Call for Papers (special issue):
The Guest Editors Anne Holm and Niklas Salmose, together with Guest Co‑editors Anna Ishchenko and Beatriz Carlsson‑Pecharromán, invite submissions for a Special Issue of Text Matters dedicated to Affect and Intermediality. The deadline for abstracts has been extended to 7 September 2026. Prospective contributors are asked to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief 200‑word biography. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to submit full papers by 1 April 2027. Please see the full Call for Papers below.
Special Issue: “Affect and Intermediality” in the journal Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture (ISSN: 2083-2931)
Editors: Anne Holm (Associate Professor of English, Linnaeus University) and Niklas Salmose (Professor of English, Linnaeus University). Co-Editors: Anna Ishchenko (PhD student in MIDWorld, Linnaeus) and Beatriz Carlsson-Pecharromán (PhD student in Global Humanities, Linnaeus)
We invite submissions for a special issue dedicated to exploring the dynamic intersections between affect and intermediality. This collection of articles seeks to illuminate how emotional experience is shaped, transmitted, and transformed across different media environments.
Theme and Scope
Affect plays a foundational role in shaping human experience, from everyday encounters to large-scale cultural and social networks. In an era deeply defined by mediated communication, affect circulates rapidly across platforms, binding communities, informing public discourse, and animating artistic expression. Understanding how these emotional currents emerge, take shape, and resonate requires close attention to the media through which they flow.
Contributors may wish to position their analyses in dialogue with established work in intermedial and affective scholarship. Within intermedial studies, foundational and contemporary approaches by Lars Elleström, Werner Wolf, Irina Rajewsky, Jørgen Bruhn, Beate Schirrmacher, Thomas Leitch, Ágnes Pethő, Niklas Salmose, Gabriella Rippl, and Marie-Laure Ryan among others offer diverse conceptualizations of mediality, mediation, and the aesthetics of cross-media relations. Elleström’s modal framework, Rajewsky’s typology of intermedial references, Wolf’s work on transmedial narratology, and Ryan’s perspectives on transmedial storyworlds, for instance, provide fertile methodological foundations for examining how affect travels between, within, and across media forms. Likewise, scholars engaging with affect studies and cognitive approaches to literature and media may find productive intersections with Patrick Colm Hogan’s investigations into emotion and narrative (e.g., Literature and Emotion, 2018), Alexa Weik von Mossner’s explorations of environmentally inflected affect in film and literature (Affective Ecologies, 2017), and Keith Oatley’s empirical work on readers’ emotional and empathic engagement with fictional characters (e.g., The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion, 2022). Bringing these strands together opens possibilities for exploring how affective experience is shaped by media affordances, formal structures, sensory logics, and embodied modes of reception—thereby advancing a more integrated understanding of how emotion and mediation co-produce meaning across the arts.
This special issue welcomes contributions that investigate how affect is conditioned by the material, aesthetic, and relational properties of media. We are especially interested in scholarship that:
• examines how emotional responses arise from specific media affordances,
• analyzes how interactions between bodies, technologies, and environments produce meaningful affective experiences,
• investigates how intermedial relations—between forms, genres, and modalities—shape or shift affective engagement,
• considers how artistic and cultural practices mobilize affect across different media contexts.
Potential Topics
Submissions may address, but are not limited to:
• Affective resonance in intermedial artistic practices
• Mediated nostalgia and cultural memory
• Sensory experience and multimodal aesthetics
• The role of affect in shaping subjectivity in media interaction
• Affective representations of illness or vulnerability
• Mood and atmosphere in various media
• Affect and authenticity in performance-based media
• Cross-media analyses of emotion, sensation, or embodied response
We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including media studies, literary studies, film studies, musicology, game studies, art history, performance studies, and related fields within the Arts and Humanities.
About the Initiative
This special issue is inspired by on-going work within the research cluster IMS Affect (https://lnu.se/en/research/research-groups/ims-affect/), part of the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. The cluster brings together scholars engaging with how affect emerges through interactions among media forms, sensory modalities, and material contexts. The special issue extends this inquiry by inviting broader scholarly dialogue on affect’s intermedial dimensions.
Submission Information
Scholars at all career stages are encouraged to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief biography of 200 words to niklas.salmose@lnu.se before August 15, 2026. Full submissions for those abstracts that are accepted, are expected on April 1, 2027.
