Call for proposals – Beyond Munro and Atwood: Other Voices in Canadian Women’s Writing

We gladly share a call for proposal from MacEwan University,  Edmonton (Alberta), Canada.

Deadline: July 15, 2018

Download the Call for proposals

With the recent critical and commercial success of the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale,
and the newly released adaptation of Alias Grace, myriad audiences are (re)discovering
Canadian Margaret Atwood. This rediscovery follows on the heels of Alice Munro’s 2013 Nobel
prize for literature, and suggests that conditions are favourable for reinvigorating an interest in
Canadian women’s writing that goes beyond the established, now-canonical writers like Atwood
and Munro. Canadian women’s writing is indeed a flourishing field and the impressive number of
women writing in Canada at the present time and the diversity of their backgrounds reflect the
multicultural mosaic that makes up the country today and underscores the need for these other
women’s voices to be heard and explored (McPherson xviii).

The collective volume we are proposing is intended to be a critical examination of contemporary
Canadian women’s writing and will therefore fill a gap in Canadian literature studies by giving
space to scholarly analysis on both established and emerging authors as well as unknown
and/or overlooked voices. Our aim is to explore the richness of women’s writing in Canada, and
contribute to the establishment of a deeper research field in Canadian women’s writing by
building on work already begun in Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli’s A Mazing Space:
Writing Canadian Women Writing (1987), Barbara Godard’s Gynocritics/Gynocritiques (1988),
Coral Ann Howells’ Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction (2003), Karen S. McPherson’s
Archeologies of an Uncertain Future. Recent Generations of Canadian Women Writing (2006)
as well as work currently being done at the University of Alberta’s Canadian Literary Centre /
Centre de Littérature Canadienne which has produced Marie Carrière and Patricia Demers’
edited volume entitled Regenerations: Canadian Women’s Writing / Régénérations: Écriture des
femmes au Canada (2014), and more recently, Ten Canadian Writers in Context (2016) – seven
of whom are women – edited by Marie Carrière, Curtis Gillespie and Jason Purcell.

The focus of this collection is broad and aims to include not only the “traditional” Anglophone
and Francophone authors of European origin, but to also shine a light on minority writers
including, but not limited to, Indigenous and Métis, writers of colour, migrant as well as LGBTQ2
authors. Some writers to consider are Nelly Arcan, Lee Maracle, Judy Fong Bates, Dionne
Brand, Bev Sellars, Esi Edugyan, Elise Turcotte, Carmen Aguirre, Cherie Demaline, Nancy
Huston, Amy MacKay, Kim Thúy, Farzana Doctor, Miriam Toews, Ishara Deen, Eden Robinson,
Erika de Vasconcelos, Ying Chen, Zoe Whittall, Madeleine Thien, Joy Kogawa, Carmen
Rodriguez, among many others.

Possible topics include, though are by no means limited to the following suggestions:
– Women and politics
– Women and society
– Indigenous and Métis voices
– Refugee and migrant female voices
– Women and violence
– Motherhood
– Womanhood
– Feminisms
– Intersectional marginalization
– LGBTQ2 communities
– Conflict with authority (church, family, culture, more, government)
– Multiculturalism and hybridity: ethnic, linguistic, religious, gender, identity
– Language and the self
– Experiences of new Canadians
– Testimony
– Exile
Please submit a 300-word abstract (including title, institutional affiliation, and brief biography –
maximum 100 words) by July 15, 2018. We welcome abstracts in English, French, Spanish,
Russian, and Portuguese, but final contributions will be in English. Acceptance of abstracts will
be communicated by August 31, 2018. Once abstracts have been selected, a proposal will be
submitted to a scholarly press. Completed articles will be expected by January 31, 2019 and
will be peer-reviewed before the final selection. Articles should not have been previously
published.
Please send your proposals to:
Dr. Cristina Ruiz Serrano (MacEwan University): ruizserranoc@macewan.ca
Dr. Suzanne Hayman (MacEwan University): haymans@macewan.ca

Reference:
McPherson, Karen S. Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future. Recent Generations of
Canadian Women Writing. Montreal: McGill-Queen´s University Press, 2006.