CFP: "Women’s Writing" Special Issue on Ghost Stories

Ghosts and the supernatural continue to attract the attention of feminist scholars, though the relationship between gender, genre and haunting has not been fully explored.

In the evolution of the ghost story, women writers of the long nineteenth century have sometimes been overshadowed, their contributions to the genre undervalued or their stories seen as inferior to their novels and poetry.

In this special issue of Women’s Writing on women’s ghost stories, edited by Zoe Brennan, Emma Liggins and Gina Wisker, we seek to address some of the following questions:

• What are the links between women’s ghost stories and understandings of Female Gothic or the uncanny?
• How did the explained/unexplained supernatural differ in stories published in the early nineteenth century, the mid-Victorian period, at the fin de siècle or in the early twentieth century?
• Why did women publish collections of uncanny stories and how were they received?
• How was haunting linked to space and place?
• How have new theoretical approaches transformed our interpretations of women’s ghost stories?

We invite submissions of papers on any aspect of women’s ghost stories published between around 1800 and 1925 but particularly those by lesser-known writers. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• The ghost story and the uncanny
• Haunting, memory and trauma
• The ghost story and empire
• Women’s colonial and international ghost stories
• The ghost story and class
• The ghost story and age
• Weird children
• Space and place in the ghost story
• The ghost story as Female Gothic
• The explained/unexplained supernatural
• The ghost story and sensation
• The ghost story in the periodical press
• The ghost story and war
• The ghost story, spiritualism and scepticism
• Tourism and the haunted house

Please submit for consideration abstracts of at least 250 words to Zoe Brennan (Zoe.Brennan@uwe.ac.uk), Emma Liggins (e.liggins@mmu.ac.uk) and Gina Wisker (G.Wisker@brighton.ac.uk) by 1 December 2019. Finished articles of between 4,000-7000 words must be received by 1 August 2020.

Contributors should follow the journal's house style details of which are to be found on the Women's Writing web site http://www.tandfonline.com/rwow. This is the new MLA. Do note that instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes. For example, we require place of publication, publisher and date of publication in brackets after a book is cited for the first time.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Women’s Writing on Women’s Ghost Stories.
Edited by Zoe Brennan, Emma Liggins and Gina Wisker