Category: Calls for papers

5-7 November 2025 (FREE online only conference)

Deadline for submissions, 20 June 2025

Letters have been described in one evocative image as ‘a form in flight’ (Liz Stanley). Seeking to appreciate more fully such descriptions and their importance for literary studies, we aim to bring together in this online event scholars, writers and researchers interested in exploring letters and literature from the sixteenth century to the present day.

This FREE 3-day online international conference’s broad focus is the letter in its material and textual forms, as manifested across literary history­—from the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the golden age of epistolary fiction, Kate Thomas’ ‘postal plots’ of the nineteenth century, and what Maria Löschnigg and Rebekka Schuh have identified as an Epistolary Renaissance in the work of 21^st century writers. Participants are encouraged to engage with this theme in ways including but not limited to the following questions/topics:

• how, where and why do letters feature in literary texts and literary communities?
• what strategies of narrative, plot, or character do they illustrate and deploy?
• the role of materiality in literary letters
• letters as vehicles for exploring writers’ ideas about the public and the private, absence and presence, the global and the local, and/or notions of authenticity and the ‘authentic self’
• letters and literary reputations
• letter writing manuals and the development of literary history
• what counts as a letter in twenty-first century narratives?

Letters have also been described as the ‘epistolary form of gift exchange’ (Stanley). We seek contributions investigating letters as makers and markers of creative communities, including but not limited to the following topics:

• the role of letters in writers’ networks
• imagined letters/letters unsent
• writers’ letters from prison
• representation or employment of letters in diasporic/migrant epistolary narratives

Creative responses to all these issues are very much welcomed.

And with a keen eye on issues of preservation and representation, we are interested to hear too from those working on the editing of writers’ letters (print and digital), and on letters in the archives.

We welcome individual paper presentations or round table discussions in any of the following formats:

• Individual paper (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words)
• Individual lightning talk (7 minutes speaking time/1000 words)
• Round table panel, up to 5 participants (40 minutes speaking time in total)
• Creative writing responses or creative/critical responses to conference themes (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words).

To propose a paper, response or panel to present at the conference, please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biography (50 words) to Sara Haslam by 20 June 2025. We welcome proposals from individuals at all stages of their academic careers, including graduate students, and dedicated graduate student panels are anticipated for the event. We will aim to inform you of the outcome of your proposal submission by 30 July 2025. The conference will be FREE to attend, but registration in advance will be required. A Journal Special Issue is a planned outcome.

This conference is organised by colleagues in the Department of English and Creative Writing (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) together with colleagues in Languages and Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies) at The Open University. The conference is supported by OpenARC, The Open University’s Arts Research Centre in the School of Arts and Humanities, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and by the History of Books and Reading (HOBAR), Contemporary Cultures of Writing, Digital Humanities, and Literature and Politics research groups in the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS) at the Open University.

Conference Lead Organiser: Sara Haslam

Programme Committee members: Francesca Benatti; Daria Chernysheva; Delia da Sousa Correa; Rachele De Felice; Jonathan Gibson; Ed Hogan; Peg Katritzky; Lania Knight; Philip Seargeant; Jennifer Shepherd; Emma Sweeney; Shafquat Towheed; Nicola Watson; Anne Wetherilt.

Conference website: https://digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/

Visual 1: Detail from letter, Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, Bath, 12 May 1801. Morgan Library and Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia.
Visual 2: Detail from Reginald Marsh “Unloading the Mail”. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Full scale image available at https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.24950. No known copyright restriction.

 

 

 

 

Guest editors: Sergej Macura (University of Belgrade), Gábor Tamás Molnár (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

The international reception of Thomas Pynchon’s work has not received much scholarly attention, even though Pynchon is generally recognized as one of the most influential American prose writers of our era. The guest editors of this special issue intend to focus on Pynchon’s reception in a specific region, a broadly conceived Eastern Europe (potentially including the Balkans, the Baltic states and former Soviet republics such as Russia and Ukraine). Since Pynchon’s early career covered parts of the Cold War period, the study of how his works were received beyond the Iron Curtain may reveal tendencies of censorship, institutions of cultural politics – and ways for translators, publishers and critics to work around them – in Soviet satellite countries. The period around the first wave of Pynchon’s reception in the Warsaw Pact countries is also a field of change, since introducing a US-American author to Poland or Romania in the 1970s and 1980s was a whiff of a completely new literary culture and carried with it a sense of clash between communism and capitalism. The political institutions of publishing were not the same in any two countries, and studying the publication history of Pynchon’s work can provide a lot of ground for the discussion of ideological dynamics in this part of the continent.

We ask contributors to investigate the overall diachronic context of transplanting Pynchon’s works into the recipient cultures, the political history of the region being an obvious point of reference. How did the fall of communism and the later Eastward extension of Western institutions and frameworks influence the reception of American writers, Pynchon in particular? Which works were published first, in what venues did they appear, and did they have any documented impact on the recipient cultures? Probably for reasons of brevity and accessibility, The Crying of Lot 49 was the first fully translated book by Pynchon in several countries (including Yugoslavia and Hungary), appearing around 1990. However, individual chapters of V. were published in literary journals in Romania and Poland earlier. An anthology of contemporary American short stories, named Entropy and containing Pynchon’s story of the same title, was published in Hungarian as early as 1980. The first translations often influence later ones, especially if the same translator translates multiple books. From the 1990s, decisions on which volumes to translate and publish may have been influenced by considerations of profitability, the availability of translation grants, and the (re)emergence of a readership that has had access to the international book market and could read works in English.

On a related point, we are also interested in the critical reception of Pynchon’s work in the region. We expect relatively sparse evidence of critical studies up to the late 1990s and the spread of online communication. When studying later periods, fan sites, blogs, interviews and media content may be relevant, but we are mainly interested in books, articles appearing in academic and literary journals, and MA and PhD theses. We would like to better understand the ways in which regional scholars working in American Studies or Comparative Literature have found to connect with international research trends, frameworks, and institutions. We are interested to see how the advent of the current publishing industry has influenced, benefitted (or hindered) the regional reception of Pynchon’s works. Which theories have made the most significant impact on the study of Pynchon in Eastern Europe? Which critical studies, which monographs have been the most influential, and how has the situation changed in the last two decades? Is there an inevitable belatedness in studying an English-speaking author in a non-English-speaking country, or can scholars in this region make original contributions to the field?

Overall, we are inviting one of two types of contributions to the issue:

1) Historical overviews of one or more aspects of Pynchon’s reception in a particular country and language, either in isolation or in comparative perspective. Such essays may focus on the history of translation, publication, circulation, critical reception of Pynchon’s stories, essays and novels. Such  essays could take a contextualist approach and may benefit from framing their object historically, using either traditional methods of intellectual history and comparative literature, or more recent approaches such as distant reading and quantitative methods in translation studies.

2) In-depth studies of the problems of translating Pynchon’s works into a particular language or languages. Essays of this type may focus either on a single work or a single set of issues—some aspects of Pynchon’s style, segments of his vocabulary, even specific passages. We expect essays of this type to offer copious textual detail and use theoretical framing derived from translation studies.

Timeline:
January 31, 2025: submission of article proposals of max. 300 words and a short (150-word) biographical note to molnar.gabor.tamas@btk.elte.hu and sergej.macura@fil.bg.ac.rs February 20, 2025: decision of acceptance or rejection of proposals by the editors
May 31, 2025: deadline for article submissions