Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of Robert Frost
Proposals are invited to a volume in the MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature series
Deadline for abstracts: 1 July 2020
Essays in this volume could address teaching Frost’s work by focusing on topics such as science, Darwinism and belief, gender relations/gender conflict, rural/urban life, politics, race/racism, traditional media/new media, the natural and/or the supernatural, the formal innovations Frost made with dramatic monologue, the sound of sense, or Frost’s engagement with traditional verse forms. Contributors are invited to propose specific topics regardless of whether those topics relate to the examples mentioned above.
Because Frost’s poetry is so well known, so frequently anthologized, and taught in so many different types of schools worldwide (including four-year colleges and universities, community and technical colleges, high schools, and middle schools) and to an unusually wide range of students (including large numbers of ESL students) essays that deal with teaching Frost’s poetry in non-traditional settings will be welcome, as will essays about teaching Frost’s poetry in traditional settings, essays about teaching Frost’s poetry outside the U.S.and/or to non-Anglophone students, and essays about teaching Frost’s poetry in online courses (MOOCs and/or smaller online courses with more traditional enrollment and participation requirements). Essays by contributors from under-represented groups and essays that deal with teaching Frost’s poetry to students of color are especially welcome.
By bringing together essays by a range of accomplished teachers of Frost’s poetry, this volume will improve the quality of instruction and student learning for a great many teachers and students, and will extend the ongoing critical recognition of Frost as a more challenging and more experimental writer than simplistic popular notions of Frost would lead one to believe.
A brief survey for prospective contributors is available at https://www.mla.org/Publications/MLA-Book-Publications/Contribute-to-a-Book-in-Development
If you are interested in contributing to this collection, please submit a 500-word abstract to the editor (sean.heuston@citadel.edu) by June 20, 2020.
(posted 27 April 2020)
“Work, work your thoughts”: Henry V revisited
Call for chapters for an edited volume
Deadline for submissions: 10 July 2020
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”: Harry of England’s rallying cry has never ceased to resonate with forceful energy to the ears of spectators far beyond the backdrop of the Anglo-French Hundred Years’ War. The climax of Shakespeare’s two tetralogies, which also coincided with the opening of the newly-built Globe theatre in the summer of 1599, Henry V has galvanized its audiences with its vibrant chorus and its battle scenes alike, while also exploring the heroic self-fashioning of a Christian king who may or may not be the noble soul that he aspires to be. Significantly, Shakespeare’s dramatic piece was also performed at court during the 1604/1605 Christmas season: it was then the only history play of the King’s Men’s repertoire.
Henry V has often been regarded as a patriotic work. Yet for all its emphasis on camaraderie, honour, power and ‘vasty’ ambition, many of its scenes resound with the heart-rending echoes of personal loss and political division. The compelling rhetoric, variety of language, violent action, together with the complex socio-political issues at work in this history play, account for its global popularity in a post-Brexit world, on ‘unworthy scaffold[s]’ as much as on the Hollywood screen.
Following the recent inclusion of Henry V in the Agrégation syllabus in France (2021-2022), our publisher, Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, seeks to provide new perspectives on the play that will question issues relating to politics, gender, class, ethnicities, aesthetics, textuality, materiality, performance and adaptation. Editors welcome contributions on a variety of approaches highlighting the richness of the play and reflecting recent critical trends in early modern drama studies.
Contributors are invited to send their proposals (300-word abstract) along with a short bio-bibliography by July 10th, to Sophie Chiari (sophie.chiari@orange.fr) and Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (Sophie.Lemercier-Goddard@ens-lyon.fr). They will be notified by July 20th.
Full chapters due by January 10th, 2021.
(posted 20 May 2020)
Theatre Censorship
Palgrave Handbook series
Deadline for absracts: 15 July 2020
Editors: Graham Saunders and Anne Etienne
The Palgrave Handbooks are prestigious reference works providing an overview of a whole subject area. To this end they provide an unparalleled overview of a specific field of research, while also setting the agenda for future directions within that specific discipline. Each Handbook is comprised of about 30 specially commissioned chapters of 7,000 words. The scope of the chapters responds to the editorial line but each chapter will be structured to include a literature review, future directions for research, and main debates in the field.
The volume will focus on the censorship of theatre/performance. It will adopt a broad chronology and pursue a global dimension. It will offer new perspectives and fresh reassessments on central questions. These might include (but are not limited to) the following: what is censorship?; what aspects of theatre and performance attract censorship?; from financial mechanisms to death threats via self-censorship or professional assassination, what forms has censorship taken?; what are the consequences of censorship and for whom?
We want the volume to encompass a wide trans-historical and geographical approach in order to consider the ways in which theatre censorship has operated in both the past and the present around the world.
