Call for Papers:
Aging in Slavic Literatures
Editor: Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl (University of Graz, Austria)
To be published in the Aging Studies series.
Publication anticipated December 2016.
Aging and old age are aspects of human experience that have always inspired literary imagination. In recent decades, scholarly attention has increasingly been paid to aging as represented and narrated in literature. Age/aging studies have become more and more aware of the degree to which the critical analysis of works of fiction can contribute to our understanding of the aging process in all its diversity. Nevertheless, there is still an urgent need for greater attention to age in the humanities. This holds true all the more for Slavic studies, where thus far aging and old age have been only marginal concerns.
This volume aims to gather together the scattered research that has been done up to now on aging as represented in Slavic literatures. Its goals are to popularize among the age studies community, as well as among an interested broader audience, pertinent findings from Slavic studies scholarship; to foster international scholarly exchange within and across the discipline; and, not least, to encourage further research in this vein.
The volume invites contributions that investigate literary representations of age as a powerful marker of difference and as constitutive of social relations and personal identity. Particularly welcome are literary analyses that bring to the fore the ways fiction challenges dominant cultural perceptions of age and provides alternative narratives of aging across the lifespan.
Specific topics include, but are not confined to:
- Narrating life, narrating the aging self (e.g., in autobiography)
- Performing age, "doing aging"
- Representations of the elderly in fiction, old-age imagery
- Generations, age relations within the family
- Age and memory, Memory loss, dementia
- Intersectionality (e.g., age and gender)
- Narrating the aging body
- Age/aging and narrated space
- Age/aging and migration, aging and the exilic experience
- Aging and creativity, late style
Submissions (in Word or PDF format) to dagmar.gramshammer(at)uni-graz.at should include:
- an abstract (max. 300 words)
- a short CV indicating your institutional affiliation and contact details.
Deadlines:
Abstract submission (300 words): May 31, 2015
Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2015
Full paper submission (selected proposals): December 1, 2015
Notification of acceptance, revision or rejection: before March 1, 2016
Manuscripts submitted should be unpublished and original. Articles may be in American or British English, but should be written consistently in whichever is chosen. They are selected for publication through a double-blind peer review process.