The European Network for Short Fiction Research was established in 2013 with the aim of fostering and promoting the study of short fiction in European universities and in interaction with short fiction writers. After an inaugural meeting early in 2014, the ENSFR has organized annual conferences as well as sponsored several other study days and events. This website aims to be an interactive platform for sharing research, expertise, ideas and information about short fiction in its diversity of linguistic traditions and forms.
The Other Side of Hope is a new journal celebrating refugee and immigrant communities worldwide. Submission of fiction and poetry is open to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants only. Non-fiction, reviews and interviews welcome from all, so long as the subject matter sheds light on refugee and immigrant life.
Deadline 31st July 2021.
More information available here
The next issue of Microtextualidades (n. 9, May 2021) is now open to the submission of contributions.
Coordinators: Eunice Ribeiro y Xaquín Núñez Sabarís
Deadline: 15/01/2021
(Spanish version below)
“The characters in the micro-story walk in profile.” This sentence by Andrés Neuman, extracted from his ten micro-notes on this narrative form, attributes to the protagonists of the mini-fiction a bodily or identitary inconsistency, in accordance with the diegetic ellipsis of hyper-brief stories and the aesthetics of post-modernity.
Characters that evaporate, disarticulate or become ghosts or animated objects, shadows that dilute as the minimal story of the minuscule fiction vanishes, are common in the repertoire of microtextualities.
This representative dimension of the character is often accompanied by cultural imaginaries (the prevalence of middle-aged characters) or political and social demands, consistent with the subversive position that the micro-narrative has had at its origins and which it has not lost in its process of canonisation. Its rebellious nature has made it a prone space for cultural resistance. For this reason, these characters who move in profile frequently represent beings marked by failure, marginality or rejection, from an individual or collective point of view. Poverty, sexism, racism or different forms of exclusion are also part of the thematic concerns of hyper-brief literature.
Related to this, and by virtue of its permeable format, it has also been a genre with great effectiveness in addressing issues of social demand, such as those mentioned above. The collective volumes of the micro-story have constituted a sub-genre in themselves, sponsored by associations, institutions or writers’ groups that focus on a particular theme. If criticism of micro-storytelling has studied its educational effectiveness in promoting and consolidating reading or literary competence, the emergence of mini-fiction has also demonstrated its relevance for carrying out a pedagogy of strong social, political and cultural commitment.
This monographic issue therefore aims to focus on the representation of characters’ identities in the micro-story, both from the point of view of its narrative materialization and from the social and political positions that intervene in its different repertoires.
Petición de colaboraciones: Identidad, exclusión y resistencia. La representación del personaje en el microrrelato. Número 9, mayo 2021)
Coordinadores: Eunice Ribeiro y Xaquín Núñez Sabarís
Fecha límite para el envío de manuscritos: 15/01/2021
“Los personajes del microcuento caminan de perfil”. Esta sentencia de Andrés Neuman, extraída de sus diez microapuntes sobre esta forma narrativa, atribuye a los protagonistas de la minficción una inconsistencia corporal o identatitaria, acorde con la elipsis diegética de las narraciones hiperbreves y la estética de la posmodernidad.
Personajes que se evaporan, se desarticulan o convierten en fantasmas u objetos animados, sombras que se diluyen a medida que se desvanece la historia mínima de la ficción minúscula son habituales en el repertorio de las microtextualidades.
Esta dimensión representativa del personaje viene acompañada, a menudo, de imaginarios culturales (la prevalencia de personajes de media edad) o reivindicaciones políticas y sociales, acordes con la posición subversiva que la minificción ha tenido en sus orígenes y que no ha perdido en su proceso de canonización. Su naturaleza rebelde ha propiciado que sea un espacio proclive para la resistencia cultural. Por ello, esos personajes que se mueven de perfil representan frecuentemente seres marcados por el fracaso, la marginalidad o el rechazo, desde un punto de vista individual o colectivo. La pobreza, el sexismo, el racismo o las diferentes formas de exclusión forman también parte de las preocupaciones temáticas de la literatura hiperbreve.
Relacionado con ello, y en virtud de su permeable formato, ha sido, además, un género con una gran eficacia para abordar cuestiones de reivindicación social, como las señaladas anteriormente. Los volúmenes colectivos del microrrelato han constituido un subgénero en sí mismo, auspiciados por asociaciones, instituciones o agrupaciones de escritores que se centran en un determinado tema. Si la crítica sobre el microrrelato ha estudiado su eficacia educativa, en la promoción y consolidación de la competencia lectora o literaria, la irrupción de la minificción ha acreditado también su relevancia para llevar a cabo una pedagogía de fuerte compromiso social, político y cultural.
