Stories continually find new paths to readers. Long before print, the Homeric epics travelled from village to village through oral performance, carried by rhapsodes who reshaped them with each retelling. That mobility has never stopped: texts continue to move across eras, cultures, and media. They reappear in new editions with shifting editorial frames, or are rewritten for contemporary audiences—as with Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, whose commercial success underscores the enduring appeal of reimagined narratives. Drawing on Mieke Bal’s notion of “travelling concepts,” literature can be approached as a mobile cultural form whose significance emerges through its circulation across contexts, disciplines, and media (24). As Baumbach, Michaelis, and Nünning remind us, concepts, and by extension, texts, “never travel on their own but need facilitators that help them cross disciplinary, temporal, cultural, or national boundaries” (12). This foregrounds the agents and infrastructures that shape textual movement: publishers, translators, booksellers, reviewers, digital platforms, and other mediators who determine what is preserved, transformed, or amplified as texts travel. These forms of mediation produce the afterlives of literature: its translations, adaptations, remediations, and online iterations which in turn influence a text’s reach, reception, and political effect.

American editor Malcolm Cowley was one of the agents who shaped the movement of texts in his era by “plucking from the crowd the sad young literary men and women” and bringing them into the limelight of literary appreciation (Lozano). His editorial choices amplified certain voices and redirected literary attention. Yet meditation does not stop at the level of agents and editors; readers and reading communities also play a decisive role in how it is framed and valued. Simon Stow, writing on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, observes the ambivalence surrounding its branded selections: readers may embrace the visibility the club provides while feeling uneasy about being seen with “the not-quite-scarlet letter that marks out a text as having the Winfrey seal of approval” (277). Conversely, Alexander Stile’s discussion of the 1989 “Eco phenomenon” in The Atlantic highlights how Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum cultivated an aura of exclusivity, making the act of reading it a performance of taste, until its complexity produced what Stile dubbed “the unread bestseller.” Meanwhile, contemporary digital spaces such as Wattpad have opened narratives to expansive fanfiction communities, while platforms like Substack or Goodreads provide immediate, public responses to literary works. These varied instances invite reflection on the forces, visible and invisible, commercial and communal, that enable texts to travel, gain meaning, and find new audiences.

This issue of FRAME seeks contributions that examine the mobility of literary texts and the ways in which their circulation across temporal, cultural, linguistic, and media boundaries shapes meaning, reception, and cultural memory. We are particularly interested in studies that explore the mechanisms through which texts travel (translation, adaptation, serialisation, digital publication, self-publishing, and fanfiction) and the impact of this movement on narrative, aesthetic, and political dimensions. Who is at the helm of these phenomena—consumers or producers? How do texts change once they enter new circuits of readership, viewership, and publication, and how is meaning recalibrated through these encounters? What is pushing the constant distribution of prequels and endless sequels, or the multi-format distribution of certain stories (novel, graphic novel, comic, play, movie, tv-show, etc.)? As a small, non-profit graduate journal that has recently flipped to Diamond Open Access, we often reflect on our own place within the publishing world. For this issue, we extend that reflection outward and invite authors to explore how texts travel: across mediums, eras, literary communities, and cultural spaces. And perhaps, along the way, to consider what this “new age” of distribution, writing, and reading might look like. 

 Themes and topics related to these questions might include, but are not limited to:

• Authorial intent vs. interpretation

• The role of publishers, translators, platforms, and other mediators

• Reception, readership, and the afterlives of texts

• Texts as monuments and agents of memory and meaning

• Rewriting, retellings, and critical appropriations of canonical works

• Cultural capital and the status economy of reading

• The role of tastemakers, institutions, markets, and popular readerships in shaping literary value.

• Serialization (novels published in smaller sections and published in magazines, pamphlets, newspapers etc.) vs. Substack (micro-content)  

• Re-tellings of classic stories (myths, folk tales, etc.)

• The influence of low-cost, small-scale publishing on literary circulation

• Digital platforms and literary circulation

• Micro- and short-form content and attention economies

The above questions and concerns are only a few of the many themes that could be explored in the upcoming issue. If you are interested in writing for FRAME, please submit a brief abstract of max. 300 words, accompanied by a structured outline. Proposals should include a thesis statement, general structure, and a preliminary reflection on the argument’s theoretical framework. 

In this issue of FRAME, we also invite visual artists and writers to submit creative works to our Gallery Section. If you are submitting a work of visual art, please include a brief explanation (max. 500 words) of your piece and its relationship to the theme. If you are submitting a piece of creative writing (poem, short story, personal essay, autoethnography, etc.) or a more experimental academic essay please submit the full piece (max. 3000 words). 

The deadline for both types of submissions is 20 February 2026. Submissions can be send to info@frameliteraryjournal.com. More information about our journal, as well as our submission guidelines, can be found on our website: https://www.frameliteraryjournal.com/ 

Works Cited 

Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Baumbach, Sibylle, Beatrice Michaelis, and Ansgar Nünning. “Introducing Travelling Concepts and the Metaphor of Travelling: Risks and Promises of Conceptual Transfers in Literary and Cultural Studies.” Travelling Concepts, Metaphors and Narratives: Literary and Cultural Studies in an Age of Mobility, edited by Sibylle Baumbach et al., De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 1-20.

Lozano, Kevin. “The Man who helped make the American Literary Canon.” The New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2025, www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-man-who-helped-make-the-american-literary-canon. Accessed 22 Nov. 2025.

Stow, Simon. “The Way We Read Now: Oprah Winfrey, Intellectuals, and Democracy.” The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah's Book Club, edited by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker, SUNY Press, 2008, pp. 277-294.

Stile, Alexander. “The Novel as Status Symbol.” The Atlantic, vol. 264, no. 5, Nov. 1989, pp. 125.