The English Academy Review – A Journal of English Studies
Special Issue: 40 (1): May 2023
Edited by Rosanna Masiola and Renato Tomei
Aim of the Special Issue:
The Special Issue ‘SPACES of the SACRED: Mapping Literary Mysticism’ is aimed to map literary mysticism and spiritual literature in its multifaceted aspects. This call intends to bring together contributions on the poetics of sacred spaces and shrines, literary spirituality, narrative topophilia, and places of devotion. It addresses themes and topics grounded in a defined spatial perspective against globalisation, countering the effects of material and cultural homogenization, and resisting the current tendency to the domestication and destruction of literary sacred spaces and places of the spirit.
Critical Questions
This challenging call raises crucial issues questioning and problematizing the need for literary sacred places and spiritual places in poetics and narrative. More specifically:
- What makes a space sacred? And why a space becomes a spiritual place and devotional site?
- What happens under the impact of destructive violence, profanation, and de-sacralization?
- How can it be preserved and re-sacralized and re-created in exile?
- Up to what point can memory, resistance, and diaspora literature reconstruct and re-locate this spirituality?
- Are there conflicting tensions between mystic memory and the sense of loss through domestication, manipulation, and the hegemony of globalisation? Is there still space for mystic literature?
- Can we detect the underground veins of mysticism in literature?
Topics
We invite the submission of abstracts on original and unpublished studies including, but not limited to the following topics:
- (Post)-colonial literature
- Comparative literature
- Mystic narrative and poetics
- Diaspora and slavery studies (pilgrimage, exodus, migration)
- Travel Literature and Narrative (exploration)
- Eco-literature and heritage tourism
- Human geography (charting, mapping, exploration)
- Metropolitan literature- (cityscapes, ghettoes, yards)
- Film and (multi)media studies (cinematic and stage adaptation)
- Language, Translation, and Lexicography
- Imagery, Iconography, and the Sublime (verbal and visual)
- Holocaust, apartheid, genocide, and extermination