Este número monográfico pretende, consecuentemente, centrarse en la representación de las identidades de los personajes en el microrrelato, tanto desde el punto de vista de su materialización narrativa, como desde las posiciones sociales y políticas que intervienen en sus diferentes repertorios.
Link to CFP website here.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND CHILDREN
Editors
Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK
and
Todd Martin, Huntington University, USA
Virginia Woolf once remarked that Katherine Mansfield had ‘a kind of childlikeness somewhere which has been much disfigured, but still exists’. This ‘childlikeness’ is indeed a facet of Mansfield’s personality which permeates every aspect of her personal and creative life. It is present in her mature fiction, where some of her most well-known and accomplished stories, such as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, have children as protagonists; it is present in her early poetry, which includes a collection of poems for children intended for publication; it is also present in her juvenilia, where many of the stories she wrote from an early age for school magazines and other publications, feature children. As Tracy Miao notes of her mature fiction, ‘in Mansfield’s modelling of her child artists […] there is more than a simple “childlikeness” […] but a serious thought process on art and the artist’.
Even as an adult, Mansfield’s love of the miniature, her delight in children in general, her fascination with dolls, all feature in her personal writing. Her relationship with John Middleton Murry was characterised by their mutual descriptions of themselves as little children fighting against a corrupt world. Alluding to their innocence, Mansfield once wrote to Murry: ‘My grown up self sees us like two little children who have been turned out into the garden’. Years later, speaking of Murry’s writing, she notes, ‘Take care of yourself – my beloved child with all these wild men about throwing stones and striking’.
Essays which address any aspect of the concept of Mansfield and children will be considered for this volume. Subjects might include (but are not limited to):
• Children in Mansfield’s fiction
• Children in Mansfield’s poetry
• Mansfield’s juvenilia – poetry and /or prose
• Mansfield’s early years
• The ‘childlike’ relationship between Mansfield and Murry
• Mansfield’s pregnancies
• Mansfield’s love of the miniature
• Mansfield and dolls
• The childlike in Mansfield’s personal writing
• Mansfield’s ‘innocent eye’ (John Ruskin)
Please email submissions of c.6000 words, including endnotes, formatted in Word and in MHRA style*, 12 pt. Times New Roman, double line-spaced, with a 100-word abstract + 5 keywords & 50-word biography, to the editorial team at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org
PLEASE NOTE: ALL SUBMISSIONS WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE ENTERED FOR OUR ANNUAL ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION UNLESS AUTHORS INDICATE OTHERWISE.
*An MHRA Style Guide is available on the Katherine Mansfield Society website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/yearbook-katherine-mansfield-studies/
Creative Writing
We welcome creative submissions of poetry, short stories, and creative essays on the general theme of Katherine Mansfield. Please send submissions for consideration, accompanied by a brief (50 words) biography, to kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 31 AUGUST 2020
Vol. 9.2. of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice is out now with articles on A.M. Homes, Thomas Harris, Lydia Davies, Samuel Beckett, Carson McCullers, Anton Chekhov and more. Plus Jonathan Crane reflects on realism in his own fiction. Robert M. Luscher on the American short story cycle, Felicity Skelton on Canadian fiction and Sarah Whitehead on Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture; and Ailsa Cox interviews Lucy Wood, the Cornish-based author of Diving Belles and The Sing of the Shore.
We welcome submissions of articles, book reviews, interviews, reports and translations on any aspect of short-story writing. For more information contact Ailsa Cox at coxa@edgehill.ac.uk.
Call for papers for the joint workshop organised by the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) and The Journal of the Short Story in English:
Even as literature and the arts of the 20th century were setting new horizons for creation, they often engaged in an inventive dialogue with the Renaissance period. From the end of the 19th century to the early 21st century, the period has offered a rich reservoir of texts, historical subjects, interrogations and experiences that have been rewritten across the centuries to constitute part of the organic fabric of literature and the arts.
The influence of the Renaissance has taken many forms, from direct intertextual references to less identifiable traces. In most cases however, the Renaissance has, as expected, been read as the founding moment of our humanist model, as well as the matrix of an individualism that has been endlessly reassessed without being radically disqualified. This explains the return of modernist and contemporary writers to a period that works as an allegorical mirror for current interrogations. Virginia Woolf sets the early moments of her historical fantasy, Orlando (1928) during the Elizabethan period, to better ground her exploration of identity fashioning in an age that was both foundational of individualism and already harboured dissenting views of what constitutes selfhood. Lytton Strachey also understood the extraordinary potential of the period which he reinvented in Elizabeth and Essex (also published in 1928). Today, the Renaissance has enjoyed a renewal of interest, both in the field of historical fiction (see Peter Ackroyd’s fantasised reinvention of Renaissance occultism in The house of Doctor Dee [1993], or Jeanette Winterson’s own take on Renaissance expansionism in Sexing the Cherry [1989]), popular culture, life-writing as well as more experimental artistic forms (see Martin Crimp and George Benjamin’s reappropriation of Marlowe’s Edward II, in their latest collaboration, the opera Lessons in Love and Violence [2018]).
