CFP on Literary Communities (Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 9.2)

In a 2019 piece in The Guardian, Indian writer-activist Arundhati Roy says of the space, created by the literary: “It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When it’s broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is needed.” This idea of literature as a fragile shelter that needs constant rebuilding throws open the question of the literary communities. What is the nature of this community of readers and writers constructed by the act of literature? How can literature have a purchase on public culture, if at all? With the onset of social media, can we see literature in the 21st century as a communitarian exercise anymore? Amid the atomistic individualism, fostered by contemporary global capitalism, how does literature re-engage with the question of community and the human collective that must include a dynamic interaction with the non-human? How does the digital turn of literature contribute to the conceptualization of an online community? Has the current pandemic and the consequent loss of public life helped foster or interrogate new literary communities? 

This issue invites papers on literature as a way of the community and literary representations of communities–human and non-human.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

Literature as Community Building 

Literary Depictions of Communities

Culture and Community

Online Communities 

Literary Community and Nationalism 

The Social Life of Literary Communities

The Environment and Literary Communities

Community and the Non-Human

Health and Literary Communities

Please send in your full papers (within 7,000 words, including notes and references and excluding bibliography, abstract in 250 words, 3-5 keywords, bio in 150 words) to sanglapthejournal@gmail.com by March 15 2023.

We follow MLA 7th edition: in-text citation with endnotes and an alphabetical WC list at the end.

We will get back to you after the peer-review by May 15, 2023. The issue will be published in June-July 2023.