Special issue of Comparative Literature Studies, guest edited by Lena Seauve (Freie Universität Berlin)
Deadline: March 30, 2024
New Right movements have moved in recent years from society’s outer fringes into the political mainstream. Disciplines like political science and sociology have given extensive attention to the phenomenon of the New Right, but its representation in fiction has yet to receive scholarly attention. This Comparative Literature Studies special issue aims to address this gap by examining contemporary narratives about and by the New Right across European and American contexts.
Essays may address contemporary literature and film that represent the New Right critically as well as those narratives that clearly propagate its political and aesthetic agenda. Special attention will also be paid to the large gray area between the two – those narratives whose stance is deliberately ambivalent. Working with methodologies borrowed from comparative literature and cultural studies, this special issue will critically examine the aesthetics and politics of contemporary New Right narratives. Questions to be addressed may include: How are New Right ideas mediated by contemporary fiction and film? How do the boundaries of what can be said and done shift in these works? How do contemporary New Right narratives represent the National Socialist, fascist, and colonial past of the (trans)national contexts in which they are set? What are the important continuities and breaks with aesthetic practices of the past? Essays will also examine how the writings of twentieth-century Right thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, and Armin Mohler, or more recently, Alain de Benoist shape the aesthetics and politics of contemporary New Right fiction. As contributions on France, Italy, Great Britain, North America, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile are already planned, the editor is particularly interested in proposals that address aesthetic productions from other regions within the defined geographical framework, for instance Central or Eastern Europe or Central America.
Contributions may be up to 7,000-10,000 words in length. Please send a proposal of no more than 500 words to lena.seauve@fu-berlin.de by March 30, 2024. Please include a 200-300-word biography, and use “New Right Narratives” in the subject line of your email. Authors will be informed of provisional acceptance by the end of April 2024, the deadline for submitting finished articles will be the end of August 2024.