On the other side of the Atlantic, the term Renaissance has been used to describe books released by major authors in the middle of the 19th century, a period during which the short story established itself through magazine publications. Major authors produced work they felt inferior to their longer endeavors but some of them started reflecting, as Poe famously did, on the art of the short story, writing almost exclusively short forms (poems and short stories). This “Renaissance” is closely related to the renewal of American letters, to the exploration of the American space and the American psyche. Critics then located a “lesser” Renaissance in the 1920s, in the cultural boom that followed WWI. There again, the short story imposed itself with such writers as Cather, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Toomer or Boyle, who were influenced by the emerging modernist movement developing in Europe. For some short story writers, Europe also appears as the locus for renaissance—Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Edith Wharton, and later John Cheever and Elizabeth Spencer all spent time in the Old World and made their characters reflect on their identity.
“RenaissanceS” can thus refer to experiment both in form and content. The term should be read as a metaphor for aesthetic renewal and reinvention. The short-story and 20th and 21st century English literature have often revisited past forms in order to self-reflexively explore the mecanisms of fiction-making and the ideological economy of representation. One should however distinguish between the revival of past forms and parody, although parody may constitute one of the chosen instruments of aesthetic revival. The renaissance of pastoral poetry in the 20th century, as well as that of gothic fiction, or of utopian writing in feminist fiction, testify to the creative potential of looking back in order to invent the literature to come and to critically embrace the present.
The workshop organised jointly by the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) and by the Journal of the Short Story in English welcomes proposals that will address the category of the “RenaissanceS” from an intertextual perspective as well as contributions exploring the history and critical rationale of aesthetic renaissance. Contributors may also turn to the philosophical and theoretical legacy of the Renaissance, whether it be in the form of a critical humanism — for instance in the permanence of dystopian fiction since the 1940s —, or in the deconstruction of travel or discovery narratives. Choosing to revive past forms or subjects is thus more than playful. It allows modern and contemporary art and literature to fathom their own historical and epistemological determinisms and to historicize their own situation as regards their legacy as well as their future.
Corpus to be addressed:
— 20th and 21st century British literature or visual arts
— The genre of the short-story (19th – 21st centuries, GB / US)
Proposals for papers in English (300 words, plus critical bibliography,) should be sent to
Catherine Bernard: catherine.bernard@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Gerald Preher: Gerald.PREHER@univ-catholille.fr
by November 2nd.
A Seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, March 19-22, 2020. Organizers: Gavin Jones (grjones@stanford.edu) and Mike Collins (michael.collins@kcl.ac.uk).
We welcome proposals for papers on aspects of the short story for the seminar described below. Please send proposals to the Seminar’s organizers by August 30, 2020.
Here is a link to the Seminar on the ACLA conference website
Continue reading “CFP- The Short Story’s Global Dimensions – ACLA Chicago March 2020”
Tinakori:
Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society
Editors: Kym Brindle and Karen D’Souza
‘But this is all a dream you see. I want to come home – to come home’
Letter from Mansfield to Murry [18 March 1918]
Home figures as an ambivalent construct in the writing of Katherine Mansfield. This special issue of Tinakori looks to explore issues of space and belonging in Mansfield’s work. We seek proposals exploring the ways in which aspects of identity in Mansfield’s work are articulated by engagement with both material and emotive notions of home. What is the significance of home and conversely homelessness for Mansfield’s creative imagination? Rosemary Marangoly George stresses that ‘fictionality is an intrinsic attribute of home’, suggesting that ‘home is also the imagined location that can be more readily fixed in a mental landscape than in actual geography’. This issue will focus on intersections between desires for home and the social reality and implications and consequences for domestic space for both men and women. In what ways do Mansfield’s stories contextualize debates about issues of identity and space and place? What impact do representations of home have for characters (and readers) in the quest for meaning?
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
· Place and space
· Exile and homelessness
· Travel and home
· Nostalgia for home
· Memories of home
· Imagined homes
· Thresholds
· Family and home
· Mourning and trauma
· Domesticity: pleasures and unhappiness
· Privacy
· Architecture
· Furnishings and ornament
Please e-mail abstracts of 500 words to brindlek@edgehill.ac.uk and dsouzak@edgehill.ac.uk by 12 July 2019
Completed essays of 5,000 -6,000 words (including endnotes) in MHRA format due 1 November 2019.
Sound is being celebrated as a source of insight in the humanities, yet so far no study has been produced that focuses exclusively on sound in/and short, short short, very short and flash fiction. This ENSFR-affiliated conference aims to close that gap.