American, British and Canadian Studies

Special Issue
After the Human, Before the Machine: Rethinking Creativity, Reading and Interpretation in Contemporary Anglophone Culture
December 2026

Deadline extension: 5 October 2026

Guest Editors
Merritt Moseley, University of North Carolina, Asheville (moseley@unca.edu)
Alexandra Mitrea, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu  (alexandra.mitrea@ulbsibiu.ro)

The rise of generative artificial intelligence, large language models, algorithmic recommendation systems, automated image and text production, and other forms of computational creativity has been transforming contemporary Anglophone culture. Rather than simply introducing new tools for producing and circulating cultural texts, these technologies challenge long-held assumptions about authorship, originality, intentionality, interpretation, and what it means to read nowadays. At the same time, contemporary debates about AI risk reproducing an overly simple opposition between the human and the machine, obscuring the complexities of mediation, automation, collaboration, and technological intervention that have always shaped cultural production. At this juncture, we stand not only after the human subject theorized by structuralism, but also before a machine whose creative and interpretive capacities remain conceptually and ethically unresolved.

This special issue invites scholars to reconsider creativity, reading and interpretation in contemporary Anglophone literature and culture at this threshold, consequential moment. We seek work that neither romanticizes human creativity as an irreducible essence, nor accepts uncritically machine authorship as its replacement. Rather, output that interrogates the categories themselves. We especially welcome essays that bring theory into mutually-informing dialogue with concrete textual case studies, and that situate this topic within extant critical genealogies.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

- Authorship in an age of large language models and algorithmic co-writing

- Posthumanist theories of creativity and their limits

- Creativity, originality and intentionality in the age of AI

- Close reading and distant reading under pressure from computational text analysis

- Contemporary Anglophone fiction and poetry thematizing AI, automation or machine consciousness

- Pedagogy of literature and creative writing in AI-transformed classrooms

- Genre and form: How AI-assisted texts unsettle literary categories

- Archives, canon, and literary value amid uncertain authorship

- Affect and intimacy in reading mediated by algorithmic generation

- The impact of AI technologies on older debates concerning posthumanism, cyborgs, automation, and technological mediation

Articles will be subject to a blind peer reviewing process and must not be under consideration for any other publications. Please refer to the author submission guidelines on the American, British and Canadian Studies websites, http://abcjournal.eu and American, British and Canadian Studies. Complete manuscripts, of up to a maximum of 8500 words including bibliography, are requested by 5 October 2026 for publication in December 2026. Please include a biographical note of up to 150 words, accompanied by an abstract (200 words) and a list of 7-10 key words / concepts. Enquiries and submissions are to be directed to Dr. Alexandra Mitrea, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu (alexandra.mitrea@ulbsibiu.ro), and copied to abc.journal@ulbsibiu.ro. Authors will be notified within a month of the closing date.