Call for Papers: Upcoming Special issue of Modern Fiction Studies
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 6000-8000 words and should follow the MLA Style Manual for internal citation and works cited. Queries should be addressed to Anne Fernald (fernald@fordham.edu). Online submission is at http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/mfs/special_issues/