[EXTENDED DEADLINE] CALL FOR PAPERS FOR DIALOG JOURNAL

Special Issue No. 47

Theme: Creative Afterlives of Texts

Note from the Editor: Owing to technical difficulties, the journal website has not yet been updated to display the revised and extended submission deadline (12th June, 2026). Please consider the extended deadline communicated through this announcement as official and valid.

dialog, a fully peer-reviewed, bi-annual international journal of the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, invites submissions for its forthcoming special issue (No. 47) on “Creative Afterlives of Texts.” The journal provides a forum for interdisciplinary research engaging literature, culture, and critical theory.

Texts do not end with the moment of their publication. They endure through translation, reinterpretation, adaptation, and rereading across historical and cultural contexts. What appears to be the stability of a text often conceals a dynamic process of renewal through which meanings are continually reconstituted.

This special issue draws inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s influential idea of the “afterlife” (Nachleben) of a text, articulated in his essay “The Task of the Translator.” Benjamin proposes that literary works do not survive merely through preservation but through transformation. Building on this insight, the issue explores the creative afterlives of texts: the ways in which works are reread, translated, performed, contested, canonised, marginalised, reclaimed, and reimagined. Rather than treating interpretation as secondary to authorship, this framework recognises reception as a generative practice that produces new meanings and new cultural lives for texts. Across time, texts accumulate layered histories of interpretation. Feminist, Dalit, queer, and postcolonial rereadings challenge inherited hierarchies of interpretation and open canonical works to new ethical and political horizons.

The journal welcomes papers on, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Rereading and historical reinterpretation
• Translation as transformation
• Adaptation, retelling, and intermediality
• Canon formation and counter-canons
• Feminist, Dalit, and queer reappropriations
• Reception theory and readerly agency
• Performance and textual reanimation
• Archives, memory, and textual survival
• Digital culture and textual circulation
• Pedagogy as creative rereading

The issue also invites original poems, translations and book reviews.

Important points to remember:

1. Word limit for scholarly articles is 4000 to 6000 words (minimum 12 and maximum 20 pages).
2. Papers must be in 12-point Times New Roman and formatted according to MLA Style Sheet (9th edition).
3. Authors should submit their papers to editordialog@pu.ac.in before the extended deadline, i.e., 10th June 2026, along with a 50-word biographical note and an abstract.
4. Papers must be original and unpublished. No simultaneous submissions are allowed.
5. Authors must provide an undertaking that the submitted paper(s) are original.

Other guidelines:

1. Photo essays must include high-resolution images submitted as a compressed or zip file, with necessary copyright permissions.
2. Word limit for Book Reviews is 1,200 words and for Interviews is 4000–4500 words.

Website: http://dialog.puchd.ac.in

Note from the Editor: Owing to technical difficulties, the journal website has not yet been updated to display the revised and extended submission deadline (12th June, 2026). Please consider the extended deadline communicated through this announcement as official and valid.

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