Call for Papers: Mapping the Impossible, Special Issue ‘Boundaries and Margins’

Submission deadline: 31 July 2023

Mapping the Impossible is an open-access student journal publishing peer-reviewed early-career research into fantasy and the fantastic.

For more information about the journal and submissions click here))
https://fantasy-research.gla.ac.uk/index.php/submissions/

Aims and Scope
We welcome submissions from undergraduate and postgraduate students (and from those who have graduated within the last year) from any higher education institution. We publish articles on any aspect of fantasy and the fantastic and any work within this transmedial genre. Increasingly, students from more established disciplines (including, but not limited to, Literature Studies, Game Studies, Film and Television Studies, Media Studies, Philosophy and Theology) elect to write essays on a fantasy-related topic that intersects with their primary discipline.

‘Boundaries and Margins’ CFP

Our third Special Issue takes as its theme ‘Boundaries and Margins’, inspired by the works produced during this year’s GIFCon. Submissions are encouraged from those who presented during the conference, but also from fantasts far and wide who would like to share their perspectives on boundaries and margins in fantasy and the fantastic.
To quote the GIFCon call for papers:
‘Brian Attebery famously argued in Strategies of Fantasy that fantasy can be conceptualised as a ‘fuzzy set,’ with the edges of the genre mainly understood through the lens of what is placed at its centre. Given the subjectivity inherent to this definition, notions of boundaries (or lack there-of) have been a key concern to academic and critical discourse on fantasy and the fantastic, as well as a preoccupation of fictional texts, with fantastical occurrences often being germinated in liminal spaces and margins. As Rosemary Jackson claims in Fantasy: A Literature of Subversion, “The dismissal of the fantastic to the margins of literary culture is in itself an ideologically significant gesture, one which is not dissimilar to culture’s silencing of unreason.” However, while fantasy fandom has historically perceived itself as being on the margins, the genre and its presumed canon privileges a narrow selection of voices and texts, pushing alternate perspectives to the edges of the fuzzy set. Despite the conception of fantasy as the literature of the impossible, the delimitation of margins and boundaries can undermine the potential offered by multiplicity, eliding certain works and creative practitioners from genre, subcultural fan communities, and academic research.’
This special issue ‘seeks to examine boundaries and margins within fantasy, be they textual, linguistic, geographical, embodied, or imposed.’ The full call for papers can be found at fantasy-research.gla.ac.uk/index.php/submissions/

Mapping the Impossible exclusively accepts academic papers between 3000 and 5000 words in length, including references but excluding bibliographies. Along with your paper, we ask you to submit a 300-500 word long abstract, and a 100 word long biography. Please attach these to an email as separate Word documents, each clearly labelled with your name. For instance: TerryPratchettSubmission.docx, TerryPratchettAbstract.docx, TerryPratchettBiography.docx

Please note that we ask for your paper to conform to the Mapping the Impossible Style Guide when you submit it. Your paper should also be anonymised as far as possible when you submit it (except for the file name!), as per our double anonymous review policy.
When you’re ready to submit, send your email to journal.for.fantasy@gmail.com with the subject line “Submission – [your name][date of submission]”. You will receive a confirmation email within seven days, to say that we have received your submission.
The board meets at least once a month to discuss submissions, and you should expect to hear back from us within five weeks.

Please email journal.for.fantasy@gmail.com for any queries regarding the call.