Sincerely / The Editorial Team
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We are also announcing a call for contributions to a section curated by Professor Norman Ravvin (Concordia University, Montreal) to be apportioned between Text Matters and Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes as part of a collaboration between the two journals. The Text Matters portion of articles will be published as part of issue 17, in the fall of 2027 (Archival Poetics: Fragmentation, Organization, Multimodality). Please see below for details.
Call for Papers
Joint Publication on Canadian Jewry and its Transnational Connections
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory, and Culture
Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes
Guest Editor: Norman Ravvin (Concordia University)
Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes and Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory, and Culture are pleased to announce a special collaboration showcasing new scholarship on Canadian Jewry and its transnational connections.
The partnership stems from a shared interest in amplifying original, comparative, and interdisciplinary research involving Canadian Jewish content to a global scholarly readership. Guest edited by literary scholar Norman Ravvin, contributions will be organized around several themes but divided up for publication between the two journals, which will each publish the material concurrently as special sections in autumn 2027. The guest editor, in consultation with editors at Text Matters and CJS / Éjc, will curate the special sections in both journals. Articles will appear in either journal, but not in both.
Possible avenues of inquiry include:
The journals welcome contributions from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, political science, law, religious studies, music, visual arts, and museum studies. Note that articles focusing on Polish/Eastern European Jewish-Canadian Jewish connections are most likely to appear in CJS / Éjc.
Please submit completed manuscripts to Norman Ravvin (norman.ravvin@concordia.ca) by November 20, 2026. Articles should arrive between 5,000–7,000 words in length, including notes. Please consult the submission instructions at Text Matters for details on how to prepare your manuscript. Please include a short abstract (max. 250 words) and biography (max. 200 words) along with your submission.
Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, published by the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies and based at York University, is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal devoted to original scholarship that illuminates any and all aspects of the Canadian Jewish experience.
To learn more, visit https://cjs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cjs/index.
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Call for Papers (Issue 17, 2027)
Archival Poetics: Fragmentation, Organization, Multimodality
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
University of Lodz, Poland
Co-editors of the issue:
Wojciech Drąg, PhD (University of Wrocław)
Elin Ivansson, PhD (Sheffield Hallam University)
Despite its associations with dusty catalogues and its complicity with colonial and totalitarian control apparatuses, the archive remains a vibrant critical category. In Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (2016), Gabriella Giannachi attributes its current relevance to “our obsession with the augmentation, documentation, and transmission of our own presence” through social media and various self-tracking apps (1–2). Today, everyone with a smartphone or computer can be an archivist and follow the “age-old impulse to gather and preserve” (Chadwick 26; Manoff 386). “Archives, it seems, are everywhere,” noted Sue Breakell in 2008, “both in popular culture and academic discourse.” Indeed, over the last three decades, the concept of the archive has elicited widely cited essays by, among others, Jacques Derrida and Hal Foster. Derrida wrote about “archive fever,” Foster about the “archival impulse,” and Giannachi proposed the term “archival craze.” At the beginning of the new century, art critics announced the “archival turn”—a shift towards including photographs and documents in contemporary artistic projects. More broadly, argues Sara Callahan, the archival turn points to a widespread tendency to use the archive as “a stand-in for a range of different collections, theoretical notions, and ideas” (75).
The word “archive” originates from the Greek noun arkheion, which referred to a place where records were kept in ancient Greece (Leavitt 176). However, as Paul J. Voss and Marta L. Werner observe, the archive no longer denotes merely “a physical site—an institutional space enclosed by protective walls” but also “an imaginative site—a conceptual space whose boundaries are forever changing” (i). When one speaks of the archive, Michael Sheringham points out, one evokes “what is generic and archetypal” about physical archives, specifically “a number of gestures, routines and operations—lumping together, singling out, rummaging, listing, counting, copying, decoding, transcribing, selecting” (47). The emphasis, therefore, is not on storing but on organizing the accumulated data—the archive is “a site of processing rather than preservation” (Chadwick and Vermeulen 4). It is a structural principle, a manner of arranging and presenting information, chronological, alphabetical, or arbitrary. Although it is associated with records of past data, critics have stressed the archive’s capacity for “mapping the everyday” and “actively produc[ing] the present and the future” (Giannachi; Chadwick and Vermeulen 1).
