plath and her correspondence
• Plath’s biography: new insights
• Plath’s The Bell Jar at 60
• Issues of genre in The Bell Jar: autobiography or autofiction?
• Issues of gender: Plath and feminism(s)
• Queering Plath
• Plath, pathography and the Medical Humanities
• Plath and Nature: ecocritical views
• Plath and intertextuality
• Re-reading Plath
• Plath studies: previous and new perspectives
• Plath’s legacy in the 21st century
• Plath in Europe

E-Rea accepts contributions in French and in English.

Submission guidelines

Contributors  should send a .pdf file to both nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr and carmen.bonasera12@gmail.com by October 15th, 2021. The proposal should include a title, an abstract in English or French (500 words max.), the author’s affiliation and brief bio. Acceptance of proposals will be notified by November 15th, 2021. Full articles will be expected by November 15th, 2022. Publication is envisioned for E-REA’s Spring issue in 2023.

^[1] For major monographs about Plath published in the 1990s and early 2000s, see: Steven G. Axelrod, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1990; Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, London, Virago, 1991; Susan R. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, Chapel Hill, U. of North Carolina Press, 1993; Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999; Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, Harlow, Pearson Education, 2001.

(posted 28 June 2021)

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A Culture of Cliches
Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal, Kodolányi János University, 2021 Issue
Deadline for abstracts : 15 October 2021

Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that was first established in 2005. Since the beginning of 2009, the journal has been given a new profile with the aim of connecting the different fields of academic studies (literature, arts, media, intercultural communication, cultural studies, history, linguistics, applied linguistics, translation, and English language teaching) by providing each issue with one particular topic. Through these specific topics we intend to create a platform for discussion that will connect the different areas of the humanities in the form of articles, reviews, interviews or even comments. We hope that by inviting and featuring various perspectives on a current theme we will be able to investigate an issue at greater length and depth. e Freeside Europe welcomes quality work that focuses on research, development, and review.

Upcoming issue

We live in an age of cliches. Their presence can be felt on various levels of our culture, including politics. Famously, the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, relied on an overly simplistic rhetoric to win support, and many argue that Brexit could not have happened without the recourse to nationalistic cliches.

In a more general sense, cliches have been gaining significance at least since the advent of postmodernism. The blurring of the lines between high and low art called for a new, creative approach to the commonplace. But are we still engaging with cliches in this postmodern way, or has our attitude changed? What are the most important cliches in a particular field, in the first place? How can we distinguish them from, say, tropes?

Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal invites submissions that explore how cliches determine, influence, or affect our culture or certain aspects of our culture. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Cliches and discoveries in literary criticism
• Cliches and populism in contemporary and historical contexts
• Subverting genre expectations in works of art (visual, media, film)
• The relevance of cliches in linguistics
• Reconsidering canonical translations of famous works
• Cross-cultural stereotypes in literature, arts, linguistics, pragmatics, and business
• What are cliches and what are not in international communication?

All papers will be peer-reviewed and evaluated for their originality, language perspective, and correctness, relevance of topic and presentation quality.
Articles must be 5000-7000 words and should not exceed 15 pages.
Reviews must be 1,500-2,500 words (4-6 pages).
Please send an abstract of 150-200 words by 15 October 2021 to kjefreeside@gmail.com
Submitted abstracts should be in English.
Authors will be informed of the acceptance or rejection by 15 November 2021.
Abstracts should include the following:

• Title of contribution
• Author’s name and surname/s
• Institutional affiliation
• email address
• 150-200 word abstract

Deadline for full-text article submission: 20 December 2021.
For guidelines please refer to the website: http://www.kodolanyi.hu/freeside/submissions/Submitting_contributions
Publication fee: no fee
Abstracts (150-200 words), articles and any enquiries should be sent to kjefreeside@gmail.com
We look forward to your submission!
Sincerely, Krisztina Kodó, Habil. PhD (Editor-in-chief)

(published 11 September 2021)

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“I want to die”: The contemporary writer and their suicide
Organizer: Josefa Ros Velasco (Complutense University of Madrid)
Deadline: 31 October 2021

Contact the Seminar Organizers

https://www.acla.org/i-want-die-contemporary-writer-and-their-suicide

From the turn of the 20th century to the present, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover the reasons why people commit suicide and how to prevent this behavior. Since Émile Durkheim published his study Suicide in 1897, a reframing of suicide took place, giving rise to a flourishing group of researchers devoting their efforts to understand better the causes and prevention of suicide. A century later, we still keep on trying to reach such an understanding of suicide and its modern conceptualization to prevent suicidal behaviors.

