[Commlist] CFP for Special Issue: ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’

Call for Papers: Short Fiction in Theory & Practice

Special Issue: ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’

Guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and 
Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice#call-for-papers 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice#call-for-papers>

‘People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and 
unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.’

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971)

Throughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has 
shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception 
of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, 
as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of 
Girls and Women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley 
et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of 
social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are 
interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they 
stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the 
mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable 
and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the 
here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody 
connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or 
discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains 
of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may 
become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than 
not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to 
the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as 
signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere 
– but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds 
surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and 
Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a 
special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material 
culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short 
fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the 
question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

  *

    Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food,
    clothing, style.

  *

    Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of
    domesticity.

  *

    Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction,
    social belonging

  *

    The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.

  *

    Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.

  *

    Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying,
    representing, conserving material forms.

  *

    Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body
    care, role of the senses, phenomenology.

  *

    Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and
    familial relations, worldviews.

  *

    Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change,
    transformation, evolving interpretation.

  *

    Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.

  *

    Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.

  *

    Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien 
settings.

  *

    Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 
words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and 
abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be 
submitted electronically through the journal webpage by clicking the 
submissions tab.

For style guide and submission details please see: 
https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice>

For further enquiries please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, 
(coxa /at/ edgehill.ac.uk) <mailto:(coxa /at/ edgehill.ac.uk)>.

The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2024.

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