If you would like to contribute to the Handbook, please submit a title and a 250-word abstract, with your affiliation, by July 15th, to g.j.saunders@bham.ac.ukand a.etienne@ucc.ie.
(posted 8 June 2020)
Literature for Change: How Educators Can Prepare the Next Generation for a Climate-Challenged World
A book of essays
Deadline for proposals: 1 August 2020
Essays or K-12 lesson/unit plans analyzing how literature frames a specific environmental concern are invited from educators around the world. Contributions will be organized in an instructional follow-up resource to Confronting Climate Crises: Reading Our Way Forward (2018). Intended to support educators’ implementation of literature-based interdisciplinary climate instruction, the project is titled Literature for Change: How Educators Can Prepare the Next Generation for a Climate-Challenged World. The collection will be published by Lexington Books, a division of Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
If you are interested in sharing a piece for consideration, please email a draft with the subject line Literature for Change by August 1st, 2020 to Ryoung1@binghamton.edu.
Contributors will be asked to prepare finalized selections by October 1st, 2020. If copyrighted work is included, it is the responsibility of contributors to obtain appropriate permissions by the submission deadline.
Essays or lesson/unit plans should analyze the ways a particular text/film (or group of works) handles an environmental concern. Submissions should explore the ways in which the literature helps frame the concern but may also be focused on patterns of human behavior that underlie or contribute to it—for example, studying the merits of scientific progress and human ambition in relation to effects on social connections and the natural environment.
Literature and film studied can represent any genre or reading level and may include an analysis of the work in its entirety or of a specific section or chapter that highlights the environmental concern. Analyses that explore how a group of works or a specific author handles a climate-related topic are also welcome.
Generally, topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: pollution (air, water, or soil); food (growth, production, distribution, or waste); climate migration and climate-related natural disasters; health and nutrition; species extinction or preservation; habitat conservation or loss; genetic engineering and GMOs; sea-level rise; impacts of plastic trash; deforestation; biodiversity concerns (ecosystems, food, species, medicinal resources); agricultural concerns (including land use, animals raised for food, climate changes); natural resources (distribution or loss of); human behavior relating to each other, other species, or the planet (population, consumption, innovation, technology, politics, economics, social or virtual connections, local and global citizenship).
Thank you very much for your time and interest in this project. A link to the publisher’s website and an abstract of Confronting Climate Crises can be found here: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498535960/Confronting-Climate-Crises-through-Education-Reading-Our-Way-Forward
Rebecca Young, PhD
Literature and Assessment Specialist for Cognia and the International Baccalaureate Organization
Editor, Literature for Change: How Educators Can Prepare the Next Generation for a Climate-Challenged World
(posted 11 May 2020)
Beyond Crisis: Raymond Williams and the present conjuncture
A special issue of Coils of the Serpent
Deadline for proposals: 16 August 2020
Guest Editors: Victoria Allen (Kiel) and Harald Pittel (Potsdam)
We are living in a time of crisis. Few would disagree in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. But what does it mean to be living in times of crisis? Considering that crises are interrelated and have deeper and broader implications, we are compelled to address this question. However, an even more pressing question would be: what alternatives are there to succumbing to a fatalist logic and being able to think and act ‘beyond crisis’?
For Coils of the Serpent’s forthcoming special issue on Raymond Williams, we invite contributions from a diverse range of research fields within the humanities and social sciences that focus on contemporary crises and employ Williams’ theories and writing for cultural analysis and political reflection. Encouraging a cultural materialist approach, this issue aims to critically engage with Williams’ work as a way of thinking ‘beyond crisis’. Williams’ insistence on a ‘common culture’ and a ‘long revolution’ of democratic transformation calls for linking various phenomena even if their interrelations are not obvious at first sight. The concept of ‘structure of feeling’ is a useful guide to gain an understanding of the present as tensioned between conflicting forces, yet showing the ‘pre-emergent’ directions of possible change. Also pertinent is Williams’ idea of the ‘tragic’ being not centred on the downfall of individuals but on collective learning processes, which richly resonates with the perception of crises as turning points and tipping points.
Rethinking Williams’ concepts to address contemporary concerns, this special issue takes a Cultural Studies’ perspective, emphasising that subject areas such as class, race, gender, age, ability and sexual orientation must be studied as complex intersections and conjunctures. We invite contributions on topics such as:
- Theory-focused discussions of Williams’ lines of thought, especially those that connect with other theoretical positions and traditions as thinking ‘beyond crisis’
- ‘Structures of feeling’ and the interrelations of crises
- Williams and ‘literatures of crisis’ (Climate fiction, Brexit fiction etc.) or other reflections of crises across media
- Social movements and protest cultures as reactions to crises
- Cultural materialism and ecology in the Anthropocene
- The economic ‘pressures and constraints’ of crises
- ‘Culture of crisis’ vs ‘crisis of culture’ as an extension of Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961)
- Representations of crises as forms of Modern Tragedy (1966)
- Keywords (1976): historical semantics and the vocabulary to emerge from societies and cultures in crises
- Digitalisation and new media practices and their relation to crises
- More inclusive forms of citizenship as a response to or even forms of moving beyond crisis
- Affects and contagiousness in times of pandemics
Please send an abstract of around 400 words to the editors Victoria Allen and Harald Pittel (allen@anglistik.uni-kiel.de, pittel@uni-potsdam.de) by 16 August 2020.
