Influence and Appropriation

CERAE: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is seeking contributions for its upcoming volume on the theme of “Influence and Appropriation”, to be published in 2017. We are, additionally, delighted to announce a prize of $200 for the best article published in this volume by a graduate student or early career researcher (details below).

Both individuals and entire cultural groups are influenced consciously and subconsciously as part of a receptive process, but they may actively respond to such influences by appropriating them for new purposes. Perhaps human beings cannot escape their influences, but think in terms of them regardless of whether they are taken as right or wrong, useful or otherwise. Such influences may have enduring effects on the lives of people and ideas, and may be co-opted for new social contexts to fit new purposes.
Contributors to this issue may consider some of the following areas:

• How writers adapt received ideas and novel conceptual frameworks or adapt to them
• How entire cultural groupings (national, vocational, socio-economic, religious, and so on) may be influenced by contact and exchange
• The mentorship and authority of ideas and people
• The use and abuse of old concepts for new polemics
• The shifting influence of canonical texts across time
• The way received ideas influence behaviours in specific situations
• How medieval and early modern ideas are reshaped for use in modern situations

These topics are intended as guides. Any potential contributors who are unsure about the suitability of their idea are encouraged to contact the journal’s editor (Keagan Brewer) at editorcerae@gmail.com.

The deadline for themed submissions is Friday 18 November, 2016. In addition to themed articles, however, we also welcome non-themed submissions, which can be made at any point throughout the year.

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Articles should be approximately 5000-7000 words. Further details regarding submission, including author guidelines and the journal’s style sheet, can be found online at http://openjournals.arts.uwa.edu.au/index.php/cerae/about/submissions.

PRIZES:

Cerae is delighted to announce a prize of $200 for the best article to be published in Volume 4 by a graduate student or early career researcher (defined as five years out from PhD completion). Cerae is able to offer this prize thanks to the generosity of our sponsors. For a full list of organizations which have supported us in the past, see our sponsorship page. The journal reserves the right not to award a prize in any given year if no articles of sufficiently high standard are submitted.

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present
Special Issue of The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 11.2 (June 2018)
Guest Editors: Li-hsin Hsu and Andrew Taylor

This special issue The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture seeks essays of 6,000 to 10,000 words engaged in debate around historical, cultural, and literary issues in the Atlantic World. Whilst national narratives have often sought to assert the truth of universal values, a more self-conscious focus upon the methodological framework of the transnational Atlantic world concerns itself explicitly with ways in which diverse and competing local or national paradigms might contest the kinds of ideological assumptions that underwrite narratives of progress, civilisation and modernity. The editors are keen to receive submissions that explore what happens when the assumptions of a nationalistic model of doing literary and cultural criticism, in which geography is allegorised as the autonomous locus of all possible meaning, are challenged by forms of encounter and contagion that disrupt and expand our frames of interpretation. How might the Atlantic space map a series of textual disruptions and contagions during the period? In what ways does transatlanticism open up possibilities for thinking about literary comparison as a critical practice? How do the crossings of people, objects and ideas complicate our sense of literary and intellectual inheritance? What kinds of relationship does the Atlantic world have with other spatial paradigms—the Pacific, the Orient, Australasia? The essays in this special issue seek to explore the meshed networks of interaction—aesthetic, ideological, material—that constitute the space of Atlantic exchange. This, we hope, will result in a wide-ranging, geographically diverse collection that displays much of the best research being undertaken in this exciting and vibrant field.

Possible areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:

• ecology and landscape
• migration and travel
• nature and nation
• Asia/Orientalism and transatlanticism
• social reform
• class and conflict
• gender and sexuality
• art and aesthetics
• slavery and empire
• science and technology
• nationalism and cosmopolitanism

The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (www.wreview.org) is a Scopus-indexed journal of interdisciplinary nature based in the Department of English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. Please follow the submission guidelines to submit articles online by 30 June, 2017.

Li-hsin Hsu is Assistant Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a PhD in Transatlantic Romanticism from the University of Edinburgh and specialises in transatlantic studies, ecocriticism, and Orientalism. She received the 2014 Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) Scholar in Amherst Award and has published in journals such as Symbiosis: A Transatlantic Journal and The Emily Dickinson Journal.

Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer and Head of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in 19th- and 20th-century North American literature and intellectual history and has an interest in the intersection of historiography and contemporary American fiction. He’s the author of Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge UP, 2002), Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Experience (U of New Hampshire P, 2010), and co-author of Thomas Pynchon (Manchester UP, 2013). He’s the co-editor of several books including Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), Stanley Cavell: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism (Manchester UP, 2012), and Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America (Routledge, 2013). An awardee of the Leverhulme Trust Project Grant, Dr Taylor is a series editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures, published by Edinburgh UP.