Suicide is an act that touches all of our lives and engages with the incomprehensible and unsayable. In searching for solutions to how to make life valuable, modern neuropsychiatric research alone is not able to offer such a chance to people after all. On the contrary, self-reflection and self-analysis, as those made by contemporary writer who committed suicide, seem a good alternative. To explore the place where reasons end, in addition to traditional and clinical suicidology studies, we count on literature and the experience of authors who committed or tried to commit suicide as invaluable resources to approach this issue in modern times.

This is a seminar to analyze the social and contextual causes of suicide, the existential, philosophical, and psychological reasons for committing suicide, and the prevention strategies we can learn from contemporary writers across the world who attempted to commit suicide or reached this goal and wrote about this topic in their biographical notes or artistic pieces. Proposals should focus on the clues the authors themselves left before committing suicide (or attempting to) both in their biographical texts and in their literary works, regardless of the literary genre, the sex of the authors or their nationality.

Such an analysis will serve the purpose of understanding better the phenomenon of suicide, its most inaccessible impulses, and provide a space to think of how their suicides might have been prevented from the examined clues found both in their biography and their masterpieces.

This workshop will be the second part of the one held in 2019 at Georgetown University (with a brief sequel at Harvard University the same year), as part of the ACLA Annual Meeting, focused on the study of suicide through the characters of contemporary fictional works. The results of these meetings will be published in September 2021 by the publisher Springer Nature (https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030693916). The proceedings of this second meeting are waiting to be published in another volume with the same characteristics. NOTE: If you are interested ONLY in contributing a chapter to the collective book, please, reach me at josros@ucm.es.

DEADLINE: October 31, 2021.

(posted 23 August 2021)

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Theorizing Literary Animals
Special issue 2/2022 of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia
Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2021

Guest editor: Dr. Ema Vyroubalova, Trinity College Dublin

(posted 22 February 2021)

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Victorian and Edwardian Autobiographies
Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens n°98, Fall 2023
Deadline for proposals: 10 November 2021

https://journals.openedition.org/cve/5046

A 400-word abstract and brief biography should be sent to Aude Haffen (aude.haffen@gmail.com) by November 10^th, 2021. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by December 18^th, 2021. Full articles (up to 7,000 words) will be due by June 10^th, 2022.

This issue of Les Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens aims to shed new light on Victorian and Edwardian self-narratives and self-representations (autobiographies, letters, travelogues, diaries etc.) by focussing on their connection to the period’s mainstream as well as minor or marginal literary tropes, political ideas, ethical principles, epistemological frameworks and religious beliefs. Subaltern forms of life-writing will be of particular interest, but also literary endeavours which challenge dominant views of the subject from within their own hegemonic or canonical status. Postmodern, feminist, queer, Marxist and Foucauldian theories have fruitfully engaged with how modern subjectivities were fashioned by 19^th century capitalist, patriarchal, scientific discourses and archetypal narratives like the Bildungsroman. However, the actual autobiographical practices of the time might also involve forms of self-representation and self-understanding which elude such ideological patterns and frameworks of subjectivation. From the cultural centre epitomized by John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography to less prominent and even marginal positions (those, for example, held by female, queer, working-class, radical or Black autobiographers or diarists), Victorian and Edwardian life-writing practices might indeed resist the liberal paradigm of universal male agents developing individual selfhood along a linear course leading to wholeness, self-discipline and self-knowledge.

