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MFS: Modern Fiction Studies
MFS publishes scholarly essays that analyze the important aesthetic, cultural, political, and environmental developments currently shaping today’s academic and public conversations. A leading international literature and humanities journal, MFS focuses on the various modalities and uses of fiction in the broadest sense of the term
—publishing material designed to speak to a wide audience of scholars, public intellectuals, and cultural practitioners working across diverse fields, regions, and venues. Now in its sixty-eighth year, MFS is published by Johns Hopkins University Press and is...
MFS publishes scholarly essays that analyze the important aesthetic, cultural, political, and environmental developments currently shaping today’s academic and public conversations. A leading international literature and humanities journal, MFS focuses on the various modalities and uses of fiction in the broadest sense of the term
—publishing material designed to speak to a wide audience of scholars, public intellectuals, and cultural practitioners working across diverse fields, regions, and venues. Now in its sixty-eighth year, MFS is published by Johns Hopkins University Press and is available online at Project MUSE.
About
Journal Details
Frequency
Quarterly
Subject
ISSN
Print: 0026-7724
Online: 1080-658X
Online: 1080-658X
Hopkins Press does not require potential contributors to pay an article submission fee in order to be considered for publication in any of the Journals that we publish. Any other website that purports to be affiliated with a Hopkins Press Journal and that requires you to pay an article submission fee is fraudulent. Do not provide payment information. Instead, we ask that you contact William Breichner, Hopkins Press Journals Publisher: [email protected].
(These guidelines apply to general submission. To submit an essay for a special issue, please see those specific instructions.)
Mfs invites the submission of articles (6,000-9,000 words) offering historical, interdisciplinary, theoretical, and cultural approaches to modern and contemporary narrative. Please visit our online submission system to upload your essay: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mfs
Documentation format should include internal citation, endnotes, and full Works Cited in accordance with the latest edition of the MLA Style Manual. Mfs welcomes the submission of illustrations. Low-resolution images are acceptable for submission, but authors must provide high-resolution images for publication.
Publication is contingent on authors granting exclusive license to Johns Hopkins UP to publish their essays for the Department of English at Purdue University. Authors may subsequently reprint their essays in books that they publish, provided they acknowledge the material's previous publication in Mfs.
Address editorial correspondence to
The Editors
Modern Fiction Studies
Purdue University
Department of English
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038
Phone: (765) 494-3758
FAX: (765) 494-3780
E-mail: [email protected]
The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice page.
Peer Review Policy
MFS: Modern Fiction Studies publishes original essays of 6,000-9,000 words. We do not permit simultaneous submission. We have initial in-house screening of essays. If we decide not to send an essay out for external review, it will be rejected within a month. Essays we like are sent out to two external readers using the blind review system. After external review, essays are either 1) accepted, 2) accepted contingent on revision, or 3) marked as revise and resubmit. This review takes around 6-9 weeks. If accepted contingent, the author must address concerns of the external reports and send us a revised essay and explain to us how the revised version engages the reader reports. A decision on these essays is then made in house, typically within a week or two of receiving the revision. Authors who are invited to revise and resubmit must also explain how they’ve addressed the readers’ concerns. We send the revised and resubmitted essay out again for external review (often to one or both of the original readers). This may take another 6-9 weeks.
All book reviews are solicited. We do not consider unsolicited reviews.
