Forthcoming Issues

2018 Fall

Poetry’s Forms and Transformations

Guest Editors, Nina Parish and Emma Wagstaff

The poetic practice of the last twenty years in France takes multiple forms, often creating permeable interfaces with other art forms, practices, and genres, whose own limits are in turn challenged and expanded. This issue examines the connections between poetry and other disciplines and creative practices. It will not simply propose that poets engage with the work of other practitioners or that they respond to poetry written in other languages. Instead it argues that the relation between poetry and other creative practices produces new artistic forms rather than dialogue, and poetic objects emerge that are more than written texts inspired by other media.

In press

2018 Winter

French and Beat Literatures: A History of Mutual Appropriation, Reception, and Translation

Guest Editor, Véronique Lane

Constructing a dialogue between Anglo-American criticism and French scholarship, this issue embodies and explores the very biculturalism that so distinctively informed Beat writing, from its emergence in 1940s New York to its major authors’ sojourn at the so-called Beat Hotel in 1950s and 1960s Paris. Drawing on expertise from across Europe as well as from the United States, it combines archival, historical, intertextual, and theoretical approaches to demonstrate the material presence of Francophone literature within the works of known and lesser known Beat writers, as well as to reassess the reception and impact of Beat literature within French culture.

In press

2019 Spring

La Portraitomanie: Intermediality and the Portrait in 19th-century France

Guest Editors, Érika Wicky and Kathrin Yacavone

From painting, photography, caricature, and sculpture to novels, essays, literary criticism, and historical writing, nineteenth-century France has aptly been described as the “siècle des portraits” (Dufour, 1997). This issue examines the nineteenth-century portrait with an emphasis on transmediality (how the portrait genre traveled from one medium to another), as well as on intermediality (whereby portraits originating in different media were brought together in the same works). Contributors explore the portrait as part of a wider evolution of textual and visual media as well as cultural history in France, while also revealing the extent to which intermediality is (re)invented in the nineteenth century.

In press

2019 Summer

Race and the Aesthetic in French and Francophone Cultures

Guest Editors, Cécile Bishop and Zoë Roth

This issue explores the specific contribution the study of the aesthetic can make to emerging debates about race in France. Contributions engage with literature, visual culture, and music to bring historical and social discourses on race into dialogue with aesthetic criticism. What does it mean to see race in a text or use it as an analytical tool? What makes a piece of art about race? What are the effects of racialized interpretation on literary fields? By addressing these questions, this issue also examines the limits and tensions between the practice of criticism and the urgencies of contemporary politics.

In press

2019 Fall

Sexual/Textual Boundaries: Women Writing Sexual Encounter in French, France, and Canada (2000-2015)

Guest Editors, Kate Averis, Eglė Kačkutė, and Catherine Mao

While women’s writing in French in the twentieth century notably re-cast the script of women’s sexual pleasure in often empowering ways, more recent works tell more varied, and often troubling, stories of sexual encounter, including ones of sexual abuse, incest, violence, pedophilia, and addiction as well as pleasure. This special issue examines the ways recent women’s writing in French, France, and Canada oversteps, disrupts or re-sets sexual and textual boundaries in fictional, autobiographical, testimonial, and experimental narratives of sexual encounter to explore a feminist politics of women’s agency, trauma, freedom, and pleasure in the twenty-first century.

In press