We invite contributions from all fields of 19^th and early 20^th-century literature, history and cultural studies. Topics and approaches might include:

• – Autobiography and liberalism
• – Chartists’, socialists’, workers’ autobiographies
• – Black British autobiographers
• – Circulation, impact and literary influence of American ex-slave self-narratives and Black abolitionists’ lecture tours in Victorian Britain
• – Archiving and publication history of subaltern self-narratives
• – Women’s autobiographies; gender and sexuality
• – Religion and faith
• – Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis
• – Hybrid forms of self-narratives; “autobiografiction” (Max Saunders); autobiographical uses of literary paradigms, motifs and patterns
• – Diaries, journals, letters, travelogues, poetry, biography as alternative modes of self-representation
• – 20^th and 21^st-century rediscovery and reinterpretation of Victorian and Edwardian personal voices (biographies, Neo-Victorian literature, films and series)

Selective bibliography:

Amigoni, David (ed.)., Life-Writing and Victorian Culture. Ashgate, 2006.
Bensimon, Fabrice, “L’histoire ouvrière au prisme des autobiographies en Grande-Bretagne au XIX^e siècle”, SFEVE conference “Popular forms and practices of reading and writing in the Victorian and Edwardian eras”, January 2021. https://sfeve.hypotheses.org/date/2020/12
Buckton Selves, Oliver, Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité I : La volonté de savoir, Gallimard, 1976.
Gagnier, Regenia, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920, OUP, 1991.
Gurney, Peter, “Working‐Class Writers and the Art of Escapology in Victorian England: The Case of Thomas Frost”, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (January 2006), pp. 51-71.
Regard, Frédéric (ed.), Mapping the Self.  Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography, Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003.
Roulston, Chris, “The Revolting Anne Lister: The U.K.’s First Modern Lesbian”, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, 17:1, 2013, pp. 267-278.
Saunders, Max, Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, OUP, 2010.
Stanley, Liz, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography, Manchester University Press, 1995.
Stapleton, Julia, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850, Manchester University Press, 2001.

(posted 18 May 2021)

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­Re-Storying the World for Multispecies Survival
A special issue of Synthesis (15. 2022)
Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 November 2021

Synthesis: an anglophone journal of comparative literary studies
Website: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis/index

Special Issue Editor: Mayako Murai

This special issue of Synthesis aims to respond to the challenges that recent reflections on multispecies survival and coexistence pose for studies in literature, art, and critical theory today.  In the past few decades, there has been a plethora of works in various media, such as literature, film, and visual and performing arts, that thematise human-animal interactions and interspecific transformations in a way that acknowledges more positive values in more-than-human worlds than before. This rising interest in literary and artistic works focusing on reconfigurations of human-animal interactions and boundaries seems to reflect a shift away from an anthropocentric and exclusive view of nonhuman animals towards a more inclusive view that values interdependence and interconnectedness between human and nonhuman animals.

This special issue invites contributions that offer new perspectives on multispecies entanglements in literary and artistic works and theories from different disciplines, genres, historical periods, and cultural traditions. At the heart of this approach is a commitment to careful and imaginative attention to the lives and worlds of others, whether human or nonhuman, grounded in diverse academic and creative practices, including literary studies, art, critical theory, natural sciences, and Indigenous knowledges.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• multispecies entanglements in literary and artistic works
• literary and artistic imaginings of more-than-human worlds
• theorising more-than-human aesthetics across art and science
• critical anthropomorphism in literary and artistic works
• post-anthropocentric critique of existing literary and aesthetic theory
• intersectionality and multispecies studies
• translation theory and multispecies studies
• Indigenous studies and multispecies studies
• the ethics of eating and multispecies entanglements

Abstracts of 250-300 words (and a brief bio note) should be submitted to Mayako Murai at mayakomurai@me.com and synthesisjournal2008@gmail.com by 15 November 2021.
Notification of acceptance will be delivered by 15 December 2021.
Deadline for a manuscript (6,000-8,000 words) submission: 31 May 2022
Publication: December 2022

All enquiries regarding this issue should be sent to the guest editor, Mayako Murai (mayakomurai@me.co

(posted 16 September 2021)

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Theorizing Literary Animals
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia Special Issue 2/2022
Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2021

studia.philologia@lett.ubbcluj.ro
Guest editor: Dr. Ema Vyroubalova, Trinity College Dublin, vyroubae@tcd.ie

Animal studies as an academic field of inquiry’s starting point is often identified with the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975. The foundations nevertheless began to be laid down long before recent scientific insights into animal cognition and communication were available. Animals have been depicted in writing for thousands of years: the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Aztec codices, and medieval bestiaries all teem with animals and the Bible alone mentions around 120 different animal species. In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne famously mused, “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?” and, in the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham asked, “the question is not, can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?”

