Call for Papers

Anglistica AION. An Interdisciplinary Journal

Call for Papers

Pseudos: Fabrication, Fictionality and Vagueness in Texts and Textual Practices

Editors:  Michael Burke (Utrecht University, m.burke@ucr.nl) and Bianca Del Villano (University of Naples L'Orientale, bdelvillano@unior.it)

 

Description

The volume aims to investigate the experience of pseudos (the quasi-thing) from philological-literary, philosophical, cultural, and linguistic perspectives, intending it as an element of trespassing and crossing textual practices, verbal behaviours, and representations of authorial subjectivity. Pseudos was first conceptualised in ancient Greece, its etymology including closelyrelated meanings such as ‘falsehood’, ‘lie’, ‘fiction’, and ‘illusion’. Beyond this primarily ‘negative’ connotation, in the history of Western thought, pseudos has also come to encompass semantic fields associated with the ‘undetermined’, the ‘changeable’, and the ‘ambiguous’. Accordingly, contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following themes:

1. The Linguistics of Lying

  1. a)  The field of lying between pragmatics and argumentation (with reference to phenomena such as fallacy, paradox, and rhetorical figures).

  2. b)  Literary, cinematographic and television representations of liars and deceivers.

  3. c)  Pseudos and narration: mendacious storytelling, narrative creativity and lies, deception as a narrative tool.

2. Pseudonyms as a Practice and Tool of Relativisation

  1. a)  The rhetorical-discursive implications of pseudonyms: the (de)construction of ‘truth’.

  2. b)  Pseudonyms as a space for resistance and subversion: using falsity, ambiguity or paradox in textual, artistic and cultural practices to question norms and ideologies.

  3. c)  Pseudos in the digital and media age: dynamics of falsehood and authenticity on digital platforms, including deepfakes, disinformation, pseudonyms and virtual identities, and discourse manipulation.

3. Liminal Forms of Textuality

  1. a)  Hypotextuality and hypertextuality from a philological and theoretical perspective, and related case studies.

  2. b)  Theoretical and methodological reflections on textual practices such as adaptation, translation, remediation, re-functionalisation.

  3. c)  The relationship between subjectivity and textuality from a linguistic and literary point of view.

Submission of abstracts

Authors wishing to contribute are invited to send an abstract of their proposed article of no more than 300 words (excluding references) in MS Word format by 15th September 2025 to Michael Burke (m.burke@ucr.nl) and Bianca Del Villano (bdelvillano@unior) [CC anglistica@unior.it].

 

Important dates

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2025

Notification of acceptance: October 30, 2025

Deadline for completed of articles: January 15, 2026

For inquiries and submission details, please, contact Michael Burke (m.burke@ucr.nl) and Bianca Del Villano (bdelvillano@unior.it) [CC anglistica@unior.it].

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BrexLit: Redefining Borders

Editors: Lucia Esposito (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, lucia.esposito@uniroma3.it); Virginie Roche-Tiengo (Université d'Artois, virginie.rochetiengo@univ-artois.fr); Alessandra Ruggiero (Università di Teramo, aruggiero@unite.it)

 

Description:

In the late 1980s, Stuart Hall identified the success of Thatcherite conservatism in the way it addressed “the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people” underling how important it was to “think about politics in images” (Hall 1988: 167). Thatcherism was “addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary [...] while the left forlornly trie[d] to drag the conversation round to ‘our policies’” (ibidem). The new “Great Moving Right Show” (Hall 1979) of the Brexit years seems to have been performed using the same patterns and cultural strategies of Thatcherism; its utopian or retrotopian (Bauman 2017) idea of ‘Making Britain Great Again’ was constructed around new nostalgic myths of past imperial greatness and iconic images of a recovered splendid isolation that convey anti-European and anti-migrant sentiments.