As well as long-form articles and academic essays we warmly encourage the submission of short articles and other kinds of contributions. These could be essays, provocations or commentaries in unconventional formats that have distinctive layouts and/or typographies, especially those combining words and images (max. word count 7,500).
Submission of completed articles and contributions is expected by 16 January 2021.
Beyond Crisis: Raymond Williams and the present conjuncture is scheduled to be released in summer 2021. Please read the journal’s submission guidelines: https://coilsoftheserpent.org/submissions/.
(posted 22 June 2020)
The Trinary Enigma of East-West Exchange: A Cultural Dialogue
Chapters for an edited book
Deadline for abstracts: 30 August 2020
Chapter proposals are invited for the edited book The Trinary Enigma of East-West Exchange: A Cultural Dialogue. This volume examines the trinary relationships of East-West exchange and cultural dialogue. The assessment of cultural exchange in the East-West context involves the original source, the adapted text (medium) and other enigmatic extras incurred during the process. For instance, various texts could be analyzed and juxtaposed from any underlying contexts (subtexts) in relation to literary and aesthetic aspects. It aims to evaluate the threefold linkage among, but not limited to, literature, film, music, art, performance, etc.
With the motive of enriching intellectual resources for academics, researchers and students who are enthusiastic in the adaptation and transformation process of different genres and masterpieces, the volume includes discussions on the long-lasting debates and controversies of Chinese literature as world literature; reconciliations of cultural identity under the contemporary waves of globalization and glocalization; Chinese-Western film adaptations and their impacts upon cinematic experiences; novel understanding towards gendered roles and voices under social gaze; and translation of texts from intertextual angles.
We welcome submissions that include, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Chinese literature and its transformation in the contemporary world
- Chinese-Western comparative studies
- New perspectives of understanding Confucian ideology
- The modern resistance of cultural identity
- Film adaptations as cultural products
- Gendered roles and voices
- Chinese humanities under globalization and glocalization
- Intertextuality and cultural concerns in translation
- Translation, texts and contexts
- Trinary relationships
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, 2020) has been published recently.
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@ouhk.edu.hk and cslau@ouhk.edu.hk) by 30 August 2020. Authors will be notified of the decision made by the editorial team by 30 September 2020. 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@ouhk.edu.hk and cslau@ouhk.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@ ouhk.edu.hk and cslau@ouhk.edu.hk by 3 January 2021. 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:
30 August 2020 (Sun): Deadline of abstract submission
30 September 2020 (Wed): Notification of acceptance
3 January 2021 (Sun): Deadline of full paper submission
(posted 6 August 2020)
Theatre and Performance Studies in English
Volume 35 of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (RAEI)
Deadline for proposals: 15 September 2020
The Editorial Board of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (RAEI), Alicante Journal of English Studies, is pleased to announce its Call for Papers for Volume 35 (Special Issue) whose approximate date of publication is July 2021.
Volume 35 is a special issue entitled co-edited by Isabel Guerrero and Verónica Rodríguez Morales. Potential contributors are welcome to send their proposals by September 15, 2020, to iguerrero@flog.uned.es or v.rodriguezmorales@reading.ac.uk.
Theatre and Performance Studies have made, little by little, their way into academia. The field is relatively new if compared to other disciplines in the Humanities, such as Literary or History Studies. Modern Theatre Studies did not appear until the early twentieth century, when the first studies on theatre historiography focused their attention on the reconstruction of past theatrical events. The theoretical field emerged at a very significant point in theatre history, as it coincided with the apparition of the theatre director and the avant- garde movements. During the twentieth century, the field broadened its scope to study all kinds of human performance – from that taking place on the stage to the study of human behaviour that involves some degree of performativity on different settings. Theatre and Performance Studies, therefore, are not limited to the study of the dramatic text or the actions carried out by a group of actors, but include life events such as circus, dance or opera, as well as performative events like parades, religious rituals or even TV realities. This special issue, thus, aims to contribute to this expansive field, welcoming articles that examine performative and theatrical events from different perspectives.
The volume welcomes papers on the followingtopics:
- Theatre and Performance: papers related to theblur of boundaries between theatre, performance, performativity in every-day life practices, performance and identity.