Long Modernism, Altered Natures
Guest Editors: Matthew Gannon, Patrick Whitmarsh, and Kate Marshall
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2025
Deadline for Manuscript Drafts: 31 July 2025
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s Presidential Science Advisory Committee published a dire warning on the state of the global environment: “Through his worldwide industrial civilization,” the report concluded, “Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment.” The report is a cultural marker of what historians J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke call the Great Acceleration, a rapid expansion of growth and production in the postindustrial Global North. The roots of this planetary transformation can be traced even earlier, however. Already in the late nineteenth century, a moment that Andreas Malm pinpoints as the consummation of steam power, literary texts were beginning to conduct experiments of their own through representations of the fraught relations between humanity, technology, and ecology. In what Elizabeth Carolyn Miller calls the “long exhaustion” of extractive capitalism, authors began recognizing “the emergence of a society that was, in a new way, unsustainable for the long run.” This new, unsustainable society gave rise to striking literary impressions of environmental crisis and rupture within the experimental aesthetics of modernist writing as well as contemporaneous genre fiction, such as the Gothic, horror, science fiction, and the weird. Furthermore, the affinities between modernist writing and genre fiction reveal a generative dialogue between aesthetic developments occurring in literature—from the canonical texts of modernism to the “new weird” fictions of N.K. Jemisin, Carmen Maria Machado, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer in the twenty-first century—and conceptual dimensions of critical and literary theory, especially those attempting to think planetary crisis. The current special issue identifies this generative dialogue as indicative of a long modernism reaching from the long exhaustion to the Great Acceleration and beyond, into the strange new realities of the postnormal twenty-first century.
We invite papers that examine links between emerging socioecological concerns and the experimental and speculative trends within this long modernist context. While contributors may focus on specific authors and historical moments within this extended temporal frame, the issue as a whole aims to build compelling throughlines between early-twentieth-century texts and the literary inheritors of modernism from the postwar era to the present, including those that venture deeper into speculative territory. Potential essays might consider the following questions: How has the literature of this long modernist period shown an interest—even implicitly or unconsciously—in accelerating climate change, environmental crisis, and other deep time metamorphoses of the planet? In what specific ways and toward what particular ends do these texts represent the accelerations of the Anthropocene? How do these narratives imagine other worlds or histories that help reimagine our own, especially by exacerbating the extent and effects of climate crises? How do they engage with or anticipate contemporary climatological concerns and literary tendencies? How does imagining the nonhuman mitigate anthropocentrism in characterization and narration? How do various genres and forms creep into—and sometimes clash within—the literary fiction of this period? How does recent literature and criticism draw on and repurpose the forms and ideas from the literary past? Essays are encouraged to examine lesser-known works or consider works whose engagement with these topics has been overlooked.
Contributors are invited to pursue any of the above questions and other related topics, including:
- Narrative engagements with alternative terminologies of the Anthropocene (e.g. Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, etc.)
- Texts that address specific manifestations of ecological or environmental change (e.g. deforestation, pollution, soil/water contamination, biodiversity loss, sea level rise, heat waves, intense storm seasons, etc.)
- Configurations of the nonhuman within ecological narratives
- Narrative depictions, impressions, intimations, or representations of extinction
- Patterns of displacement, occupation, oppression, and genocide as they accompany or are intertwined with processes of ecological disruption
- Reassessments of various modernist periodizations (e.g. High Modernism, late modernism, Cold War modernism, postmodernism, etc.) in the context of ecological and environmental change
- Expressive, figurative, allegorical, or otherwise implicit treatments of ecological topics in texts that are not ostensibly about the environment
- The dynamic between the so-called built and unbuilt worlds, including ways this distinction is often difficult to identify
- Intersections between ecology, energy, and economy
- Redefinitions of ecology and/or environment as imagined by the literary output of long modernism
Essays that seek to retheorize central terms (modernism, genre, speculation, nature, Anthropocene, acceleration, weird, etc.) are welcome, as are essays that put texts in conversation with each other in rich and provocative ways.
Essays should be 7,000–9,000 words, including all quotations and bibliographic references, and should follow the MLA Handbook (9th edition) for internal citations and Works Cited. Please submit your essay via the online submission form at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mfs. Queries ahead of submission may be directed to Matthew Gannon ([email protected]) and Patrick Whitmarsh ([email protected]).
