For this literary-focussed issue of the New Global Studies journal we invite proposals for essays on any aspect of literature’s engagement with ideas of the global, from the ways in which literature’s conceptual reach may help us to think the possibilities of the planetary, to how the global literary marketplace can act as a barometer for shifting cultural norms.
The central question that this special issue poses is: how does literature help us to conceptualize the global? Secondary to this, the issue asks how literature, literary theory, and literary movements and networks may help us to shape, observe, and define what Bruce Mazlish called the ‘emerging global civil society’.
Topics that essays might engage with include, but are no means restricted to, the following:
– literary modes of thinking through the planetary (past and present)
– literary engagements with thinking the environment on a global scale
– paradigms of ‘global’ as opposed to ‘world’ literature(s)
– the effects of a global consciousness on the ways we write and read literature
– travelling forms/genres in literature: how the literary work adapts to globalization
– the (im)possibility of a literature without borders: comparative literary studies in a global context
– modes of translinguistic, transnational, and transcultural mediation in literary works
– literature in the global marketplace (translation, adaptation, anthologization, censorship…)
– the effect of world literary prizes / organizations and the movement of cultural capital
Please send abstracts of 500 words and a brief bio-note, as well as any initial queries, to the issue editor, Dr. Heather H. Yeung (h.yeung@dundee.ac.uk) by 30 November 2017.
Notification of acceptance will be no later than end December 2017. If accepted, full essays (of 7000 to 9000 words) will be due by 15 June 2018.
Review-essays, event reports, and interviews pertinent to the special issue are also of interest. Please contact the issue editor on h.yeung@dundee.ac.uk to enquire about possibilities here, and include a brief synopsis of the prospective review/report/interview with your enquiry.