Numerous thinkers from diverse disciplines have continued along this trajectory, working to complicate, challenge, and ultimately supersede traditional anthropocentric and anthropomorphic approaches to animals by finding alternatives to the hard binary and/or implicit hierarchy through which human-animal relations have often been conceptualised. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer envisages a more fluid “indistinction” between animal and human life. Cary Wolfe in Animal Rites explores theoretical avenues for freeing discourses about continuities and differences between species from the anthropocentric tendencies of speciesism. Animacies by Mel Y. Chen seeks to break down boundaries further, not only between human and non-human animals, but also between animate and inanimate entities and organic and inorganic matter. Donna Haraway’s recent work offers bleak visions of humans and animals alike clinging to survival in the degraded worlds of the Plantationocene and Capitalocene. David Herman’s Narratology Beyond the Human repurposes the methodologies of narratology to craft a new animalcentric approach to narratives dealing with animal-human relations. Advances in animal studies have opened up new opportunities for scholars working in literary studies to apply and create theories and methodologies based on understanding the relationship between humans and non-human animals as a complex and constantly evolving
multidirectional dynamic.

This special issue seeks essays in English that engage with as well as challenge existing work in animal studies in relation to literary texts and/or theories from across different genres, historical periods, and linguistic and national traditions. Topics for possible essays include the following:
• relationship between animal studies and literary theory and/or history
• theorizing human-animal hybridities and continuities in literary texts
• alternatives to anthropocentrism and/or anthropomorphism in literary criticism and theory
• intersectionality and animal studies
• triangulating between animal studies, ecocriticism and literary theory/studies
• animals and translation theory
• impact of the animal rights movement on literature
• pedagogical approaches to combining animal and literary studies

Indicative Bibliography:
AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
BAKER, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Urbana- Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
BOEHRER, Bruce, ed. A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2009.
BJORKDAHL, Kristian, and PARRISH, Alex. Rhetorical Animals: Boundaries of the Human in the Study of Persuasion. Lantham: Lexington Press, 2017.
BROWN, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
DERRIDA, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
HARAWAY, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
HARAWAY, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
NASH, Richard. Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
RITVO, Harriet. Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.
SALISBURY, Joyce. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 2010.
WOLFE, Cary. Zoontologies, The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
WOLFE, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Timeline:
• 15 November 2021 – proposal submission deadline (200-word abstract, 7 keywords, 5 theoretical references, 150-word author’s bio-note)
• 1 December 2021 – notification about acceptance
• 1 February 2022 – submission of full papers (Instructions for authors regarding formatting rules and style sheets can be found on the journal’s webpage: http://studia.ubbcluj.ro/serii/philologia/pdf/Instructions_En.pdf)
• 30 June 2022 – publication of the special-themed issue

Please send your abstracts and papers to both email addresses: studia.philologia@lett.ubbcluj.ro and vyroubae@tcd.ie.

(posted 19 October 2021)

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Tolkien as a translator: investigations on Tolkien translation studies
A collection of essays
Deadline for submissions: before December 2021

Editors: Giuseppe Scattolini and Enrico Spadaro

A call for papers from Tolkieniani Italiani

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was first and foremost a great philologist: words and languages were his bread and butter. Languages that evolved throughout their history, languages near and far, languages that had to be translated. Because Tolkien was also a great translator: dealing with Old and Middle English, it was necessary for him to translate into modern English, according to contemporary language, those ancient texts that would inspire him so much as a future author and creator of worlds and languages. It is perhaps from the translation into modern English of the poem Beowulf that Tolkien’s great literary production started; and to this first translation work, the Professor also dedicated a study, Translating Beowulf, in which he explained and argued his choices and reflected on the difficulties of translation.

