Forthcoming Issues

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

2019 Winter

Translingual Writing in French and Francophone Literature

Guest Editors, Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth

This special issue will explore ‘translingual’ writing by French and Francophone authors. It will focus on literary texts that incorporate other languages besides French. The editors call for articles that examine texts that destabilize our understanding of French literary history. How do such texts complicate the perceived monolingualism of the French canon and invite a reassessment of relations between French and other languages in the Francosphere? How do they reflect histories of intercultural exchange, postcolonial relations, and contemporary culture? How can translingualism be employed as a critical tool to build upon, nuance, and reframe current work in French studies?

In press

2020 Spring

Writing/Creating in the Feminine in Early Modern France

Guest Editors, Colette Winn and Anne Larsen

For this special issue, submissions are invited that reflect current developments in the field of early modern women’s studies. Articles may consider or reflect new critical approaches in assessing the historicity, contexts, poetics, and crafting of these early cultural productions, or the recovery of early women’s texts and creations.

Proposals should be submitted to Colette Winn and Anne Larsen at chwinn@aol.com by September 1, 2019.

2020 Summer

Imagining the Body

Guest Editors, Polly Galis, Maria Tomlinson, and Antonia Wimbush

This issue examines the body in French and Francophone cultures within and beyond the metropole, with a broad temporal, national, ethnic, racial, gendered, and generic scope. Articles explore how the body can be deployed to challenge normative spaces and/or gazes, including fixed notions of identity, as well as heteronormative and patriarchal structures of representation and power. Articles focus on how the body is understood and presented in the twentieth and twenty-first century across multiple medias. The issue offers a far-reaching conceptualization of the body, inclusive of the queer, racialized, transnational, migrant, exiled, and posthuman body.

Abstracts in English or French of no more than 250 words, along with a short biography, should be submitted to Antonia Wimbush, Maria Tomlinson, and Polly Galis at imaginingthebody@gmail.com by January 15, 2019.