Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.2 Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.2   contains selected articles from the 2023 ENSFR conference on Landscape and Temporality plus an interview with writer Thomas Morris and a range of book reviews. Guest editors are Paul Knowles, Ana Garcia-Soriano and Madeleine Sinclair. Topics and authors covered include Inuit short stories, Hungarian short stories, short fiction and domestic space, short fiction and dementia, Theophile Gautier, M.R. James, Michel Faber. Plus an iconoclastic new essay from Jon McGregor. And book reviews. Thanks to everyone involved, including the diligent and supportive peer reviewers.

A second volume will follow shortly.

Edge Hill Prize Shortlist Announced

The shortlisted titles for the Edge Hill Prize 2024  for a published collection from Britain and Ireland are as follows:

  • Forgetting is How we Survive by David Frankel (Salt)
  • After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape)
  • Encounters with Everyday Madness by Charlie Hill (Roman Books)
  • Monstrous Longing by Abi Hynes (Dahlia Publishing)
  • Parables, Fables, Nightmares by Malachi McIntosh (The Emma Press)
  • Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by CD Rose (Melville House Publishing)

A new £1,000 Debut Collection Award will also be presented to one of the shortlisted authors to celebrate the best new voices in short story writing, and a £500 prize will be awarded for the best entry from an Edge Hill University postgraduate creative writing student.

The winner will be announced in February 2025 at an award ceremony in London.  More details of judges and news about the prize are on its website.

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.1

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.1: Special Section on ‘The Short Story and Ecology’

 Guest edited by A. J. Ashworth and Aleix Tura Vecino

 

Vol. 14.1 of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice includes a special section on ‘The Short Story and Ecology’ with original fiction by Claire Dean and Ashley Bullen-Cutting, plus articles discussing short fiction and hybrid texts by Nirmal Ghosh, Sam Cohen, D. H. Lawrence, Juliana Spahr and Sarah Moss. A.J. Ashworth interviews the American writer Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature.

In the general section, you will find articles by Karla Cotteau, Ariela Freedman and Ines Gstrein, discussing fiction by Anthony Burgess, Souvankham Thannavongsa, Anthony Veasna So and Janice Galloway. Paul March-Russell reviews Glimpse: An Anthology of Black British Speculative Fiction.  Din Havolli reviews Kurdistan + 100: Stories from a Future State

Available now at https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/fict/browse.

 

17th International Conference on the Short Story in English

The 17th International Conference on the Short Story in English   directed by Dr Maurice A. Lee will take place in Killarney, Ireland, in June 2025.

Theme: “How it Works: The Uniqueness of the Short Story.”
Often, the short story is defined by what it is not: the novel. Yet perhaps the better question to ask is what does it uniquely offer that other forms of fiction cannot? What effect does the concentration of story and human experience into a few thousand words have on the reader? The shortness of form puts focus on individual experience, containing ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness’ (Frank O’Connor). It is a form that insists on removing everything non-essential and demands a ‘large deal of detection’ (Mary Lavin). This spareness requires total concentration from its reader to understand its profound wordless elements. Most importantly it seduces, with seeming simplicity, calling on our empathy; it creates a ‘transference of emotion’ (James Joyce) with a few carefully crafted lines. It is a form that is effortful, in some respects, for the reader, yet maintains a keen focus and is unmatched in its precision. What is so unique about this conference is that writers of fiction in English (Irish, British, American, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, South Africa, Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, etc.) and writers who have had their work translated into English, together with scholars of the genre will all come together to discuss that seductive unmatched precision.

Further details on the conference website.

Special issue, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, deadline extended to November 15th.

Short Fiction Theory and Practice

‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971. ShrThroughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

 

The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.

 

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.
  • Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.
  • Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging, Marxist theory.
  • The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.
  • Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.
  • Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.
  • Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.
  • Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.
  • Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.
  • Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.
  • Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.
  • Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.
  • Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

 

Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage, by clicking the submissions tab here https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

 

For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is extended to 15 November 2024.

 

NB: This call for papers was produced before Andrea Robin Skinner, Alice Munro’s daughter, made public revelations about her stepfather in the summer of 2024. The guest editors will pay due attention to this event and its repercussions in their editorial to the issue.