Therefore, it turns to be useful to devote a collection of essays to Tolkien as a translator: to his way of translating, to the criteria he used, to the choices that distinguished his style and that inevitably influenced his sub-creation(s). Tolkien’s interest in translation was manifold and peculiar; moreover, the quick success of The Lord of the Rings around the world soon prompted him to draw up guidelines on the nomenclature of the work itself for those who would attempt to render the novel in their own languages. Several countries may now boast of having more than one translation of the adventures of Frodo and the Ring, thus providing new elements for reflection in Tolkien translation studies. This miscellany therefore aims to cross-examine, from a comparative point of view, the translation practice of Tolkien’s work in the light of the author’s thoughts on translation itself.

Contributions are particularly requested that investigate:

• The translation methodologies that Tolkien used in his translations and that he establishes in his non-fiction works, with particular attention to the essay Translating Beowulf;
• The translation criteria Tolkien gave to the translators of his works, especially in the “Nomenclature” and “Appendices” of The Lord of the Rings;
• The use of such methodologies and criteria in translating Tolkien’s works into the language of one’s own country;
• The possibility of applying these methodologies and criteria in future translations of Tolkien’s works into the language of one’s own country.

This Call for Papers is international and open to Tolkienian scholars and fans from all over the world: the participation of linguists and translators from is requested and welcomed. Essays will be published in two languages, English and Italian, by carefully selected publishers. For those who need assistance in translating their essays from Italian into English and vice versa, please contact the editors. Anyone wishing to publish this volume in their own language is encouraged to do so by writing to the editors and making arrangements with them for this purpose.

The maximum length of contributions is about 6500 words, notes, bibliography and spaces not included in the calculation. Abstracts of no more than 300 words are requested before December 2021; essays are due in May 2022. Essays should be written according to the editorial criteria that will be indicated to the participants via e-mail. Citations should not exceed 15% of the total word/character count of the article. Copyrighted material should be avoided unless you have permission to publish.

Email addresses to which proposals should be sent:
Enrico Spadaro henryspad7@icloud.com
Giuseppe Scattolini giuseppescattolini@gmail.com

(posted 18 May 2021)

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World-Wide Woolf
A book to be published in 2023
Deadline for proposals: 1 December 2021

From a somewhat niche position in English modernism, Virginia Woolf istoday an icon (see Brenda Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon) recognised aroundthe world. World Wide Woolf will consider the many steps of culturalmediation that ‘produce’ the varied and varying versions (‘versionings’,Silver) of Woolf that readers and even non-readers encounter in nationaland transnational contexts. Organised in two axes, this internationalmulti-authored collection will explore the poles of production andreception as part of the complex circuits from which many differentWoolf images emerge. The chapters in the first section will explore howher works are edited, translated, and (re)produced in many languages,media, platforms and disciplines, both historically and contemporarily.The second section will focus on how ideas of Woolf are received in newmedia and on new platforms such as the world wide web, fashion, andsocial media, and how Woolf lives in the works of contemporary artistsand cultural creatives. Given the importance of academics in mediatingthis reception, the final chapters will also bring new critical perspectiveson Woolf.
We the editors are excited to invite contributions for chapters that fallinto either of the following sections:

World-Wide Woolf
Edited by:
Elisa Bolchi, Universit  degli Studi di Ferrara (Italy)
Maria Rita Drumond Viana, Universidade de Federal deSanta Catarina (Brazil)
Hala Kamal, Cairo University (Egypt)
Monica Latham, Université de Lorraine, Nancy (France)
Sayaka Okumura, Kobe University (Japan)
Mine Özyurt Kılı, Social Sciences University of Ankara(Turkey)
Helen Southworth, University of Oregon (USA)

1. Production: Editing, Translating, Publishing
This first section of World Wide Woolf will include chapters covering allsteps of cultural mediation put in place by literary agents, editors,translators, publishers and booksellers to ‘produce’ and ‘market’ Woolfaround the world. This section will be mainly concerned with bookhistory, publishing history, translation studies, censorship, sociology ofliterature, and archival studies.
The two main subsections of this section will be:
A. Woolf’s many languages: editing and translating
B. Publishing Woolf around the world: past and present challenges

