Deadline: November 14, 2022
For a new journal dedicated to the study of American Literatures – AmLit – we are looking for guest editors interested in organizing one of the journal’s maiden issues. AmLit is designed as a new academic venue for experienced as well as young and upcoming scholars to publish collections of cutting-edge articles on recent developments in American literature. We believe that literature from North, Central, and South America has been at the forefront of registering, tracing, and narrativizing complex cultural developments such as digitization, migration, globalization, trans- and interculturality as well as visuality and intermediality, imbuing them with recognizable aesthetic patterns of representation. We are eager to provide a publication forum for scholarly essays from the fields of US-American, Canadian, and Latin American literary studies that deal with fictional, non-fictional, and graphic texts as well as book reviews. Questions we deem of central relevance include: What significance do literary texts have within global social change? How have the functions of literature changed in the course of these developments, and with which theoretical instruments can we rethink ‘the literary’ today? The methodological orientation of the journal encompasses all major branches of literary studies (African American & Ethnic Studies, Gender, Feminist & Queer Theory, Marxist Theory, New Historicism, Postcolonialism, Socio-Linguistics, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, Visuality, etc.). The target group for this publication is the academic community, with scholars and advanced students from all European countries, but potentially also from the USA, Canada, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Central and South America.
The journal is organizationally based at the University of Graz (www.amlit.eu/), with members on the General Board from universities all over Europe. We are inviting abstracts (400-500 words) from potential guest editors for special issues to be published in AmLit – American Literatures. These special issues should comprise no more than 5 individual essays – either to be collected through a new Call for Papers or already part of an existing project of the editors (from previous conferences, workshops, or other academic venues). You can either suggest abstracts for completely new projects (abstract plus call for papers) or hand in abstracts for already fully-fledged projects (including general abstract for the whole project of 400-500 words and abstracts of each individual contribution of 250 words each).
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
· New Materialism – Material Studies
· Affect Studies
· Digital Studies
· Adaptation Studies – Generic Transformations
· Queer/Disability Studies – ‘Failure’
· Class/Poverty Studies
· Post/Nation, Home and/or Nation
· Transnational/Transcultural Studies
· Graphic Narratives
· Critical Regionalism
· Post/Race
· New Right/Christianity Revisited
Send your abstracts to amlit-journal@uni-graz.at
The deadline for sending in abstracts is Monday, Nov. 14th, 2022.