Bio

Researches scholarly content across the various periods, intellectual fields, and geographical locations that interconnect and compare literary studies. Aims to critique, and seek questions both inherited disciplinary frameworks and new critical orthodoxies. College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing original and innovative scholarly research across the various periods, intellectual fields, and geographical locations that comprise the changing discipline of Anglophone and comparative literary studies. The journal is committed to the renewal of critique as a historically determinate, self-reflexive, and socially substantive practice, which in resisting 'empathy with the victor' (Benjamin) remains perpetually dissatisfied with each new consensus. They are convinced that literature remains a significant locus for such a renewal, since in seeking to establish a space 'outside' normative social values, literary (and other) texts continually stage and restage the discursive, disciplinary, and institutional limits that enable such norms, and so work to reveal critique’s complicity with them. In interrogating critical practice, the journal aims to investigate its involvement in broader parameters of public debate organized by such enduring (though mutating) political demarcations as that between private and public, the national and the global, or indeed between the cultural and the political itself. Rather than restricting its scope to a particular national, chronological, intra-disciplinary, or identity-based focus, College Literature therefore welcomes submissions from across the range of scholarship in literary studies. It invites studies that explore how changing structures of social experience (such as the transnational reach of culture, or the transgressive power of sexuality, or the excessive potential of the past over contemporary interpretation) call on us to rethink existing critical assumptions, conceptual terms, and historical frameworks. But the journal is also interested in asking how people are to orientate critical inquiry once those assumptions are brought into question, and in examining the resources for historical understanding and rational critique that may yet be available. Consequently, alongside work that reconsiders 'traditional' or 'conventional' critical orthodoxies, College Literature also welcomes scholarship that questions the 'new orthodoxies' which themselves developed as radical critiques of those existing positions, but which are also embedded within specific intellectual trajectories and historical configurations of experience. College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies considers scholarly essays that fall within the scope of its Editorial Policy (see About the Journal). The journal will also consider commentary or opinion pieces on issues of importance to contemporary literary scholarship, but please contact the Editor prior to submission with details of