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.

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.

 

Call for papers, ‘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)

 

Throughout 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
  • 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 1 September 2024.

 

 

 

 

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 13.2 Short Fiction as World Literature

Out now – the special issue of  Short Fiction in Theory and Practice , ‘Short Fiction as World Literature’ 

Guest-edited by Amandio Reis, the issue follows on from the ENSFR conference in Lisbon, October 2022. It includes articles on Janet Frame, Annie Dillard, Lucia Berlin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zoe Wicomb and Zadie Smith from a host of international contributors.  It also features an essay by Helena C. Buescu on Eca de Queiros, and Livi Michael speaking ‘On Judging and Being Judged’ plus book reviews on fiction from Ireland and Albania.

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 12.2

Vol. 12.2 , the second of two special issues on ‘the health of the short story’ guest-edited by Lucy Dawes Durneen is now available.  Lucy’s editorial
‘Breaking ourselves open: Recovery and survival in the short form’  reflects on the process of editing and arranging articles that speak to and across the individual issues, and the way in which this itself mirrors the short story’s trifold ability to diagnose, observe and potentially suture together resolutions for the challenges of the human condition, both within the boundaries of the text, and as a discrete tool for personal recovery.

Other articles discuss pandemic literature; medical short stories in the 1890s; the early 20th century US writer Fanny Hurst; monstrous motherhood in Renaissance short fiction; and running writing workshops for health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are creative contributions from Moy McCrory, Virginia Hartley and the Chilean author Carolina Brown, who is also in conversation with Lucy Dawes Durneen. Plus book reviews on the modern short story and magazine culture and the German short story by  Aleix Tura Vecino and Livi Michael.