Special Edition of Revenant: Obscene Surfacings and the Subterranean Gothic

Deadline for abstract submissions: October 31st 2020

Guest Editors: Joan Passey (Bristol), Sherezade García Rangel (Falmouth) and Daisy Butcher (Hertfordshire)

The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of literary works that adapt, challenge and elaborate the narrative and lyrical traditions of the Spanish-speaking world. From the neorrural novel of Spain to the Mexican ‘Generación del Crack’, from the neoclassical poetry of Aurora Luque and Juan Antonio González Iglesias to the experimental artifacts of Agustín Fernández Mallo or Pablo Katchadjian, novelists and poets in Spain and Latin America have reimagined their literary traditions and adapted them to the new realities of the 21st century.

Bucknell University’s series, Transits: Literature, Culture, Thought 1650-1850, invites expressions of interest for essays or collections of essays that highlight the scholarship of teaching the long eighteenth century including the Romantic era. Proposals for edited volumes need not have firm commitments from authors at this stage, but should detail possible contributors and topics.

What can be better, during these uncertain times, than producing innovative research about fun primary sources that can fill our hearts with hope and motivation? With the aim of making that possible, the PopMec academic collective opens a call for papers about one of the most successful and influential American popular culture productions: the Rocky film series. Mostly written, starred and directed by Sylvester Stallone, the story of the Italian-American boxer Rocky Balboa cautived the world, since 1976 till our days, with 6 movies and 2 spin-offs (the Creed series). 

“Perhaps you may be able to help solve a mystery”: Critical Essays on Unsolved Mysteries

We are looking for proposals or full essays that explore the concept of "waste" from either a literary or a cultural studies perspective. This is a companion to a parallel project dealing with waste through the lens of the social sciences. Now we would like to hear from literary and cultural studies.

Call for Book Chapters for Edited Volume 

"Science Fiction in an Age of Crisis: Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm"  

MEL (Middle Eastern Literatures) is willing to consider a potential special issue on men and masculinities to discuss the changing social construction of masculinities in Middle Eastern literatures, and to elaborate on how literature as a field can contribute to the theorization of masculinities. This special issue is intended to explore masculinities as dynamic and multifaceted phenomena emerging within contradictory cultural, material and discursive contexts of the Middle East. The aim is to locate and dislocate masculinities, along the line of thought presented by Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne in Dislocating Masculinity (1994).

The concept of evil received much attention throughout the 20th century. Despite the industrial scale atrocities committed in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China, alongside the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda, as well as the explosion of serial killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Andrei Chikatilo in the latter part of the 20th century, the first two decades of the 21st century have been largely unconcerned with rigorous discussion of such evil.

About the Conference RIOC 2020

RIOC, the first international scholarly conference sponsored by Rupkatha, seeks to address advances in research in Interdisciplinary Humanities. After the launch of our non-profit scholarly venture with the Rupkatha Journal, we now consider it a sacred duty to respond to the call of times by organizing this conference to interact and understand our present situation and the emerging future in a fuller and critical manner. The objective is to create a dialogue and affect the social and cultural discourse at a crucial phase of our history. 

Zooming Along and Writing Digital Presence: The Tension of Disclosure and Visibility (Roundtable)

Commenting on Ivy Compton-Burnett’s subtly brutal A House and Its Head (1935), Francine Prose argues that the author’s portrayal of domestic life works to illuminate ‘the fear of being humiliated, bullied, silenced, and ignored, the fear of eternal incarceration in the prison of the family’. Bearing this sense of domestic peril and claustrophobia in mind, it can be argued that portrayals of home and family provide one of the foremost intersections between the twentieth century middlebrow novel and the older literary tradition of the Gothic. 

Gendering Pandemic: The Impact of COVID-19 on Women

(Special Issue on COVID-19)

Guest Editor: Amina Hussain

CONCEPT NOTE