Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Call for Papers: Special Issue of MELUS

Call for Papers
Special Issue of MELUS
Guest Editors: Kathryn Nicol and Jennifer Terry

Toni Morrison: New Directions

With the publication of her eighth novel, A Mercy (2008), Toni Morrison has signaled her continuing centrality to the work of imagining and re-imagining American lives, histories, and cultures. A Mercy’s engagement with America’s pasts and futures provides an opportune moment to engage anew with Morrison’s career, to historicize and revise critical paradigms, and to suggest new directions for study. This call for papers invites contributions to a special issue of MELUS dedicated to new work on Toni Morrison. The issue aims to explore fresh approaches to Morrison’s body of work, offer critical readings of the recent fiction, and suggest responses to her non-fiction writing and work in other genres.
We welcome a wide spectrum of responses but topics of particular interest might include:
• Explorations of the author’s recent work (i.e. post-Jazz publications)
• Responses to Morrison’s prefaces and essays, particularly in light of the publication of What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (2008)
• Critical accounts of work in other genres: writing for children, dramatic and operatic works
• Comparative approaches
• New theoretical approaches
• Interdisciplinary and / or ‘non-literary’ approaches
• Morrison as public intellectual and / or Morrison’s self-fashioning
• Studies of the reception of Morrison and / or the responses of different readerships
Completed papers should be between 7000-9000 words, including notes and works cited, and in MLA format. Queries concerning possible submissions as well as book reviews are welcome. Electronic submission is required. Please send an email attachment to Kathryn Nicol (kate_edin@hotmail.com). Deadline for submission: 20 January, 2010.

MELUS Home
http://www.ship.edu/~kmlong/melus/
NewsNotes@Marshall University
1 John Marshall Drive, Huntington, West Virginia, 25755
Voice: (304) 696-6613 Fax: (304) 696-3229
Brooks@marshall.edu (c) 2007 by MGB