CFP â€" Special Issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory: “Narrating Cities”

The Journal of Narrative Theory seeks submissions for a forthcoming
special issue: “Narrating Cities”.

Since 2007, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s
population has lived in cities.
Have narratives, and readings of them, prepared us for this?

Papers are welcome that try to say something new about how urban
environments past or present have produced, or have been re-produced in,
narratives. In diverse locations, and at various times, cities have
provided narratives with subjects, audiences, technologies of consumption
and distribution; in turn, narrative show cities themselves, accommodating
plurality or regulating otherness. Clearly, not all narratives, and not
all cities, do this in the same way.

Cities divide and discriminate, often all the more viciously precisely
because social and spatial divisions are hard to uphold when the past
accretes and geography compels interdependences. Do narratives counteract
or consolidate such divisions?

A city may reify the solid certainties of ideology and politics, where
material reality plumbs the depths and scrapes the sky. Yet with each
corner turned the city, its inhabitants, you, take on new forms, new
identities. How have narratives registered these realities and
disruptions? Given the rise of global cities, can they continue to do so?

Cities are exciting, terrifying, overwhelming, lonely places, home and
unhomely to millions: do the structures of narrative mitigate
estrangement, or does narrative dislocation amplify the uncanny?

Papers should concern these or related issues as reflected in the novel or
any of its antecedents, narrative theory, and/or interdisciplinary
critical theory, including cultural geography. Hence we invite
considerations of any genre or any period of literature, from the
pamphlets of early modern London to the contemporary postcolonial,
globalised novel, Anglophone or otherwise. We encourage submissions on
non-canonical texts and authors.

Information about the journal can be found at the following address:

<http://www.emich.edu/public/english/literature/JNT/JNT.html>

Contributors should follow the MLA style (5th edition), with footnotes
kept at a minimum and incorporated into the text where possible.

Please send a copy of the submission by email attachment to the editor
Adam Hansen (adam.hansen_at_unn.ac.uk) by April 2009.

Or, if you prefer, send two copies of the submission as well as a stamped
addressed envelope to Adam Hansen at the address below:

126, Lipman Building
Division of Arts and Social Sciences
Northumbria University
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 8ST
United Kingdom

Hard-copy submissions will not be returned unless a second stamped
envelope (self-addressed) is also enclosed. Overseas authors wishing to
submit disposable copies should indicate so in an accompanying letter.

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Received on Thu Oct 02 2008 - 09:00:27 EDT