In the 1930s and ‘40s, crime fiction was often published on cheap paper made of wood pulp, and this reputation as faintly disreputable has stayed with it, pursuing it into creative writing classes in which “genre-writing” has traditionally been discouraged. This panel invites creative writers as well as literary scholars to consider crime writing—true crime, mystery and detective fiction, suspense fiction, and film or television drama—in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Is crime writing inherently disreputable? Does this genre have a place in the creative writing classroom?

While it is too soon to fully assess the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic will stand as a watershed in global human life, creative writers as canaries in the cultural coalmine will be among the first to try to render it comprehensible and are already responding to the seismic shifts. The unexpected changes the pandemic has created have altered all of the processes that sustain human life, the social practices and interactions that are the mainstay of poetry, fiction, and drama, perhaps permanently. Enforced social isolation has caused people from all strata of society to contemplate what it means to be engaged in human culture while at the same time facing the possibility of sudden and random mortality, even mass extinction.

In an age of Twitter rants, allegations of fake news, and increasingly bitter partisan divides, what happens to the novel or poem? Does literary material have to engage with the political? And if it doesn’t, must the political be read between its lines? What are the possibilities for creative work in an era that is increasingly in a state of emergency? This panel asks creative writers to consider the question of political and literary engagement in our political age. Writers of all modalities and genres are encouraged to explore these questions in the context of their own work. This panel asks creative writers to consider the question of a political literary engagement in our political age. Writers of all modalities and genres are welcome.

The convergence of critical masculinity studies with postcolonial theory aims, at its core, to interrogate discourses that created hegemonic and binary categories that in turn became eventual grounds for the historical racialization of gender and sexuality, as well as the gendering and sexualization of race. Taking the image of “palimpsest” as its semantic inspiration, this session seeks to problematize the layerings and shifting stratigraphies of power that obscure, erase, or overwrite the specific historical, cultural, and political experiences that underpin notions of Asian masculinity and male identity as represented in various forms of literature and media.

Research articles are being invited for a peer reviewed edited book to be published by a reputed publisher tentatively in 2020.    

Pandemics, Theatre and Performance: Perspectives and Possibilities

Call For Papers

Several Romantic artists and, in particular, writers focused on historical events that brought the Americas on the forefront of the European imagination. Certainly, many Italian writers looked at what then still was the New World with a prismatic approach, either because they were writing on historical events that occurred in North America (especially the formation of the United States) or because they were looking at the independence wars fought in South America; either because the Americas offered shelter to the exiles, or because they provided new ground for thinking about the relationship between nature and culture.

Special-Issue Proposal Guidelines

Papers on Language and Literature is seeking proposals for special issues on subjects including but not limited to

Digital Humanities

Film

Literary Translation

Print Culture

PLL is a generalist publication that is committed to publishing work on a variety of literatures, languages, and chronological periods. We accept proposals year-round. We are a quarterly and expect to publish a special issue once a year, every year. The specific volume and issue will be determined later, depending on the editors’ schedule.

Label Me Latina/o is an online, refereed international e-journal that focuses on Latino Literary Production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal invites scholarly essays focusing on these writers for its biannual publication. 

What makes us happy and content in our life? Some people may point to fabulous fame, fortune, or money. Some may say that the key to happiness are interpersonal relationships. But what if someone is alone? Is loneliness really disastrous? Are there any benefits of loneliness? Can loneliness become an epidemic? In order to answer such questions, during our conference we will have to concentrate on many particular issues. Thus, we are interested in all aspects of loneliness in the past and in the present-day world.

Beyond Crisis: Raymond Williams and the present conjuncture

A special issue of Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power

Guest Editors: Victoria Allen (Kiel) and Harald Pittel (Potsdam)

SPECIAL ISSUE - CALL FOR PAPERS

Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media 

(Special Issue 5, Dec. 2021)

SPECIAL THEME:

Religion, Mobilities and Belonging

in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Film/TV Series Production

SPECIAL ISSUE GUEST EDITORS:

Dr. Efthymia-Lydia Roupakia, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

roupakia@enl.auth.gr

This edited collection will be published by Cambridge Scholars in late 2020. The volume invites essays that focus on literary or other cultural texts that use the graveyard as a liminal space within which received narratives and social values can be challenged, and new and empowering perspectives on the present articulated.  Essays in the volume will examine the use of liminality as a vehicle for social critique, paying particular attention to the ways in which liminal spaces facilitate the construction of alternative perspectives.

A Chapter should be no longer than 6000 words, and should be original and previously unpublished.

Networks, broadly defined, share tasks and information between nodes through a unique spatial constellation which allows them to distribute power evenly and, in the process, eliminates the need for a concentrated source of directives. For this reason, they have been looked at within various disciplinary communities as harbingers of negative and positive possibilities in the 21st Century. What are networks capable of, and how does literature address the significance of networks, both locally and globally? Are authors working to alter, exploit, or combat modes of power through their portrayal of various networks? This standing session invites papers from all fields, but has a particular interest in papers that address the local and global.

For centuries Italy and East Asia have been at the center of numerous economic, political, and cultural exchanges. Studies have mostly focused on the relationship between Italy and China. As Zhang (2018) points out, in the last decade this topic has piqued the interest of a number of scholars on Italy-China issues. In addition to the special issues of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies (2010) and in the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (2014), books have been published on Italian-Chinese relations such as Marinelli and Andornino (2013) and Chinese migration to Italy (Pedone 2013).