Special Issue title: Negotiating Spaces in Women’s Writing
Journal name: Humanities / Basel, Switzerland
Submission Deadline: 1 September 2018
Guest Editor: Prof. Dr. Eleonora Rao
Affiliation: Department of Humanities, University of Salerno, Fisciano84084, Italy
Website: http://docenti.unisa.it/001647/home
E-Mail: erao@unisa.it
Interests: Gender Studies; autobiography and memoir; Canadian Literature
Guest Editor: Prof. Dr. Robert Tally Jr.
Affiliation: Department of English, Texas State University, 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX 78666, USA
Website: http://www.roberttally.com/
E-Mail: robert.tally@txstate.edu
Interests: American Literature (especially 19th and 20th Centuries), Literary Criticism and Theory, World Literature.
Summary:
Gender is achieved through performances and interpretations associated to normative judgments of masculinity and femininity. Gendered imaginations and power relations are inscribed into space as structures and reproduced through spatial interaction, but gender is only one among numerous symbiotic categories of social differentiation and inequality such as ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, etc. Different spaces present more or less great latitudes for reinterpretation, determination and conflict of all kinds of identity categories that can be interrelated or played out against each other.
This special issue seeks essays that would investigate question pertains to women’s relations and representations of unbounded and bounded spaces. These would include spaces of language and spaces of self and other, spaces of experiences and spaces of writing. How women live the lines and spaces on the maps of their territories, whether these are rural, urban, or borderline spaces between countries and provinces.
For example, the word “home” traditionally connotes the private spheres of patriarchal hierarchy, shelter, comfort, nurture and protection. As imagined in fiction, “home” is desire that is fulfilled or denied in varying measure to the subjects constructed by the narrative. The space marked “home” has been read as the terrain of conservative discourse and “home” has been abandoned to clichés. Often, however, home cannot be pinned down to a single definition or notion. It is represented as a complex nuanced concept that changes constantly: it can be perceived as an oppressive prison, or as a place that provides affection, security and protection; a centripetal and a centrifugal force for the characters, who react in different, often surprising manners. Home is a place of violence and nurturing; a place to escape to and to escape from.
We welcome proposals that would tackle questions of spatiality and gender in novels, short stories, poetry, travel writing and autobiography from the UK, US, Canada and other Anglophone countries.
Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 February 2018
Deadline for submission of article to guest editors: 1 August 2018
Length of article: 8000 words max
Please send proposal to
Eleonora Rao: erao@unisa.it
Robert Tally: robert.tally@txstate.edu
__________________________
Aisna Graduates is recruiting: if you are interested in working with us (both online and offline), check our Call For Application!