Drawing on the shared idea that literature and performing arts can not only encourage empathy and help create a sense of community (Nussbaum 2010) but also effectively “engage with emergent political realities” (Shaw 2018: 16), especially through the voices of intellectuals in the public sphere, this issue intends to focus on literary works, also in their intermedial relations with other arts, that deal with the impact of Brexit on the life, thoughts and feelings of British society. 

The present call for papers seeks contributions from scholars and researchers interested in the political and cultural debates surrounding Brexit and its aftermath. We welcome submissions across a spectrum of themes, including but not limited to:

  • Discussing the redefinition of identity and belonging according to new configurations of nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, Englishness or Anglo-centric Britishness.
  • Analysing postcolonial issues in relation to migration and ethnicity, considering the changing governmental attitudes towards postcolonial subjects, in a framework of post-imperial nostalgia.
  • Exploring the remapping of borders and borderlands following a revival of geographical and mental insularity, especially with regard to the dichotomies between city and country, England and the other regions, with a particular focus on Ireland and Scotland.
  • Focusing on women’s voices across the infinite array of borders that have been crossed post-Brexit (at individual, international, political, gender, cultural, social and many other levels).

 

Submission of abstracts:

Authors wishing to contribute to this issue of Anglistica AION are invited to send an abstract of their proposed article of no more than 300 words (excluding references) in MS Word format by 30th September 2024 to Lucia Esposito (lucia.esposito@uniroma3.it), Virginie Roche-Tiengo (virginie.rochetiengo@univ-artois.fr) and Alessandra Ruggiero (aruggiero@unite.it) [CC anglistica@unior.it].

 

Important dates:

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2024

Notification of acceptance: October 21, 2024

Deadline for completed articles: January 20, 2025

 

Publication Schedule:

The accepted papers will be curated into a cohesive volume, aiming for publication in Anglistica AION (http://www.serena.unina.it/index.php/anglistica-aion) in 2025.

For inquiries and submission details, please contact Lucia Esposito (lucia.esposito@uniroma3.it), Virginie Roche-Tiengo (virginie.rochetiengo@univ-artois.fr) and Alessandra Ruggiero (aruggiero@unite.it) [CC anglistica@unior.it].

 

References

Anderson Benedict (1983, 2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalisms (London, Verso)

Bauman Zygmunt (2017), Retrotopia (Cambridge, Polity Press)

Berberich Christine (2023), Brexit and The Migrant Voice: EU Citizens in Post-Brexit Literature and Culture (London, Routledge)

Bischoff Lisa (2023), British Novels and the European Union: DysEUtopia (London, Palgrave Macmillan)

Eaglestone Robert, ed. (2018), Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses (New York, Routledge)

Featherstone Simon (2009), Englishness: Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press)

Hall Stuart (1979), “The Great Moving Right Show”, Marxism Today, pp. 14-20

Hall Stuart (1988), “Gramsci and Us”, in Id., The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London, Verso), pp. 161-173

Heidemann, Birte (2020), “The Brexit within: Mapping the rural and the urban in contemporary British fiction”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Vol. 56, no. 5), pp. 676-688

McLeod John (2020),“Warning signs: Postcolonial writing and the apprehension of Brexit”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Vol. 56, no. 5), pp. 607-620

Nussbaum Martha C. (2010), “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Brown, G. Wallace and David Held (eds) The Cosmopolitan Reader (Cambridge, Polity Press), pp. 155– 162

Shaw Kristian (2018), “Brexlit”, in Eaglestone Robert ed., Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses (New York, Routledge), pp. 15-30

Shaw Kristian (2021), Brexlit: British Literature and the European Project (London, Bloomsbury Academic)

Sierz Alex (2017), “Dark Times: British Theatre after Brexit”, A Journal of Performance and Art 115, pp. 3–11. 

Sierz Alex (2020), “Brexit Revisited”, The Theatre Times, online, available at https://thetheatretimes.com/brexit-revisited/

Ward Stuart and Astrid Rasch, eds (2019), Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (Bloomsbury Academic)