2. Reception: New Media and New Critical Perspectives
This second section of World Wide Woolf will focus on the reception ofWoolf in new media (Websites, Fashion, Social Media…); on Woolf stillliving today in contemporary literature, art, dance and music, in short onWoolf’s literary and artistic legacy; and it will end with a section on newcritical perspectives both applied to Woolf or in which Woolf is usedinterdisciplinarily to discuss other subjects. Among the many subjectareas touched on in this section are ecocriticism, digital humanities,feminism and neo-feminism, sociology of literature, interdisciplinarity,transnationalism and gender studies.
The three main subsections of this section will be:
A. Multimedia Woolf / DH Woolf: the Web and Other Media
B. Thinking through Woolf: Legacy and contemporary influences
C. New Woolf, New Critical Perspectives (Woolf’s oeuvre interpretedwith new critical concepts).

Deadlines
Prospective contributors are invited to submit a 1,500-word chapterproposa by the 1st of December 2021
In their final versions, chapters should have a 7,000-word count.
Accepted proposals should be turned into full chapters to be sent by the 1st of July 2022 for peer review, which will be conducted on a double-blind process by external readers. The full process, including revisionsby the authors when required, should lead to the final acceptance byJanuary 2023 for the expected publication in late 2023.
The volume prospectus has been preliminarily accepted in the Edinburgh Companion to Literature and the Humanities series, with the provisiona title: The Edinburgh Companion to World Wide Woolf
For this reason allchapter submissions should be in English and appropriate for an academic readership.
Please get in touch with us if you have any questions or would like toknow more about the project. We encourage proposals from emergingscholars as much as well-established ones and are especially interestedin research conducted in the Global South, in non-Anglophone contexts,and by artists, editors, and publishers in independent presses.
All queries and chapter proposals can be sent to:

• worldwidewoolf@gmail.com
• to the corresponding editor, Elisa Bolchi,
• or to any of the other editors.
  Elisa Bolchi – elisa.bolchi@unife.it
  Maria Rita Drumond Viana – m.rita.viana@ufsc.br
  Hala Kamal – hala.kamal@cu.edu.eg
  Monica Latham – monica.latham@univ-lorraine.fr
  Sayaka Okumura – sayaka1931@hotmail.com
  Mine Özyurt Kılı  – mine.ozyurtkilic@asbu.edu.tr
  Helen Southworth – helen@uoregon.edu

(posted 21 June 2021)

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Conjugal Relationships: An Assessment of Sino / West Discourse and Aesthetics
An edited volume to be published in 2022
Deadline extended: 15 January 2022

We are now inviting chapter proposals for the book volume Conjugal Relationships: An Assessment of Sino / West Discourse and Aesthetics. This book aims to review the presentation of conjugal relationships in the Sino / West context. In what way is the act of marriage represented / misrepresented in different literary genres and their adaptations? What are the gendered characteristics that affect the overall conjugal relationships in Chinese societal practices? What are the essential features that give rise to nuptial arrangements from the Chinese perspective? How do Sino and / or West mentalities differ in terms of autonomy in marriage? To what extent could marriage be in the form of transaction of female / male bodies? Under what circumstances do wedding ceremonies constitute to archetypal or counter-archetypal notions in modern / pre-modern society? The volume serves to revisit the connection between marriage and various art forms including literature, film, theatre, adaptations, etc.

We welcome submissions that include, but not limited to, the following topics in Sino / West scenarios:

1. Marriage from ancient to present times
2. Empire, romance and marriage
3. The ethics of love and marriage
4. Duty and rights in conjugal relations
5. Marriage as ritual culture
6. Inter-racial / Inter-cultural marriage
7. Legitimacy in marriage and concubinage
8. Widowhood in Confucian ideology
9. Divorce as resistance
10. Re-marriage and its taboo
11. Conjugal violence
12. Conjugal transaction

The volume will be edited by Dr. Kelly Kar Yue Chan and Dr. Chi Sum Garfield Lau. They have rich experience in the academia and connections with various publishers. Their edited book, Chinese Culture in the 21st Century and its Global Dimensions: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Springer Nature) was published in 2020. A forthcoming edited volume, Cross-Cultural Encounters: Global Networks, Mediation, and Intertextuality in Modern and Premodern China (Springer Nature), will soon be released in late 2021 / early 2022.

