CFP Three centuries of the literature of fear by women authors (Spec Issue of Revista Abusões; 7/17/2022)

Three centuries of the literature of fear by women authors

source: https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/abusoes/index

Editors:
Ana Paula Araujo dos Santos (UERJ, Brazil); Ana Resende (UERJ, Brazil); Anna Faedrich (UFF, Brazil); Renata Philippov (UNIFESP, Brazil)

Submissions are due by July 17, 2022
Publicado: 2022-04-12





Three centuries of the literature of fear by women authors



In Literary Women (1976), Ellen Moers defines the term “female Gothic” as those works written by women that produce fear or fear-related sensations, such as horror, terror, and disgust, in the readers. Moers makes her point by drawing on Ann Radcliffe, the most successful writer of the eighteenth century, and the Gothic machinery she used in her novels to create the sublime effect, such as dark landscapes and ruined castles—suitable spaces for supernatural apparitions. According to Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein (1831), a successful narrative depends on the intensity of the physical sensations produced, such as freezing the blood and accelerating the heartbeat.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, only the “ghosts within us” caused chills and excited the nerves, as Virginia Woolf observes in Granite and Rainbow (1928), referring to the interest in a fiction that addressed more contemporary fears rather than those explored by early Gothic literature. The literature of fear has gained a new life with the fin-de-siècle and modernist female fiction of authors such as Kate Chopin, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, and Virginia Woolf herself.

Contributors may submit work that focuses on various aspects of women’s literature of fear from a transnational and transhistorical perspective, reflecting its global diversity. We invite contributions in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.




Revista Abusões
e-ISSN: 2525-4022