Studies in Canadian Literature is turning 40!!! Join the celebration! To commemorate this significant milestone (1976-2016), Studies in Canadian Literature is putting together a special issue dedicated to the past 40 years in Canadian literature. Call for Papers Canadian Literature: The Past Forty Years Having published its first issue in 1976, Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne will be celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2016. This special issue will be dedicated to the past forty years in Canadian literary production and scholarship. The period witnessed substantial developments and shifts in the field, from the legitimation of Canadian literature as an academic field of study and the rise of popular non-academic phenomena such as “Canada Reads” and the Giller Prize, to significant literary and critical movements: postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, canon debates, new historicism, Indigenous studies, book history, transnationalism, critical race theory, queer studies, diaspora studies, and, more recently, advances in the fields of digital humanities and ecocriticism. Many of these changes resonated in important ways with broader political and cultural events in Canada, such as the official Multiculturalism Act in 1988, the free-trade debates of the late 1980s, the 1990 Oka crisis, the constitutional crisis and ensuing referendum of 1990, the Japanese-Canadian Redress Movement, the “appropriation of voice” debates of the 1990s, the formation of the Territory of Nunavut in 1999, the demise of many Canadian small presses and bookstores, and the Harper government’s cancellation of the “Understanding Canada” program and its adverse effects on Canadian studies internationally. This period saw the publication of many groundbreaking literary texts, the selection of Canadian authors for several prestigious international awards, and the rise of Canadian literature as a popular subject of study internationally, but also the death of many authors and critics associated with the heyday of Canadian literature, including such figures as Margaret Laurence, Gabrielle Roy, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, Robert Kroetsch, Barbara Godard, Anne Hébert, Northrop Frye, Carol Shields, Mavis Gallant, Gaston Miron, David French, Rita Joe, Farley Mowat, and Alistair MacLeod. Looking back on the past forty years, how do we assess the changes that have taken place in this period? In what ways have the past forty years been formative (or not) in the development of Canadian literature? In what sense can one trace a series of identifiable shifts and/or interventions? What is the value of a generational analysis of Canadian literature? In what ways has the period been marked by a series of disjunctions? Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne invites submissions for essays that engage with the past four decades from a range of entry points and perspectives. We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to: • shifts in authorship and/or critical focus over the past 40 years • the significance of the cultural nationalist period of Canadian literary production and scholarship • literary reputations and celebrity • new authors emerging during this period • looking backward and/or looking forward • the influence of electronic and digital media • the legacy of postmodernism and/or postcolonialism; the linguistic “turn” • new theoretical areas that emerged during this period: e.g. trauma theory, affect theory, life-writing, memory studies, ecocriticism • revised configurations of the concept of “nation” • the rise of historical fiction • international developments in Canadian literary study • shifts in Canadian literary pedagogy • changes in conceptualizations of regionalism • new developments in Canadian poetry • changes in Canadian theatre production • discourses of optimism and/or crisis Please send us something and be part of the celebration! The anniversary issue will be inaugurated by a special session at the 2015 Congress dedicated to this topic and an early anniversary birthday cake! Join us at Congress for a piece of cake! Submissions should be 6,000-8,000 words, including Notes and Works Cited, and should conform to the MLA Handbook, 7th edition. Please submit essays electronically via Word attachment to [email protected] . Deadline for submissions is 1 August 2015, with publication scheduled for 2016. We welcome submissions in English and in French. For more information, visit the journal’s website at journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/ or contact Cynthia Sugars at [email protected], or Herb Wyile at [email protected].
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 23:06:00 +0000
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