https://www.ncgsjournal.com/cfp.htmlThe term aslant slips between categories: as an adverb it indicates a direction or orientation, but as a preposition it moves across. Neither is it straight nor does it ever quite arrive, remaining in transition. A vowel away from Emily Dickinson’s imperative for poets to “tell it slant,” it strays even further. Under the oblique auspices of this word, this special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies pays homage to those whom history has called “bent,” to queer orientations and perspectives, authorial clinamen from prior understandings of gender, errant genres—in short, to writerly voices that have strayed beyond gender categories of male and female. How did literature in nineteenth-century Britain produce gender aslant? How did nineteenth-century understandings of gender produce literature?We welcome essays that engage literary texts ranging across the British nineteenth century where gender runs adrift of the male/female binary, slants across it, or refuses it altogether. This special issue seeks to recognize the ways writers across the British empire turned to cross-gender identification, nonbinary gender expression, and intersex experience in producing, representing, and reconceiving of gender discourses—and therefore of literary production itself. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• transgender, genderqueer, and nonbinary subjects in and of literature
• writing as a technology of gender transition, cross-gender ventriloquism
• pseudonyms, pen names, authorial signatures
• sex, gender, and narrative voice
• gender and literary style
• third gender categories across the British empire
• transgender narratives and the construction of racial categories
• class and gender roles
• androgyny and/or inversion
• translations of and across gender
• literary writing against sexology

The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2023. Essays should range from 5,000–8,000 words, following MLA style guidelines. Please include a brief biographical statement.Queries and completed essays should be sent to the co-editors of this special issue: Mary Mussman (mary.mussman@berkeley.edu) and Margaret Speer (mspeer@uci.edu).