MFS: Modern Fiction Studies
Conferences and Calls for Papers

CFPs and conferences are organized by submission deadline from newest to oldest.

Call for Papers: Upcoming Special Issue
New British Fiction

Guest Editor: Patrick O’Donnell
Deadline for Submission: 1 November 2011

The Editors of MFS seek essays that consider the fiction of the group of young British writers whose work has been evolving and maturing since the turn into the twenty-first century. Over the past fifteen years, there has been a remarkable outpouring of new and innovative fiction from Britain comparable in quality and range to that of American postmodernist experimentation during the 1960s and 1970s. This new writing reflects, in part, the continuation of that experiment into the twenty-first century, and it also reflects the crucial impact of postcolonial thought, multiculturalism, globalization, and, as Rebecca Walkowitz has characterized it, an emergent cosmopolitanism, a cultural paradigm that values contact with strangers and their ways of life . . . [as well as] individualism, artistic experimentation, social deviance, and urban mobility.

This special issue will examine the generation after Rushdie, McEwan, Ishiguro, and Byatt. The 2003 version of Granta’s decennial list of Best Young British Novelists included the increasingly familiar names of David Mitchell, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Philip Hensher, and Sarah Waters; in June, 2010, the Telegraph published an update that listed writers who were beginning to make an impact in the intervening years, including China Miéville, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, and Steven Hall. This list of writers is meant to be indicative, not exclusive: we invite essays on these and many other British writers who are involved in the making of new British fiction. Essays on individual writers and works are welcome, as well as essays on broader trends and issues in new British fiction, but all essays should consider how the works discussed reflect the developing, interactive cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts that inform the writing of new British fiction.

Essays should be 6000-9000 words and should follow the MLA Style Manual for internal citation and works cited. Please submit two copies of your essay to The Editors, MFS, Department of English, Purdue University, 500 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038. Queries should be directed to Patrick O’Donnell (pod@msu.edu).

Call for Papers: Upcoming Special Issue
Modern Fiction and Politics

Guest Editor: Rajagopalan Radhakrishanan
Deadline for Submissions: 1 February 2012

The Editors of MFS seek essays that reflect on the relationship between modern fiction and politics, broadly conceived. In a world structured by dominance and animated by heterogeneous and often incommensurable temporalities, how should fiction, in the act of constructing itself, address the world as well? Would such an address be political or nameless, or would it be a gesture that transcends this axiomatic binary? During times when the very category of the political is in utter disrepute, when politics is mired either in ideological sclerosis or the fakery of prepared answers, how should fiction imagine with precision critical-utopian alternatives to the status quo of the world? What are the innovative forms of community that fiction as aesthetic can propose in opposition to false conscious forms of collectivity? How can fiction as subaltern, postcolonial, gendered, feminist, post-heterosexual, post-global, or eco-planetary envision radically different forms of temporality and historicity? In the ongoing dialectical strife between living and telling, how should storytelling enable and empower existing as knowing? We invite original essays that respond to these and other related questions that constitute the crisis of fiction during our times, and address contemporary writers such as, but not limited to, James Baldwin, J. M. Coetzee, Ralph Ellison, Amitav Ghosh, Orhan Pamuk, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Thomas Pynchon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chimamudo Adichi, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith.

Essays should be 6000-9000 words and should follow the MLA Style Manual for internal citation and works cited. Please submit two copies of your essay to The Editors, MFS, Department of English, Purdue University, 500 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038. Queries should be directed to Rajagopalan Radhakrishanan (rradheya@gmail.com).

Call for Papers: Upcoming Special Issue
Modernist Life Narratives: Bildungsroman, Biography, Autobiography

Guest Editor: John Paul Riquelme
Deadline for Submissions: 1 September 2012

The Editors of MFS seek essays that reflect on the bildungsroman from 1890 to 1950, especially in relation to other types of life writing of the period. What are the significant similarities and differences among these related narrative forms, with regard to style, structure, and conceptual implications?

We welcome essays that focus on individual writers and works, as well as essays that deal more broadly with relations and differences between writers and forms of modernist life writing. We would be especially interested in seeing commentaries that involve revisionary thinking about modernism or that take innovative theoretical directions for characterizing life writing in the frame of modernity.

Essays should be 6000-9000 words and should follow the MLA Style Manual for internal citation and works cited. Please submit two copies of your essay to The Editors, MFS Department of English, Purdue University, 500 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038. Queries should be directed to John Paul Riquelme (jpriquel@bu.edu).

Call for Papers: Upcoming Special issue
Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism

Editor: Anne Fernald
Deadline for Submission: 1 March 2012

The editors of MFS solicit new feminist scholarship on neglected women writers from the first half of the twentieth century. Feminist readings of single texts, essays on groups and/or movements, and overviews of a single woman’s career are equally welcomed. We are particularly interested in new theoretical approaches to modernism emerging out of feminist theory, imbued with what Sianne Ngai calls “a feminist attentiveness to the persistence of sexual hierarchies” (2). How can a feminist approach to women writers shape the conversation at a time when New Modernist studies have largely shifted the focus away from gender toward history and nation? How do recent developments in transnational modernism, urban theory, material, textual, and cultural history affect our readings of texts by women? Most of all, this issue’s double focus on neglected women writers and feminist theory seeks to make a critical intervention: What might new theory of modernism, taking as its foundation a feminist approach to a woman writer, look like?

This issue seeks to represent the full range of womanhood in the early twentieth century: conservatives and radicals, feminists and anti-feminists, lesbians, mothers, professionals, urban and rural women, women of color, white colonialists. Most importantly, it hopes to offer readings of texts by women through new feminist theoretical approaches with continuing resonances for all scholars in the field.

Essays should be 6000-9000 words and should follow the MLA Style Manual for internal citation and works cited. Queries should be addressed to Anne Fernald (fernald@fordham.edu). For information on submission, please contact mfs@purdue.edu.