Main theme: Spaces of literature - spaces in literature

We would like invite you to submit proposals for articles for the thematic issue "Spaces of literature – spaces in literature". The theme is related to the specific status of literary discourse, which is autonomous and at the same time inextricably linked to its own context. We want to look, firstly, at the modes of making space and spatiality present in literature, and secondly, at issues concerning the functioning of literature in culture of various periods and formations.

We are particularly interested in the relationship between literature and space – poetics and stylistic and genre specificity of geographical, travel, tourist and topographic descriptions that appear in literary and literary texts of various epochs, including the ideological and aesthetic determinants of such descriptions. We consider an interesting problem, worthy of constant discussion, the reflection of authors on the issues of relationship between culture, space and identity/subjectivity, especially due to the current vision of the Anthropocene as a sphere of humanistic reflection, including literary studies. As part of the proposed topic, we would also like to raise the issue of literature as a tool for the expression of spatial experiences, as well as the area that determines the processes of their conceptualization and definition. We are also interested in literary discourses as "laboratories" of geopoetics or new regionalism – we want to consider whether prose, poetic, essayistic, non-fictional texts are sometimes lined with quasi-theoretical reflections, and to what extent selected texts can verify the effectiveness of methodology and theories under the sign of topographic turn.

We would like to reflect on the issue of changes in literature – the ways in which it functions in today’s culture and functioned in past centuries. We want to look for answers to a few questions, such as: What is the space of literature today? How has it changed over time? How do local literatures create their fields in the context of world literature? We are interested in transformations within the understanding and definition of literature and literariness, the way of constituting literary institutions and entities related to literary life and the literary field, especially in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will be interested in sketches devoted to changes in writing tools, the emergence of new topics, problems, issues that have been overlooked, ignored, tabooed or simply occurred in recent years as a result of socio-civilizational development.

We invite you to send finished articles until the end of February 2023, we accept texts in congress languages and in Polish.