Call for papers: Edited volume:

The Feel of Experience: Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness in Modernist Storyworlds

I am guest-editing a collection of essays for Cambridge Scholars Publishing called The Feel of Experience: Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness in Modernist Storyworlds and would like to invite you to consider submitting one or more chapters. Please see the call for chapters here below:

The modernist writers wanted to “make it new,” revalue life through art: “we need a new conception of life,” says D. H. Lawrence; protesting against the Edwardian novelists’ social realism Virginia Woolf claims, “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”; more specifically, Katherine Mansfield seeks to capture the nuances of emotion and asks, “How are we to convey these overtones, halftones, quarter tones, these hesitations, doubts, beginnings, if we go at them directly?”; the impressionist methods of Joseph Conrad probe the experience of characters and narrators, revealing the dynamic role of memory in constituting a life; T. S. Eliot, as Omri Moses states, “drew inspiration from [philosophical] vitalism as a way of reinventing the means of depicting people in poetry.” Although the aesthetic innovations of the modernists have widely been recognized, the analysis of the patterns and processes of their storyworlds from the perspective of the cognitive sciences is a rather recent undertaking.

This collection of essays will draw on the body of work within cognitive criticism and modernist studies. The unique focus will be on the conception of “experientiality,” the techniques used by exploratory modernism in evoking real-life experiences. The collection will encourage dialogue with theoretical traditions that interface with the contemporary cognitive turn such as phenomenology, psychoanalysis and classical narratology.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

The phenomenology of reading; affect theory; cognitive narratology; cognitive linguistics; cognitive psychology; psycholinguistics; vitalist psychology; philosophy of emotion; philosophy of mind; psychoanalytic models of mind; possible world theory; classical narratology (e.g. reader-response theory; the rhetoric of narrative).

Contributions that are not exclusively concerned with historical modernism, but that examine works that anticipate or extenuate the modernist aesthetic will also be considered.

A chapter should normally be no longer than 6000 words, and should be original and previously unpublished. If the work has already been published (as a journal article, or in conference proceedings, for example), the publisher will require evidence that permission to be re-published has been granted.

Here you can download and complete a submission form:  https://www.cambridgescholars.com/pages/guest-edited-collections 

Please email the completed form to admin@cambridgescholars.com and to margret.gunnarsdottir.champion@sprak.gu.se. The deadline for proposals is April 15, 2021.

The deadline for completed chapters is November 15, 2021. Chapters should be submitted to the email addresses listed above.

About the editor:

Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion is Associate Professor (emerita) of English Literature, The University of Gothenburg. Her major areas of research interests are British modernism, literary theory and philosophical approaches to literature. She is the author of Dwelling in Language: Character, Psychoanalysis and Literary Consolations (2013) and co-editor of Ethics and Poetics: Ethical Recognitions and Social Reconfigurations in Modern Narratives (2014).

Please direct any questions about the topic to the guest editor: margret.gunnarsdottir.champion@sprak.gu.se

Best regards,

Margrét

Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion

Associate professor of English literature (emerita)

Department of Languages and Literatures

University of Gothenburg

Senior Editor, Cogent Arts and Humanities

https://www.cogentoa.com/journal/arts-and-humanities/