Foreseeable Humanities Futures
The past half-century of research in the humanities has been exciting by any measure of intellectual excitement. The vertiginous explosion of new subfields—queer theory, postcolonial studies, studies in race and ethnicity, disability studies, animal studies, indigenous studies, environmental humanities, new materialism, and digital humanities (just to name a few)—has opened new avenues of inquiry into the full range of human expression as well as unprecedented interdisciplinary inquiries into the relations between humans and nonhuman worlds, from bacteria and lichens to birds and bees to plastic and the polar ice caps. Research in the humanities explores our human cultural heritage and imagines our present and future interactions with each other and with the biosphere. Crucially, contemporary work in the humanities also seeks to preserve our “cultural heritage” without defaulting into nationalist or ethnocentric conceptions of culture, appealing instead to our collective—our global—need to understand our multiple heritages and trajectories as humans in terms of intraspecies diversity in all its manifestations, and in terms of our various and often vexed relations with the nonhuman world.
And yet that sense of excitement in new work is never matched by enthusiasm about the institutional status of the humanities in higher education, as that status seems to dwindle with each passing year. Falling enrollments, declining numbers of tenure-track faculty positions, a general atmosphere of malaise and bad morale—this is what people tend to think of when they think of the humanities today. Those people are not wrong. The quality of new research in the humanities bears no relationship to the public image of the humanities—even though, as Amanda Anderson has argued, a great deal of contemporary culture uses the interpretive tools of the humanities every day, every time someone reviews a new book, a new film, a new series on a streaming platform. Given this contradictory state of affairs, what foreseeable futures can we imagine for the humanities?
Essays of 6000–9000 words are welcome anytime between now and December 1, 2025.
Global South Ecologies
Guest Editors: Pashmina Murthy (Kenyon College) and Rituparna Mitra (Emerson College)
Deadline for Submissions: January 31, 2026
This Special Issue invites papers on topics at the intersection of the Global South and climate crisis. In bringing these two areas of study together, we hope to suggest their complex imbrication: the Global South is increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic climate events; at the same time, ongoing breakdown—(neo)colonial economies of extraction, the racialization of laboring bodies and geographies, the creation of carceral and sacrifice zones, and migration and displacement—is a defining feature. Key to our understanding of the Global South is its constitution by the histories and conditions of global capitalism as well as attempts at resistance (López 2007; Prashad 2012; Armillas-Tiseyra and Mahler 2021). And yet, it is worth recalling that often the South is not only the site of anthropogenic devastation but also, as Amitav Ghosh has remarked, its “major driver” (Ghosh 2018). As the above remarks might suggest, we see “Global South Ecologies” not as an already-legible field of inquiry but as an invitation to interrogate the terms through each other.
Our framing of this Special Issue is in conversation with other recent critical investigations of the climate crisis with a literary or media focus (Song 2022; LeMenager and Shewry 2021; Iheka 2021; Hsu 2020; DeLoughery 2019; Farrier 2019). Literary texts give form and narrative shape as much to the catastrophic as to what Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) has labelled the “cruddy everydays” of the present. They capture the multiscalar and uneven texture of ecological devastation and disappearance. The term Global South as a relational geography itself emerges out of the distribution and sedimentation of power. In contexts of accelerated environmental change, it offers a strategic heuristic for a “rescaling of attention and concern beyond the local or national, beyond the human and anthropocentric, and beyond modernity itself” (Wenzel 2019). We anticipate that the contributions will draw practices from various fields of inquiry including Critical Anthropocene Studies, philosophy, feminism, Latinx Studies, Indigenous Studies, and postcolonial studies and address the comparative and interdisciplinary scope of the topic. Papers might interrogate ongoing histories of exploitation, jagged materialities of the present, or imagine different kinds of futurity. Equally, we welcome papers that work at the scale of the regional or the national, or that think about the global and planetary together (Chakraborty 2021; Baishya and Kumar 2022; Pratt, 2022).