According to Jim Collins, “the construction of the archive is a foundational aspect of the narrative universes in a number of recent, critically esteemed literary bestsellers” such as Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018), Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019) (219–20). The archive has also been an important formal influence on many recent works of life writing, including Anne Carson’s Nox (2009) and Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (2024). Contemporary literature’s engagement with the archive is not only thematic but also visual and material, as these works often borrow from archival methods of organization and the aesthetics of fragmentation to construct multimodal compositions (Davis; Ivansson and Gibbons).
To capture this thematic and visual engagement with the archive in multimodal lyric poetry, Rebecca Macmillan proposes the term “archival poetics,” suggesting that visual and structural engagement with the archive “presses us to consider the contents collected and to notice the process of collection,” inviting “association between materials without the claim of complete or definite representation” (201). Similarly, Brian Davis uses the term to discuss “multimodal book archives,” an experimental genre of contemporary literature in which the narrative is constructed “through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and other artefacts, [and] in which the book-object is presented as a container for preserving and transmitting textual artefacts” (84–85). Furthermore, Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons employ a more expansive conception of archival poetics, suggesting that it “encompasses a radical evocation of archival organisation, through the inclusion of lists, inventories, storage, indexes, and methods of cataloguing” (101). Taken together, these definitions of “archival poetics” signal a range of multimodal archival practices where collecting, organizing, and curating play a structural and visual role in literary composition.
Considering the changing nature of the archive and the recent interest in the archival dimension of contemporary literature, we invite papers that consider the visual, structural, and thematic role of the archive in literary practices. We are also interested in contributions that explore how the archive functions as a metaphor for examining historical and personal trauma, as well as analyses of the scope and legacy of the archival turn. Since discussions of the archive often center on Western notions of the “modern archive,” we also appreciate global perspectives on archival poetics and practices, for example, addressing representations of the colonial power of archives or Indigenous traditions of record-keeping and memory practices.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
An abstract [300-500 words] should be submitted as an email attachment to: wojciech.drag@uwr.edu.pl , elin.ivansson@mail.com, and text.matters@uni.lodz.pl.
In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, the title of the proposal, abstract, 5 keywords, and a brief bio note.
Important deadlines:
Deadline for submission of the abstract: 31 January 2026
Deadline for editors’ acceptance/rejection of proposals: 7 March 2026
Deadline for submission of full articles (max. 6000 words): 7 September 2026
Deadline for peer review and final acceptance/rejection of articles: 1 December 2026
Deadline for submission of final versions of articles: 1 February 2027
Bibliography:
Breakell, Sue. “Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive.” Tate Papers, vol. 9, 2008, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/09/perspectives-negotiating-the-archive.
Callahan, Sara. “When the Dust Has Settled: What Was the Archival Turn, and Is It Still Turning?” Art Journal, vol. 83, no. 1, 2024, pp. 74–88.
Chadwick, Tom. The Archive Novel. 2019. KU Leiden, PhD dissertation.
Chadwick, Tom, and Pieter Vermeulen. “Literature in the New Archival Landscape.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 31, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–7.
Collins, Jim. “Locating the Goods in Contemporary Literary Culture: Between the Book and the Archive.” The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities, edited by Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 211–27.
Davis, Brian. “Instrumentalizing the Book: Anne Carson’s Nox and Books as Archives.” Frontiers of Narrative Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 84–109.
Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, 1995, pp. 9–63.
Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.” October, vol. 110, 2004, pp. 3–22.
Giannachi, Gabriella. Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday. MIT P, 2016.
Ivansson, Elin, and Alison Gibbons. “Important Artifacts and Literary Media in Archival Autofiction.” The Routledge Companion to Literary Media, edited by Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round, and Bronwen Thomas, Routledge, 2023, pp. 99–110.
Leavitt, Arthur. “What Are Archives?” American Archivist, vol. 24, no. 2, 1961, pp. 175–78.
Macmillan, Rebecca. “The Archival Poetics of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 58, no. 2, 2017, pp. 173–203.
Manoff, Marlene. “Archive and Database as Metaphor: Theorizing the Historical Record.” Libraries and the Academy, vol. 10, no. 4, 2010, pp. 385–98.
Sheringham, Michael. “Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing.” French Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2005, pp. 47–53.
Voss, Paul J., and Marta L. Werner. “Toward a Poetics of the Archive: Introduction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 32, no. 1, 1999, pp. i–viii.
Increase in the contribution of foreign reviewers in the assessment of articles submitted for publication in the yearly “Text Matters. A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture” – financed under Agreement No. 605/P-DUN/2019 12.06.2019 with funds provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education for activities popularising science.
