Open Call for WSA Volume 30 (2024)

Deadline: 15 October 2023

Launched in 1995, Woolf Studies Annual will publish its thirtieth volume in the spring of 2024. The editor invites submissions for this important milestone volume. 

Of particular interest would be articles that make use of the WSA Index (see vol. 28 and 29) to return to and expand/revise the insights of the scholarship and archival material published in the journal’s first 15 years. Of particular interest might be 

• Vara Neverow and Merry M. Pawlowski’s preliminary bibliography to Three Guineas’s notes (vol. 3), 

• Beth Rigel Daugherty’s transcription of the holograph of “How Should One Read a Book?” (vol. 4), 

• Anna Snaith’s transcription of readers’ letters to Woolf re: Three Guineas (vol. 6),

• Pawlowski’s publication of the Woolf and Vera Douie letters (vol. 8), 

• Daugherty’s transcription of readers’ letters to Woolf (vol. 12), 

• Georgia Johnston’s transcription of Woolf’s “The Dreadnought Hoax” (vol. 15), 

• Leslie Kathleen Hankins’s article on and transcription of the pre-texts to “Cinema” (vol. 15), 

• and more.

More recently, Joshua Phillips published a new transcription of the 1917 dinner party in the holograph Years (vol. 26). The editor encourages scholars to draw on these resources, intended to enrich and support ongoing and future research in Woolf/modernist studies.

The deadline for volume 30 consideration is 15 October 2023. WSA publishes original articles on Virginia Woolf and her circles as well as new transcriptions of unpublished archival material, short-form comments (a la Notes and Queries), book reviews, and more. Should authors be looking for a home for recent Woolf-related discoveries or have a general inquiry about the journal, please reach out to the editor (woolfstudiesannual@gmail.com).

Contributions submitted after 15 Oct will still be considered for publication, but they may not make it through the peer-review process in time for the 2024 volume. (They will be considered for Volume 31.) Before submitting their work, authors interested in publishing with WSA should familiarize themselves with the journal’s submission guidelines as well as scholarship in past issues. (Guidelines: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.pace.edu/dist/b/160/files/2016/06/Submission-Guidelines-.pdf)

Call for WSA Volume 31 (2025)Centenary ClusterMrs. Dalloway and/or The Common Reader

Initial Deadline: 1 July 2024

The editor of Woolf Studies Annual invites contributions to a cluster that will mark the centenary of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Common Reader (1925). Researchers are welcome to submit full-length articles of approx. 8,000 words or shorter-form essays of 2,000–3,000 words. Submissions may focus on either Mrs. Dalloway or The Common Reader (or both). They may also focus on one of the essays printed in The Common Reader or a selection of them. All submissions will move through the standard peer-review process.

Of particular interest would be studies that:

• make use of the most recent editions of Mrs. Dalloway (especially the Explanatory and Textual Notes in Anne Fernald’s 2015 Cambridge edition) or the WSA Index, demonstrating the new areas of inquiry they open and support;

• attend to the reception history of Mrs. Dalloway since the publication and film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours;

• the renewed attention Mrs. Dalloway received upon its entry into public domain in the United States in 2021;

• new theoretical or philosophical approaches to Mrs. Dalloway;

• studies of the material history of the book(s);

• studies of The Common Reader as a whole collection;

• genetic and/or rhetorical studies of individual Common Reader essays;

• re-assessments of The Common Reader as literary criticism from the perspective of 21st-century debates about criticism and the value of the literary (Moi, Felski, Guillory, Levine, Robbins, etc.);

• decolonial or anti-racist readings of the 1925 work;

• rereading Mrs. Dalloway in light of the revision of literary history developed in The Common Reader;

• Woolf’s critical methodology/methodologies; 

• and Mrs. Dalloway as criticism/critique.

These topics are suggestions; they do not exhaust the possibilities of new, fruitful approaches to these major texts or their histories of publication and reception. The deadline for volume 31 initial consideration is 1 July 2024. Contributions submitted after 1 July will still be considered for publication, but they may not make it through the peer-review process in time for the 2025 volume. Before submitting work, authors interested in publishing with WSA should familiarize themselves with the journal’s submission guidelines as well as scholarship in past issues. (Submission guidelines: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.pace.edu/dist/b/160/files/2016/06/Submission-Guidelines-.pdf)