We invite contributions that focus on a variety of temporal and geopolitical sites while being attuned to the politics of extinction, extraction and empowerment. Key topics the Special Issue seeks to address include but are not limited to:
- Narratives of loss and extinction from multiple cultural, generic, linguistic, and ecological contexts
- The Global South as a theoretical method to examine ecological devastation and disappearance
- “Southern” memory and remembrance of extraction, exploitation, disappearance, crisis in the U.S. and global contexts
- Gender, race, caste within global South ecologies
- South-South movements for environmental justice
- Critiques and theoretical expansions of biopolitics to include ecological devastation
- Forms of resistance, reinscription, and repair by global South actors
- Lithic, mineral, vegetal, and animal entanglements in the South
- Non-human ontologies, geo-histories, temporalities
- Emergent modalities of self-hood in the context of ecological collapse
- Non-extractive/non-anthropocentric/multispecies epistemologies
- Narrative scale, gaze, perspective attuned to the ecological and ethical
- Conjunctions of cultural and ecological disappearance
- Constructions and reorganizations of carceral and/or sacrifice zones
- Climate-induced migration and displacement
Essays should be 7,000-9,000 words, including notes and references, and should follow the MLA Handbook (8th Edition) for citation style. Please submit your essay via the online submission form for MFS: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mfs
We welcome any queries about the special issue, and you can reach out to Pashmina Murthy ([email protected]) and Rituparna Mitra ([email protected]).
In addition to its continuing commitment to publishing the best scholarship on modern and contemporary fiction, MFS is also especially interesting in pursuing topics of current importance to literature and the humanities in general, including:
- Critical AI Studies and The Fictionality of AI/Machine Learning/Large Language Models
- Fictions of Conspiracy Theory
- The Future of Literary Studies in the University
- Populism and its Fictions
- Discourses of Neoliberalism
- Migration and Nation
- Discourses of Sustainability
- Literary Studies, Climate Change, Species Extinction
- Fictions and New Directions in Critical Race Theory
eTOC (Electronic Table of Contents) alerts can be delivered to your inbox when this or any Hopkins Press journal is published via your ProjectMUSE MyMUSE account. Visit the eTOC instructions page for detailed instructions on setting up your MyMUSE account and alerts.
Editor
Robert P. Marzec
Associate Editor
Maren Linett
Managing Editor
Frida Beckman
Editorial Assistants
Rochel Bergman
Jeeyoung Choi
Emily M. Pearson
Project Manager
Daniel Froid
Editorial Collective
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Pennsylvania State University
Frida Beckman, Stockholm University
Debra Rae Cohen, University of South Carolina
Elizabeth DeLoughrey, UCLA
Joseph Keith, Binghamton University
Anne Garland Mahler, University of Virginia
Timothy Melley, Miami University
Kalpana Seshadri, Boston College
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Rice University
Aarthi Vadde, Duke University
Jay Watson, University of Mississippi
Purdue Advisory Board
Marlo Denice David
John Duvall
Wendy Flory
Sandor Goodhart
Shaun F. D. Hughes
Robert Paul Lamb
Alfred J. López
Jennifer Freeman Marshall
Daniel Morris
Nancy J. Peterson
Arkady Plotnitsky
Aparajita Sagar
Editorial Advisory Board
Michael Awkward, University of Michigan
Herman Beavers, University of Pennsylvania
Michael Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University
Stephen J. Burn, University of Glasgow
Debra Rae Cohen, University of South Carolina
Santanu Das, All Souls College, Oxford
Laura Doyle, University of Massachusetts
Jonathan Eburne, Pennsylvania State University
Anne Fernald, Fordham University
Ellen G. Friedman, College of New Jersey
Scott Herring, Indiana University
Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky
John T. Matthews, Boston University
Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia
Mark McGurl, Stanford University
James McNaughton, University of Alabama
Alan Nadel, University of Kentucky
Kinohi Nishikawa, Princeton University
Stacey Olster, SUNY, Stony Brook
Robert Dale Parker, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Adam Parkes, University of Georgia
Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, University of California, Irvine
Judith Roof, Rice University
Michael Rubenstein, SUNY, Stony Brook
Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania
Ramón Saldívar, Stanford University
Urmila Seshagiri, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Anna Snaith, King’s College London
Stephen Hong Sohn, Fordham University
Siobhan Somerville, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Susan Strehle, SUNY, Binghamton
John J. Su, Marquette University
Phillip Wegner, University of Florida
Send books for review to:
The Editors
Modern Fiction Studies
Purdue University
Department of English
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette IN 47907-1389
Please send book review copies to the address above. Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.