Interested authors should send an abstract (no more than 250 words) and a short biography (no more than 150 words) to the editorial team (kkychan@hkmu.edu.hk and cslau@hkmu.edu.hk) by 20 December 2021.

Authors will be notified of the decision made by the editorial team by 31 January 2022. Only papers that have not been submitted to any other publishers before will be considered for acceptance.

For details and enquiries, please write to kkychan@hkmu.edu.hk and cslau@hkmu.edu.hk.

Full Paper Submission Guideline The submission should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words (excluding references) and it should follow the attached full paper style guide.
Submission Channels: Please send your full paper prepared in APA style to kkychan@hkmu.edu.hk and
cslau@hkmu.edu.hk by 25 April 2022. All received abstracts and papers will go through the process of internal review and language editing before they are included in the proposal to potential publishers.

Important Dates:
20 December 2021 (Mon) Deadline of abstract submission
31 January 2022 (Mon) Notification of acceptance
25 April 2022 (Mon) Deadline of full paper submission

(posted 25 October 2021 / Dedline extended: 25 December 2021)

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Fantasies of the Subject: Affecting Selves in Contemporary American Literature
Call for chapters for an edited volume
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 December 2021

The volume is edited by Paula Barba Guerrero & Laura de la Parra Fernández

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly towards and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core —the fountain— of our power […] we give up the future of our worlds.
—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

“Nations provoke fantasy”, contends Lauren Berlant (1997, 1). In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), Berlant argues that citizenship has become privatized in neoliberal America, and political discourses have turned to the private sphere and the appeal of the emotions. This way, what being an American citizen represents has become closely linked to the individual subject, their life choices, and their feelings and emotions. In short, certain choices, feelings or even identities, as Donald Pease claims, can be considered “un-American” (1994, 11). At the same time, the tendency toward the privatization of feeling and politics has developed along with neoliberalism. If, according to Foucault, neoliberalism can be understood as organisation of subjectivity (2008), the subject can then be managed by market rationality, whereby identity is turned into a series of rational consumer choices, risk-management and governmentality. The individual can thus be marketed and capitalised through emotions.

Following Benedict Anderson’s claim that nations are “imagined communities” (2006, 22), Timothy Brennan affirms that nations “are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative fiction plays a decisive role” (1990, 49). In this sense, the idea of national fantasy may be propelled forward by means of cultural artifacts that sustain it, and which put forth the “correct” performance of subjectivity. Amongst them, fiction is a powerful tool to create what Lauren Berlant has called “intimate publics”, which are a group of readers and consumers who “already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience” (2008, ix). These productions, especially those traversed by sentimentality and addressed to an intimate public, allow, on the one hand, to voice complaints and express discomfort or disappointments at the failed expectations of the “good life” (Berlant 2011), while on the other hand they reify and uphold these normative narratives.

This volume seeks contributions that deal with representations of emotional selfhood from a variety of perspectives. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• “Biofiction” and the female self
• Bodies and/in nations
• Re/productive future(s)
• National post-memories, mobility, and the American dream
• Radical hope narratives and emotional (after)lives
• Emotional fantasies and cultures: the self and/as the Other
• Environmental fiction and the anthropocene
• Visual and digital cultures
• Political emotion and intimate publics
• Pleasure narratives, affect-centered writing
• Posthuman subjectivities and the emotions of the future
• Literature, emotion, and activism

Prospective contributors are expected to submit 300 to 400-word abstract proposals, including full name, affiliation, and email address to paulabarbaguerrero@usal.es and lauradelaparra@usal.es by December 30th, 2021. Please indicate “Fantasies of the Subject Proposal” in the email’s subject.

