Special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Robert Spencer and Anastasia Valassopoulos (English and American Studies, Manchester)

Title: Literary Responses to the War on Terror

This special issue seeks to bring together scholars working on post September 11th fiction in order to engage with the prolific literary production that has taken as its subject the perceived consequences of September 11th and the subsequent 'war on terror'.

Contributors are asked to respond to these works as a 'genre' and/or as a 'corrective measure' to the more profuse political and media-based responses that these events have evoked. We are particularly interested in essays that bring together analyses of form and content and that reflect in detail on the necessary complexities of form (the use of the monologue and allegory for example) when seeking to represent ideology through narrative.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

British Writing post September 11th (e.g. Martin Amis, Ian McEwan)

American writers (e.g. Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, John Updike)

Arab-American Writers (e.g. Laila Halaby)

Apocalyptic Writing and Political Thrillers

Science Fiction and the response to the war on terror

Novels of religious fundamentalism in relation to terrorism

European responses to the events of September 11th (e.g. Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World)

Writing from Asia, Africa and particularly the Middle East and Iraq that engages with discourses of terror and terrorism and/or the experience of war and occupation

We also welcome papers that question the emergence of the 'post 9/11' film and that seek to problematise this category.

Deadline for submission of abstracts of around 200 words: 1st May 2009. Manuscripts of around 7,000 words to be completed by 1st September 2009. We would aim for publication in mid-2010

Please send your abstracts to Robert.Spencer@manchester.ac.uk OR A.Valassopoulos@manchester.ac.uk