Call for Essays

Edited Anthology

The Heroine's Tale: Reimagining The Female Hero's Journey in the New Millennium 

We are seeking essays for an edited collection titled “The Heroine's Tale: Reimagining The Female Hero's Journey in the New Millennium.” This collection considers the role of the contemporary heroine, aiming to take stock of existing conversations and debates related to cultural and creative representations of heroines and heroinism and providing the basis for new directions of inquiry.

Borderlands: Reimagining the Medieval Periphery

MEST Symposium, Indiana University Bloomington

April 11-12

Keynote: Dr. Dorsey Armstrong (Purdue University)

The Middle Ages and our study of it are defined by borderlands. To better understand and enrich our knowledge of the medieval world, this conference asks us to consider what lies at its peripheries and what happens when we attend carefully to these “borderlands.” 

Potential panels might consider:

Global Historical Fictions

Defining historical fictions as encompassing of many media forms, this book series invites contributions that consider the multiple ways in which we shape history for diverse purposes, and that investigate popular history in a variety of contexts, and modes.

We are proposing an ACLA Seminar to convene, for the first time, the interdisciplinary community of scholars working on or in the spirit of J.L. Austin (1911–1960). Though widely, albeit often begrudgingly, acknowledged as an important twentieth-century philosopher, Austin is unique among this rarified class of thinkers in several unfortunate ways: he is the progenitor of no noteworthy schools, there are no chaired positions named for him, and until recently there were no collections of essays about his work and even fewer conferences about his legacy. Yet, many scholars owe a debt to Austin, and there have been signs recently of a more pronounced reemergence of interest in him.

Ekphasis as Resistance: Empowering Marginalized Voices Through Art and Literature (roundtable)

This roundtable invites proposals that explore the intersection of visual, aural, and verbal frontiers.  Although ekphrasis and musical form mirror words, they directly affect the emotions at a primordial level not available to verbal articulation. Ekphrasis translates words into visual images, whereas musical form translates them into sounds and rhythms. What are the differences between these modes of expression and how they affect their audiences?

This roundtable is part of NeMLA's 56th annual convention, to be held in Philadelphia, PA, March 3-6, 2025. To submit propoosals, follow these steps. 

Navigate to nemla.org

Navigate to Convention>Call for Proposals>Ekphrasis and the Music of Literature

The publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, in some ways, marked the end of New Criticism. The two approaches—structuralism and New Criticism—represent two ways of seeing texts as unities, yet produce entirely different views on key issues, such as how texts might be grouped together, the importance of historical context to the literary text, and the role of broader cultural systems in shaping a text’s meaning. We might wonder now whether or not these issues and ideas from New Criticism and structuralism, rooted in mid-20th century literary theory, continue to offer valuable insights and methodologies.