Call for papers: Reading Marechera (Abstracts - May 21, 2010)

full name / name of organization: 
Grant Hamilton

Submissions are invited for an edited collection of new research on the work of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera.

Dambudzo Marechera is an important writer. Indeed, fellow writer John Wyllie, who reviewed his work for Heinemann's prestigious African Writer Series, considered Marechera to be 'as important a writer as Soyinka'. It is somewhat puzzling, then, that only a handful of critical works have been dedicated to the examination of Marechera's oeuvre.

As Flora Veit-Wild shows in her introduction to 'The Black Insider', the Marechera universe is filled with provocative literary talent – the romantic outsiders, Novalis, Coleridge, and Shelley; the aesthetes, Edward Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde; the corrosive realists, de Sade and Bukowski, to name just a few. Drawing on such rebellious and revolutionary literary forces, Marechera penned combative experimental texts that continue to challenge the perception of a decorous world.

Provisionally titled 'Reading Marechera', this edited collection seeks to get to grips with Marechera's combative experimental writing by way of a range of incisive critical/theoretical responses to his work. It is hoped that this will be achieved through synthesising Marechera's literary heritage with the themes to which he continually returns in his writing.

Therefore, contributors are invited to consider, but are not limited to, the themes of:

War
Desire
Identity
Madness
Dislocation
Anarchy
Desire
Terror
Violence
Solitude

…in the context of Marechera's literary relationship with:

James Joyce
Marquis de Sade
The Beat Generation
African literature
Bakhtin (the carnival/grotesque)
Post/modernism
Poststructuralism
The utopian impulse

Notable contributors to this collection include Professor Bill Ashcroft and Dr China Mieville.

Expressions of Interest/Abstracts (300 words) with brief author biography (100 words) should be submitted by email before 21 May 2010.

Articles should be 5,000–6,000 words in length and submitted by email before 1 September 2010.

Enquiries should be directed to the editor, Dr Grant Hamilton, at marecheracollection@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts: Fri, 21 May 2010
Deadline for articles: Weds, 1 September 2010

The editor of this collection, Dr Grant Hamilton, is Visiting Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong.