cfp

Telling the Story of Oceans and Archives: Rethinking the Novel Form

Due Date: 02-15-2025

This proposed special issue will situate the novel’s colonial history at the juncture of two distinct yet related fields: transoceanic studies and archival studies. The transoceanic paradigm connecting Europe and its former colonies has been integral not just to the dissemination of the novel, but to the contours of the genre itself, and nowhere is this history of engagement better documented than in colonial archives. By attending to the archives documenting political and commercial networks that connected the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, we acquire a better understanding of how the novel traveled and what happened to the genre during these perambulations. And by locating the novel in colonial maritime travel archives, we illuminate the genre’s material and literary historical connections to the ocean, which has historically been a conduit for global systems connecting—willingly and unwillingly—people, ideas, and places.

We invite contributions that explore Anglophone traditions in the long nineteenth century. In challenging Eurocentrism, the special issue will prioritize contributions from and about the Global South.

Among the topics that contributors might explore are the following:

  • Maritime histories in engagement with novelistic traditions
  • Archival histories of the novel’s production, dissemination, or reception
  • Pacific, Atlantic, or Indian oceanic world in relation to novel history
  • Primary source materials in the literary history of the novel
  • The novel form, epistolarity, and transoceanic correspondence
  • Oral narrative (or other nonwritten narrative) and long-form prose as novelistic genres
  • Translations and transmedial adaptations of novels
  • Strategies for decolonizing the novel
  • Aesthetic experimentation and the limits of the novel as a form

Please send an abstract (500–700 words) and a short author bio by 15 February 2025 to Sunayani Bhattacharya and Lanya Lamouria. Final papers (6,000–8,000 words) are due 1 August 2025.