Journal of Literary Multilingualism - Call for Proposals special issue 2/2024: Australia’s Multilingual Literary Landscape

Journal of Literary Multilingualism (www.brill.com/JLM)

Call for Proposals special issue 2/2024: Australia’s Multilingual Literary Landscape

The ‘global turn’ in literary studies has destabilised the relationship among literature, language and nation, questioning the notion that a national literature is necessarily written in a national language.

This special volume explores the multilingual literary landscape of one specific nation. It aims to showcase the variety of languages in which Australian literature is written. Since Australia’s multicultural heritage is also a multilingual heritage, this volume aims to discover, disseminate and promote new understandings of the breadth of literature in this predominantly – but far from exclusively – Anglophone country.

We welcome analyses of Australian literature that is written in languages other than in English and analyses of literature that incorporates another language into a predominantly English text. Contributions might include but are not restricted to the following questions and topics:

How do writers represent multicultural Australia in languages other than English? How do writers weave another language or other languages into predominantly Anglophone writing?
How do Indigenous authors represent their linguistic heritage in their writing?
How do migrant writers negotiate the relationship between English and the language(s) of their home country?
How do authors represent the weight, primacy or dominance of the English language within their multilingual writing?
How do authors position themselves as writers of “Australian literature” through the prism of a language other than English?

Informal queries are welcome, and contributors are asked to submit an abstract by April 1, 2023. Please direct queries to Christopher Hogarth (University of South Australia).

Articles should be 6,000 to 10,000 words in length, and the deadline for their submission is October 1, 2023. Acceptance of the final versions of articles is subject to double-anonymous peer review. Please send articles as email attachments to Christopher Hogarth at Christopher.hogarth@unisa.edu.au.