- Performing Practices and Stage Forms: papers on acting, directing, theatre and performance historiography, performance-as-research, theatre architecture, scenography, music, dance, and other elements of the mise-enscène and/or its audience reception.
- Drama: critical studies on translation, adaptation, dramaturgy, linguistics or any aspect related to the textual component of theatre.
- Theatre and Cultural Studies: papers related to anthropology, sociology, pedagogy as well as those on queer theatre, theatre and feminism, theatre and post-colonialism, intermediality in theatre, theatre and politics, theatre and health and theatre and crisis, among others.
- Comparative Theatre: comparative studies bringing together different aspects of the topics above (i.e. adaptation of the dramatic text for performance, different productions of the same title, contextual analysis…).
If you are interested in contributing a chapter, please send your working title and a short abstract (250 words) to Isabel Guerrero and Verónica Rodríguez Morales by September 15, 2020:
iguerrero@flog.uned.es
v.rodriguezmorales@reading.ac.uk
RAEI also publishes general issues. Volume 36 is a general issue of the journal to be publishd in Januay 2020. Authors are invited to submit manuscripts that revolve around English Studies, and are expected to meet the scientific criteria established by RAEI.
Alicante Journal of English Studies is an international scholarly open-access, peer-reviewed English-language journal which publishes papers and reviews on the fields of English Language and Linguistics, Applied English Linguistics, Literature in English and Cultural studies of English-speaking countries. As of 2021, the journal is published twice a year (January and July), and is indexed in: LATINDEX, MLA, ERIH PLUS, LABS, ISOC, CARHUS PLUS, among others, and it has been granted with FECYT Quality Award (2019).
Interested authors are asked to submit their articles or reviews electronically, through the Open Journal System webpage: https://raei.ua.es/login. Submissions are welcome throughout the year.
For more information, we would like to invite you all to take a brief tour around our newly-renovated journal website and design https://raei.ua.es/
We look forward to your contributions.
(posted 15 June 2020)
European Literary Magazines
Special issue of the Journal of European Periodical Studies
Deadline for proposals: 15 September 2020
Critical studies of European literary magazines of the past fifty years are very rare. Some examples stick out in the British and Irish contexts: in 2016, Gerry Cambridge published The Dark Horse: The Making of a Little Magazine, a fascinating analysis and retrospective account of the first two decades of Scotland’s transatlantic poetry magazine, which published issue 41 in September 2019. The core of Bruce Wilkinson’s Hidden Culture, Forgotten History is a critical study and contextualization of the little magazine Move, edited by Jim Burns from Preston between December 1964 and April 1968, and Poetmeat, a Blackburn-based magazine run by David Cunliffe, Tina Morris, and Kirby Congdon from 1963 to 1967 (Wilkinson 2017). Anne Mulhall’s important essay on the Irish magazine Cyphers, established in 1975 by Leland Bardwell, Pearse Hutchinson, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Macdara Woods, is a model of its kind. Its author contextualizes Cyphers in relation to Poetry Ireland Review and argues that the magazine has offered “an alternative gloss on the interrelations of literature and the ‘home land’, mapping (or recovering) an unofficial geography of the place of that home spatially and historically”. We would also like to mention in this context the studies by Stewart Smith on literary magazines and the avant-garde in 1960s Scotland.
However, when we consider the situation of German and Austrian literary magazines, only two manuals of literary magazines – and no detailed studies – stick out: Handbuch deutschsprachiger Literaturzeitschriften, edited by Dorothée Leidig and Jürgen Bacia Duisburg: AutorenVerlag Matern, 2001) and two volumes of Handbuch österreichischer und Südtiroler Literaturzeitschriften 1970–2004, edited by Ruth Esterhammer, Fritz Gaigg, Markus Köhle (Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag, 2008).
France and Poland have had a lively literary periodical scene in the last fifty years, one which, similarly, remains – we believe – substantially undocumented and analyzed. Our hypothesis is that this is true, too, in the case of several European countries.
For the special issue on European literary magazines of the Journal of Periodical Studies we welcome papers focusing on literary magazines and journals, whether print or digital, published in the past fifty years in as wide a range of European countries as possible, as well as on all relevant and related issues. Case studies of individual magazines as well as overviews are welcome. We believe that the special number of Journal of European Periodicals will make a substantial contribution to the studies in the field.
The deadline for article proposals is 15 September 2020, full articles are expected on 15 March 2021. All accepted articles will be reviewed and sent out to one external reviewer (double-blind peer review). The standard length of an academic essay is between 5,000 and 8,000 words, and this includes notes and bibliography.
Website: https://ojs.ugent.be/jeps
Guest-editors: Wolfgang Görtschacher (University of Salzburg, Wolfgang.Goertschacher@sbg.ac.at), David Malcolm (University of Warsaw, dmalcolm.pl@gmail.com)
(posted 22 June 2020)