Deadline: August 30, 2022
Percival Everett is among the most significant and prolific living contemporary American writers. The author of over twenty novels, four short-story collections, five volumes of poetry, and a children’s book, Everett is famed for his versatility and range while retaining a distinctly recognizable style. His prose oeuvre includes masterful satires as well as unconventional takes on genre fiction, profound explorations of personal tragedy as well as playful metafictional experiments, stories of the rural as well as the cosmopolitan, bitter critiques of American injustices past and present as well as absurd tall tales. Everett also, of course, has a distinguished career in the academy as a Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Orbit: A Journal of American Fiction now seeks contributions for a special issue on any aspect of Everett’s distinguished writing career. We welcome any approach to Everett’s work that can shed new light on his formal and thematic preoccupations. For instance, articles may wish to consider the textual scholarly histories of Telephone or the legacies of metafiction in Erasure, the significance and subversion of genre in his Western novels God’s Country and Wounded or his crime novel Assumption, the recurrent use of myth in novels such as Zulus, Frenzy, or For Her Dark Skin, or the engagements with personal and political violence that range from individual revenge in The Water Cure to the haunting history of racial violence in The Trees. The role of race, gender, and disability, of course, are prominently recurring themes throughout Everett’s body of work and we would expect contributions to engage with political questions raised by his writing. Essays could also engage with Everett as a philosophical writer whose core concerns are issues of cognition, epistemology, and aesthetics, or they could explore the larger historical and conceptual literary, cultural, and political contexts in which his work (or individual works) might be placed.
We invite scholars from across all fields to submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by e-mail to the editors, Martin Paul Eve (martin.eve@bbk.ac.uk) and Sascha Pöhlmann (Sascha.Poehlmann@uibk.ac.at), by August 30, 2022. Acceptance of abstract will be signalled by September 15, 2022 and final submissions will be due by January 10, 2023. Final acceptance will be subject to a rigorous double-blind peer review process. Accepted articles will be published online in Orbit’s open-access format, funded and underwritten by the Open Library of Humanities.