CFP Special Issue of Revenant - Dialogues with the Dead (1/31/2023)

Special Issue of Revenant - Dialogues with the Dead

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Revenant Journal

contact email:
Fiona.Snailham@greenwich.ac.uk

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/10/18/special-issue-of-revenant-dialogues-with-the-dead

CALL FOR PAPERS: Dialogues with the Dead

Guest Editors: Dr Anna Maria Barry and Dr Fiona Snailham

Communication with the dead has gripped the Western imagination for centuries - from Odysseus’s journey to the underworld and Saul’s attempt to summon Samuel to the Fox sisters’ nineteenth-century mediumship and the purported appearance of Arthur Conan Doyle at the Royal Albert Hall in 1930… several days after his death! This Anglo-American cultural obsession continues to manifest in films such as The Sixth Sense (1999) and Hereafter (2010), as well as popular television series like the long-running Most Haunted which follows the investigations of ghost hunters. In literature, too, there are many accounts of dialogues with the dead, from Hamlet’s conversations with the ghost of his father to W.T. Stead’s Letters From Julia which were supposedly dictated to the author by the eponymous spirit. Other works have considered the role of the medium, from Robert Browning’s Mr Sludge, “The Medium” (1864) to Alison Hart in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005).

Engaging with this intense interest, our special issue explores depictions of spirit communication across the globe. We are interested in work that explores what is at stake when we claim contact with the other side. How do different cultures afford different levels of respect to deceased voices? How does gender function within these conversations? Does dialogue with the dead influence our perception of authority and to what extent is this reflected in critical responses? How do apparently posthumous conversations reflect the anxieties of the individual acting as conduit, and the time in which they exist? How do we respond to art purportedly created through contact with the dead, and what questions does this raise about the creative process?

Contributing to these discussions, we invite articles, creative pieces, and reviews that address any aspect of dialogues with the spirit world. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

•  Considerations of autobiographical writing by spiritualists and/or mediums – e.g. Elizabeth d’Espérance’s Shadowlands
• Non-fiction accounts of conversations with the spirit world
• How representations of communication with the dead differ across geographic and cultural borders
• Literary and artistic depictions of those who communicate with the dead - for instance: the spiritualist, the shaman, the sangoma
• Art produced through contact with the spirit world - in current practice or by historic practitioners such as Georgiana Houghton, Anna Mary Howitt (later Watts), Emma Kuntz, Florêncio Anton, Augustin Lesage
• Postcolonialism and dialogues with the dead
• Depictions of investigations into spirit communications
• Spiritualism’s influence on the work of writers such as H.D., Sylvia Plath, Rebecca West and Rosamond Lehmann.
• The relationship between spiritualism and genre: modernism, magic realism, the Gothic etc
• Specialist Spiritualist journals and periodicals: The Spiritualist, El Espiritismo, La Revue Spirite, Light
• Automatic writing - in non-fiction and fictional accounts
• Proclamations of contact with the spirits of deceased authors and artists - (e.g) Dickens and the alleged posthumous completion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood

For articles and creative pieces (such as poetry, short stories, flash fiction, videos, artwork and music) please send a 500-word abstract and a short biography by 31st January 2023. Reviews of books, films, games, events, and art related to the dialogues with the dead (800-1,000 words in length) are also welcome. Please send full details of the title and medium you would like to review as soon as possible.



If your abstract is accepted, the full article (maximum 7000 words, including Harvard referencing) and the full creative piece (maximum 5000 words if a written piece) will be due by 31st October 2023.



Further information, including Submission Guidelines, are available at the journal website: www.revenantjournal.com. Enquiries are welcome and, along with all submissions, should be directed to both Dr Anna Maria Barry (anna_maria_barry@hotmail.com) and Dr Fiona Snailham (Fiona.Snailham@greenwich.ac.uk). Please quote ‘Dialogues with the Dead special issue’ in the subject box.





Last updated October 23, 2022

CFP The Exorcist: Studies on Possession, Influence, and Society (due date 10/31/2021)

Sorry to have missed posting this earlier:

The Exorcist: Studies on Possession, Influence, and Society

 

deadline for submissions: October 31, 2021


full name / name of organization: Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural


contact email: cuevae@uhd.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/04/11/the-exorcist-studies-on-possession-influence-and-society


 

Special Edition of Revenant:

“The Exorcist: Studies on Possession, Influence, and Society”

Deadline for abstract submissions: October 31, 2021

Guest Editors: Edmund P. Cueva (University of Houston-Downtown) and Nadia Scippacercola (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II)

The Exorcist, both as a book and film, has had a lasting influence beyond the world of horror. It is essentially a foundational, multivalent work: on the one hand, it helps understand and approach the theological concept and spiritual dimension of demonic possession as found in the Catholic faith, and on the other hand, it investigates domestic/public, spaces, dynamics, and spheres. Indeed, The Exorcist examines social discourse and narratives from a transformative and turbulent period of American history, sheds light on the difficulties that aging populations face in societies that do not offer adequate social safety nets, and exposes the miserable circumstances that people with mental health conditions and medically uninsured individuals and families often endure. Moreover, The Exorcist also speaks directly to the colonization and neo-colonization of archaeological sites and religions.

