Call for Papers: “I Read It in a Magazine”: The Changing Roles of Literary Periodicals, 1960-2020

The activities of European literary magazines since the 1960s constitute an under-documented and under-analyzed field. And yet most European countries have a lively literary magazine scene. Such a lacuna needs to be addressed and rectified. Certain categories of literature – poetry and short fiction, for example - depend heavily on journals for initial readership and in order to achieve subsequent book publication. This special issue of the Journal of European Periodical Studies aims to draw attention to this vital aspect of the periodical scene and literary periodicals’ importance in relevant national and trans-national literatures. The changing configurations and roles of literary journals in the past decades may also tell us something of the effects of new media on this venerable type of periodical. The period in focus is the last sixty years; this may be interpreted to include literary journals that have emerged in (approximately) the last sixty years, or older literary periodicals that have evolved or played (or evolved to play) significant roles in literature over the past several decades.

Possible topics could include:

• discussions of the literary periodical scene in individual European cultures;
• discussions of the activities and changing faces of individual journals in the period under consideration;
• the intimate relationship between the literary periodical and categories of literature – poetry, the short story, and drama, for example;
• the effects of specific literary journals on the literature of particular decades or contexts;
• the literary periodical as a vehicle for literary and social change;
• the response of literary periodicals to social, cultural, and political changes of the past six decades (Eastern European examples may be of particular interest here);
• responses of literary journals to new media and the digital revolution;
• economics and institutional issues in literary magazine publication;
• editors and their influence on the literary periodical scene.

The aim of the special number is to offer a view of the development and roles of the literary periodical in several European (not only Anglophone) cultures over the past sixty years.

The deadline for article proposals is December 1^st 2020, full articles are expected on June 1^st 2021. All accepted articles will be reviewed and sent out to one external reviewer (double-blind peer review). The standard length of an academic essay is between 5,000 and 8,000 words, and this includes notes and bibliography.

Please send your article proposals to the guest-editors: Wolfgang Görtschacher (University of Salzburg, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and David Malcolm (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)