The crisis and collapse of Marxism as the dominant paradigm of left intellectual thought undoubtedly remains one of the most seismic shifts in the ideological history of the late twentieth century. With the collapse of actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union, the pressure of postmodern concepts, and the rise of new social protest movements in the spheres of  race, gender, and sexual orientation, Marxism came to appear the ‘signifier par excellence of theoretical hubris, redundancy and error’ (Pendakis and Szeman, 2014). In the twenty-first century however, precipitated by the succession of economic and ecological crisis scenarios, Marxist criticism has experienced a critical resurgence.

The 11th Conference of the Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies

20-21 October 2017

Abstract Submission Extended to February 15th

Imagination and Representation: Descriptions of Arcadia from Antiquity to Pre-Modernity

Call for book chapters: Reading the Road in Shakespeare’s Britain

Edited collection.

Publisher TBC.

Editors: Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus

Contact emails: 

L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk

w.j.angus@massey.ac.nz

Deadline for submissions: 

Deadline for submitting chapter proposals (400 words): April 28th, 2017.

Notification of acceptance: 19 May 2017

Deadline for final submissions (6000-8000 words): 29 September 2017

‘Go hie thee presently, post to the road’ (CE 3.2.906)

This special issue of Genders invites essays, reviews, roundtables, and creative work that address the emergent category of “postnature” in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. We seek interventions across local and global frameworks that consider the ways postnature is informed by gender identities, norms, discourses, and practices, as well as their socio-political, scientific, popular, and aesthetic regulation. As a disciplinary norm deployed to police the “unnatural,” nature has proved to be a labile signifier used to endorse or discredit a wide spectrum of cultural formations.

In the opening pages of Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues (1995), Spokane Indian storyteller Thomas Builds-the-Fire comes into ownership of legendary African American bluesman Robert Johnson's guitar, a magical object that both furthers his band's musical aptitude and reopens the scars of historical memory. In Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land (1996), her titular Chinese-American protagonist, newly-relocated to an affluent New York suburb, converts to Judaism, arguing to her mother, "we are a minority, like it or not, and if you want to know how to be a minority, there's nobody better at it than the Jews."

2017 is the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. Austen has become one of the most discussed and beloved literary figures; indeed, her status as one of our most beloved literary figures has often influenced the ways in which her life and works are discussed within critical circles.