Call for Chapter Proposals: The Oxford Handbook of Carson McCullers 

Call for Chapter Proposals — The Oxford Handbook of Carson McCullers

Editor: Carlos Dews, John Cabot University, Rome
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2027
Contact: cdews@johncabot.edu

A more detailed version of this Call for Chapter Proposals can be found via THIS LINK. Please consult it before submitting a chapter proposal.

Carson McCullers remains one of the most distinctive and influential American writers of the twentieth century. Her fiction, drama, essays, journalism, poetry, letters, and other writings continue to generate important scholarship in American literature, Southern studies, modernism, queer studies, disability studies, childhood and adolescence studies, race and regional studies, affect theory, life writing, music and sound studies, adaptation, and archival research. Recent biographies, archival discoveries, documentary and musical projects, and the publication of previously unavailable materials have opened new possibilities for understanding McCullers’s life, work, and cultural legacy.

Proposals are invited for contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Carson McCullers, which will bring together established and emerging scholars to provide the first comprehensive handbook devoted to McCullers. The volume seeks both authoritative overviews of established areas of McCullers scholarship and innovative essays that introduce new questions, methodologies, archives, comparisons, and interdisciplinary approaches.

The Handbook will be organized into six sections:

1. Life, Archives, and Historical Worlds
   II. The Works: Textual Histories, Genres, and Career Contexts
   III. Bodies, Genders, Sexualities
   IV. Race, Region, Citizenship, and Social Difference
   V. Form, Feeling, and Intellectual Genealogies
   VI. Reception, Influence, Adaptation, and Global McCullers

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

McCullers’s biography, letters, recordings, archives, and literary networks

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and Clock Without Hands

Short fiction, drama, essays, journalism, poetry, and unfinished writing

Queer desire, gender nonconformity, adolescence, marriage, masculinity, and nonnormative kinship

Disability, illness, embodiment, bodily difference, and freak aesthetics

Race, segregation, whiteness, Blackness, ethnicity, region, citizenship, class, and labor

Loneliness, love, communion, affect, empathy, and belonging

Voice, silence, listening, music, and sound

Modernism, Gothic form, narrative form, and formal experimentation

Psychoanalysis, religion, ethics, philosophy, and literary influence

Biography, reception history, and McCullers’s twenty-first-century rediscovery

Stage, film, opera, music, and other adaptations

Translation, comparative approaches, and global reception

Teaching, archives, public humanities, literary houses, museums, and literary tourism

We particularly welcome proposals that extend McCullers studies into new methodological and disciplinary areas, including critical race studies, transgender studies, performance and media studies, international and comparative approaches, and work by scholars outside the United States. The Handbook seeks a productive balance between established scholars and newer voices and welcomes proposals from scholars whose primary expertise lies in fields adjacent to McCullers studies.

Please submit a 300-500 word chapter proposal, together with a brief biographical statement or CV, by 15 January 2027 to cdews@johncabot.edu. Proposals should identify the proposed chapter’s central argument, primary texts or materials, methodology, and contribution to the Handbook.

Completed chapters will be approximately 6000-9000 words and will be due 15 February 2028.