The Exorcist has much to offer as the foci for extensive and sustained research in the humanistic disciplines. This Special Edition of Revenant aims to start a new conversation on The Exorcist according to three dimensions: 1) to go back to the roots of the concept of possession, 2) to assess the cultural impact of the book and film, and 3) to present new scholarly developments about the book and film. Potential topics include but are not limited to: 

• possession in antiquity – literary accounts
• possession in antiquity – anthropological, psychological, archaeological data and observations
• antiquity as a bridge between medieval and/or modern religious views of possession
• possession in post-classical – pre-modern times
• the influence of ancient literature and thought on the book and movie
• possession in the modern age
• similarities differences between Western and non-Western possession (ancient, post-classical, and modern) – literary accounts; anthropological, psychological, archaeological data and observations
• possession in the arts
• possession and witches
• mysticism and altered state of consciousness
• psychology/psychiatry and possession
• the influence of the book and movie(s)
• the persistence of the popularity of the book and movie

For articles and creative pieces (such as poetry, short stories, flash fiction, videos, comics, artwork, and music) please send a 500-word abstract and a short biography by October 31st, 2021. If your abstract is accepted, the full article (maximum 7000 words, including Harvard referencing) and the full creative piece (maximum 5000 words if a written piece) will be due April 30th, 2022. Reviews of books, films, games, events, and art related to The Exorcist will be considered (800-1,000 words in length). Please send full details of the title and medium you would like to review as soon as possible. Further information, including Submission Guidelines, are available at the journal website: www.revenantjournal.com. Inquiries are welcome and, along with all submissions, should be directed to cuevae@uhd.edu and nadia.scippacercola@gmail.com.

Last updated April 15, 2021 

 

CFP Obscene Surfacings and the Subterranean Gothic (Spec Issue of Revenant; 10/31/20)

 (Sorry to have missed this.)

Special Issue of Revenant: Obscene Surfacings and the Subterranean Gothic

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/07/13/special-issue-of-revenant-obscene-surfacings-and-the-subterranean-gothic

 

deadline for submissions: 

October 31, 2020

full name / name of organization: 

Joan Passey, University of Bristol

contact email: 

joan.passey@bristol.ac.uk

Special Edition of Revenant: Obscene Surfacings and the Subterranean Gothic

Deadline for abstract submissions: October 31st 2020

Guest Editors: Joan Passey (Bristol), Sherezade García Rangel (Falmouth) and Daisy Butcher (Hertfordshire)

The Gothic is a fundamentally subterranean genre. Its underbelly is riddled with crypts, labyrinths, tombs, catacombs, graveyards, mausoleums, sewers, basements, caves, hollows, holes, and mineshafts. The genre is one concerned with the buried and the disinterred, the repressed and re-emergent. Stratified subterranean imagery connotes layers, surfaces, depths, deceits, and concealments. The Gothic is entangled in ideas of revealing, uncovering, and decoding. The act of reading as interpretation has been described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok as a cryptography related to cryptology. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claimed that to be ‘buried alive’ is the Gothic master trope. The horror imagination is preoccupied with hands clawing through graves, clowns staring through flood drains, and the world’s potential subterranean flipside – its Upside Down.

From the underground labyrinths of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) to the dirt coffin of Dracula (1897); from Stephen King's It (1986) to the underground realms of Jordan Peele's Us (2019), the subterranean can be recognised in natural spaces and in inorganic infrastructure; in ancient architecture and modern interventions. In the Hole in the Ground (2019) presents the chasm of changelings, whereas Parasite (2019) uses the image of the basement to conjure class horrors.

Robert MacFarlane's Underland (2019) uses the term ‘Anthropocene unburials’ to describe ecological catastrophes such as the thawing of the Arctic permafrost, positing these as ‘obscene surfacings’. Images and articulations of the Gothic underground have the capacity to unearth ecological, social, economic, and cultural anxieties.

