CFP: Humanities, Special Issue on Modern and Contemporary Irish Writing (Feb.28, 2021)
Robert Brazeau and Laura Sydora
We seek original, previously unpublished essays for a special issue of Humanities on the topic of Modern and Contemporary Irish Writing.
Irish writing has emerged, especially since the turn of the last century, as a space of compelling and varied production. While we remain mindful of Emer Nolan’s important proviso that the Republic of Ireland “now appropriates all ‘success’ (including literary ‘success’) as evidence of its own dynamism, tolerance, and inclusiveness,” we are nevertheless interested in examining the ways in which historical and emergent forms of expression have combined in contemporary Ireland to produce this present moment of innovation and compelling creativity.
Writers might choose to historicize their reading of present social formations against the backdrop of powerful nationalist and postcolonial narratives, or they may choose to look at diverse, emergent trends in Irish writing as products of our own eruptive and disruptive moment. The editors seek, in fact, to place no prescriptive constraints whatsoever on the work being solicited in the hope of receiving responses as different, various, and transformative as the work being produced by writers in both the Republic and the North of Ireland in our present conjuncture; however, we offer the following far from exhaustive list of topics that might be of interest:
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Gender and sexuality in contemporary Irish writing; Ireland’s literature of sexual and social liberation;
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Celtic Tiger and/or post-Tiger Ireland: readings between economy and culture;
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Postnational Ireland/ Brexit/ Ireland and the EU: the expanding borders of Irish politics;
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Ecological and posthumanist approaches to Irish writing, past and present;
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Reimagining Ireland: the archival future and digital storytelling;
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Ireland’s mediasphere: alternative spaces of literary production;
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Ireland as a space of net inward migration: discourses of race and belonging;
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Contemporary Poetry or Drama North and South.
The editors welcome queries from prospective writers, but final decisions will be based on completed papers rather than proposals. You can reach us at rbrazeau@ualberta.ca or sydora1@ualberta.ca Essays are due Feb. 28th, 2021 with a publication date of April 30th, 2021. We encourage all prospective writers to read the Instructions for Authors page prior to submitting their work: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/instructions