We are seeking proposals for contributions to an edited collection of essays, titled Unruly Fictions: Geographies of Genre in the Contemporary Global Novel, focused on how the contemporary global novel expands the generic boundaries of fiction. This collection returns to a question that is at this point familiar terrain within literary studies: what is a novel? Our goal in this collection is to approach this question through scholarly essays that span a broad geographic scope and rethink the idea of “global” within and beyond established binaries: global norths and souths, easts and wests, colonial centers and peripheries, travelers and travelees. 

We seek proposals for essays on contemporary novels from across the globe. We are especially interested in proposals that examine ways that contemporary fiction produces and is produced by practices of movement and travel through an examination of how novelists deploy the strategies of other genres– including travel writing, poetic forms such as the prose novel, elegy, and the ode, and speech acts such as the eulogy and oral storytelling–in the service of fiction. Additional questions we would like to explore include: How might we think of the relationship between fiction, genre, and space differently in the age of climate disaster and the post-pandemic? How, too, might a rethinking of what it means to compose fiction in this setting challenge the core conception of the “human” at the center of the “humanities”? How has our definition of “the novel” evolved in recent decades?

Please submit a 250-500 word abstract (for essays between 6,000-8,000 words) and a CV to both Shannon Derby at shannon_derby@emerson.edu and Kyle Kamaiopili at kyle.kamaiopili@uvu.edu by November 20, 2023. Completed essays will be due February 1, 2024 and sent out for anonymous peer review. We are currently in contact with an interested academic press. We also invite prospective authors to email us with inquiries about the collection.