This Special Edition of Revenant aims to catalogue the myriad subterranean, underground, underworld images that underline the Gothic imagination through its long, deep history. While there has been some recent attention paid to the environmental humanities and the Gothic, or the ecogothic, and the industrial Gothic, the subterranean Gothic in particular provides a space for considering intersections between these modes, complicating the binary of the industrial and the natural. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• The Gothic subterranean/underground/depths in literature, poetry, prose, drama, film, periodicals, newspapers, culture, society, economics, politics, video games, RPGs, Youtube videos, television, graphic novels, radio plays, podcasts, theatrical productions, musicals and comics
• Mines, mining shafts, and mining bodies; tunnelling, digging, sewers; the industrial underground, working underground
• The invisible poor, class stratification, and the Marxist imagination in the subterranean Gothic
• The stratification of the psyche and the depths of the mind in the psychoanalytical Gothic
• Literal or metaphorical holes, chasms, depths, craters, absences
• The London underground, the Paris metro, the New York subway, and travelling bodies underground
• Living underground, ‘hollow earth fiction’, and the fear of what may lie beneath
• The geological, palaeontological, archaeological, and anthropological in the Gothic
• The postcolonial Gothic and images of archaeology, exoticisation, and globalisation
• Burials, the buried, graveyards, cemeteries, graverobbing, disinterment, memorials, and funeral practices
• Caves and the natural world; the ecogothic; holes and chasms in the environment
• Bogs, swamps, marshlands, wetlands, fens and liminal subterranean spaces
• ‘Deep time’ and understandings of the primitive and the atavistic as related to the repressed or the underground
• Dinosaurs, discovery, adventure fiction, empire fiction, and excavation
• Underground lives – piskies, goblins, knockers, worms, moles, fungi

For articles and creative pieces (such as poetry, short stories, flash fiction, videos, artwork and music) please send a 500-word abstract and a short biography by October 31st, 2020. If your abstract is accepted, the full article (maximum 7000 words, including Harvard referencing) and the full creative piece (maximum 5000 words if a written piece) will be due April 30th, 2021. The aim is to publish in Summer 2021. Reviews of books, films, games, events, and art related to the subterranean will be considered (800-1,000 words in length). Please send full details of the title and medium you would like to review as soon as possible. Further information, including Submission Guidelines, are available at the journal website: www.revenantjournal.com. Inquiries are welcome and, along with all submissions, should be directed to joan.passey@bristol.ac.uk, sherezade.garciarangel@falmouth.ac.uk and d.butcher@herts.ac.uk. If emailing the journal directly at revenant@falmouth.ac.uk please quote ‘subterranean special issue’ in the subject box. 

Last updated July 15, 2020

 

CFP Revenant Inagural Issue

'Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural' (http://www.revenantjournal.com/)

Revenant is a peer reviewed e-journal dedicated to the study of the supernatural, the uncanny and the weird in any form and in any period. Committed to the scholarly, academic and creative exploration of the supernatural in its multiple, variable and fantastic forms this inter-disciplinary journal encourages discussion about the supernatural or the weird in literature, history, folklore, philosophy, science, religion, sociology and all aspects of popular culture. All areas of discussion are welcome and we invite for example discussions of classic Victorian ghost stories, articles about Shakespeare’s ghosts, standing stones, architecture, film, television, games or new media.

Revenant promotes new writing on the supernatural, the uncanny and the weird and we are looking to publish ghost stories, tales of the extraordinary, poems and nature writing. Encouraging a cross-theoretical approach the super-natural may also be explored in relation to gender, sexuality, spirituality, post-colonialism, Marxism or eco-criticism.


Call for submissions

For its inaugural issue Revenant is calling for academic articles and new creative writing on the subject of the supernatural. This inter-disciplinary journal includes and welcomes discussion on the Supernatural, the Uncanny and the Weird from all disciplines. The journal is seeking to publish a mixture of academic articles covering any aspect of the super-natural from any period and new creative writing.

Topics might include: discussions of classic Victorian ghost stories, articles about Shakespeare’s ghosts, science fiction, standing stones, science and the supernatural, architecture, film, television, games or new media. Encouraging a cross-theoretical approach the supernatural may also be explored in relation to gender, sexuality, spirituality, post-colonialism, Marxism or eco-criticism. Creative writing can take the form of new ghost stories, tales of the fantastic, poems or nature writing. Revenant also welcomes reviews of books, plays, television programmes, films, events or conferences.

Articles should be of 4000 to 7000 words in length and short stories no more than 5000 words long. Reviews should be concise. Read our full submission guidelines.

Please submit all manuscripts via our submissions page.

There are also opportunities for guest edited editions.

Revenant is committed to Green politics and emphasises that the ‘natural’ is part of the super-natural.