Selected, peer-reviewed contributions will be published in 2023 by a top-tier academic press.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
—. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
—. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
—. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, [1983] 2006.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
—. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2008.
—. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1997.
—. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 44–70.
Butler, Judith. The Force of Non-Violence. London: Verso, 2020.
—, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Foucault, Michel. The birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. London: Polity, 2007.
Khair, Tabish. The New Xenophobia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Your Silence Will Not Protect You. London: Silver Press, [1977] 2017, pp. 7-12..
Pease, Donald E. “National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives.” National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, edited by Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 1–13.

Timeline:

• Deadline for abstract submission: December 30th, 2021
• Confirmation of acceptance: January 30th, 2022
• Book chapters due: June 30th, 2022

Contact information:

Dr. Paula Barba Guerrero, University of Salamanca paulabarbaguerrero@usal.es

Dr. Laura de la Parra Fernández, University of Salamanca lauradelaparra@usal.es

(posted 16 September 2021)

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Representations of Happiness
Journal of Philology and Intercultural Communication Vol. 6 No. 1, February 2022
Deadline for contributions: 31 December 2021

In times of pandemic and world-wide socio-economic crisis, we evoke the example provided by Giorgio Boccaccio’s characters in the Decameron and invite contributors to conceive papers on the concept of ‘happiness’, its various representations as well as its dark counterpart, the ‘unhappiness’. We welcome submissions from different fields of expertise, including literature, visual arts, cultural studies, gender and identity studies, philosophy, religion, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, among many others and propose topics such as:

• Theoretical approaches of (un)happiness;
• Types of happiness;
• The eternal quest for happiness
• Ways of achieving happiness
• Collective vs individual happiness
• Social happiness: utopia vs dystopia
• Happiness in empires and colonies
• Mythological representations of happiness
• God / Divinity and the expression of supreme happiness
• Materialism / Consumerism / Social status and happiness
• Mass media and the projection of happiness
• Human ages and the stages of happiness
• Family and its old / new ways of expressing happiness
• The connection between happiness, love and passion
• Passions and addictions as forms of happiness
• Happiness and mental or physical sickness, disability
• Finding happiness in extreme conditions: wartime and pandemic  Happiness in seclusion: extermination camps, prison, hospital, monastery

Please note that the above topics are not exclusive and all contributions on the proposed theme are warmly welcomed. Likewise, the journal section titled Miscellaneous may include papers that are not related to the present theme.

HOW TO SUBMIT:
Contributions should be sent by December 31st 2021 to:
Adela Catana: adela.catana@yahoo.com (English and Romanian)
Andreea Preda: andreeamaria_diaconescu@yahoo.fr (French and Romanian)

GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS:
We invite our collaborators to submit original articles that have not been published, under
review or accepted elsewhere. It is the responsibility of the authors to ensure the originality,
authorship, accuracy, complete references, coherent organization and legible appearance of their
works.

• Languages: English, French, Romanian
• The page-limit for articles: no more than 12 pages, works cited included
• The margins: left – 25 mm, right – 25 mm, top – 25 mm, bottom – 25 mm, header and footer –15 mm
• Paper setup: A4, 1,15 space between lines, 20 mm margins, justified
• Title of the article: Caps, Times New Roman 14 Bold, Centred, at 50 mm above the text
• Author’s name, scientific title and academic affiliation: Times New Roman 12 Bold, under the title, at 2 lines distance
• Abstract: Approximately 250 words in English, Times New Roman 11, italics, two lines below the author’s name, in English
• Five Keywords under the abstract, in English (TNR 11)
• Text of the article: one line below the keywords, in English, Times New Roman, 12, justified
• No endnotes (footnotes only): font size 10, numbering: continuous; No Page Breaks in the document; All graphic elements set in line with the text
• Bibliography/ Works Cited: at 2 lines distance from the end of the paper; single column format, Times New Roman 12, italics, under the bibliography. Sources must be quoted according to the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers
• Biodata: 2 lines distance from the end of the Bibliography; Times New Roman 12; justified
• All papers will be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word format

Submitted papers are subject to PEER REVIEW and will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content, style, clarity, and relevance to the journal issue’s theme.
For more information, feel free to check our website https://jpic.mta.ro

(posted 10 September 2021)