Abstracting & Indexing Databases
- Clarivate Analytics
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index
- Current Contents
- Web of Science
- De Gruyter Saur
- Dietrich's Index Philosophicus
- IBZ - Internationale Bibliographie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur
- Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlicher Literatur
- EBSCOhost
- Academic Search Alumni Edition, 6/1/1990-
- Academic Search Complete, 6/1/1990-
- Academic Search Elite, 6/1/1990-
- Academic Search Premier, 6/1/1990-
- Biography Index: Past and Present (H.W. Wilson), vol.29, 1983-vol.55, no.1, 2009
- Book Review Digest Plus (H.W. Wilson), Jan.1983-
- Current Abstracts, 1/1/2000-
- Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson), 4/15/1965-3/1/1983
- Humanities Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), 6/1/1983-
- Humanities Index (Online), 1983/01-
- Humanities Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson), 4/15/1965-3/1/1983
- Humanities International Complete, 3/1/1982-
- Humanities International Index, 3/1/1982-
- Humanities Source, 4/15/1965-
- Humanities Source Ultimate, 4/15/1965-
- MasterFILE Complete, 3/1/1982-
- MasterFILE Elite, 6/1/1990-
- MasterFILE Premier, 6/1/1990-
- MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
- OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), 6/1/1983-
- Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, 3/1/1982-
- RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale)
- Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies
- Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1983 (H.W. Wilson), 1965/03-1973/09
- SocINDEX, 6/1/1982-
- SocINDEX with Full Text, 6/1/1982-
- TOC Premier (Table of Contents), 1/1/1995-
- Women's Studies International, 6/1/1970-
- Elsevier BV
- Scopus, 2002-
- Gale
- Academic ASAP, 03/1987-
- Book Review Index Plus
- Gale Academic OneFile
- Gale Academic OneFile Select, 03/1987-
- Gale General OneFile, 03/1987-
- Gale OneFile: High School Edition, 06/1985-
- Gale OneFile: Leadership and Management, 03/1971 -
- General Reference Center Gold, 03/1980-
- General Reference Centre International, 3/1980-
- InfoTrac Custom, 3/1987-
- MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
- OCLC
- ArticleFirst, vol.38, no.1, 1992-vol.57, no.4, 2011
- Electronic Collections Online, vol.40, no.3, 1994-vol.57, no.4, 2011
- Humanities Index (Online), 1983/01-
- Periodical Abstracts, v.35, n.1, 1989-v.56, n.4, 2010
- Personal Alert (E-mail)
- ProQuest
- Art, Design & Architecture Collection, 04/01/1989-
- Arts & Humanities Database, 04/01/1989-
- Arts Premium Collection, 4/1/1989-
- Literary Journals Index Full Text
- MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
- Periodicals Index Online
- Professional ProQuest Central, 04/01/1989-
- ProQuest 5000, 04/01/1989-
- ProQuest Central, 04/01/1989-
- Research Library, 04/01/1989-
- RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale)
Abstracting & Indexing Sources
- Children's Book Review Index (Active) (Print)
- Abstracts of English Studies (Ceased) (Print)
- Academic Index (Ceased) (Print)
- Chicano Index (Ceased) (Print)
- Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities (Ceased) (Print)
- MLA Abstracts of Articles in Scholarly Journals (Ceased) (Print)
- Middle East: Abstracts and Index (Researched / Unresolved) (Print)
Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.
0.1 (2024)
0.3 (Five-Year Impact Factor)
0.00015 (Eigenfactor™ Score)
Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor):
Note: While journals indexed in AHCI and ESCI are receiving a JIF for the first time in June 2023, they will not receive ranks, quartiles, or percentiles until the release of 2023 data in June 2024.
© Clarivate Analytics 2025
Published quarterly
Readers include: Scholars and students of literary criticism
Print circulation: 304
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