The Historical Fictions Research Network (historicalfictionsresearch.org) is pleased to announce the arrival of the international, interdisciplinary, Open Access, peer-reviewed, scholarly, online Journal of Historical Fictions. The journal will be published twice a year, with the first issue to be presented in February 2017 at the second conference of the Network.
1:1 Narrative Constructions of the Past
Call for abstracts
In the study of historical fictions, there is increasing critical recognition of convergences between the philosophy of history, narratology, popular literature, historical narratives of national and cultural identity, and cross-disciplinary approaches to narrative constructions of the past in diverse media.
Narrative constructions of the past constitute a powerful discursive system for the production of cognitive and ideological representations of identity, agency, and social function, and for the negotiation of conceptual relationships between societies in different times and lived experience. The licenses of fiction, especially in mass culture, define a space in which the pursuit of narrative and meaning is permitted to slip the chains of sanctioned historical truths to explore the deep desires and dreams that lie beneath all constructions of the past. Historical fictions measure the gap between the pasts we are permitted to know and those we wish to know, interacting between the meaning-making narrative and the narrative-resistant nature of the past.
This journal welcomes inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary proposals on historical fictions of the Victorian period in Britain, and elsewhere, from archaeology, literature, film, history, media studies, art history, musicology, reception studies, and museum studies. The journal encourages ambitious approaches of high quality, using new methodologies to support research into larger trends. The journal aims to foster more theoretically informed understandings of the mode across historical periods, cultures, media and languages.
The journal is supported by an inter-disciplinary core of researchers, to generate a collective discourse around historical fictions in a range of media and across period specialties. Please send abstracts of no more than 800 words to journalhistfics@gmail.com by 30 June 2016, with a view to submitting a full article of 6000-8000 words by 30 September 2016.