CFP, Moveable Type 2021:

‘I liked to read there. One drew the pale armchair to the window, and so the light fell over the shoulder upon the page.’(Woolf 1966) 

Brian Eno wrote that the ambient ‘should be as ignorable as it is interesting’ and that ‘ambient arts’ should produce ‘a space to think’ (Eno 1978). Ambient Literature (Dovey et al 2020) suggests ‘place-based writing and location-based technologies’ produce new kinds of literary experiences. It suggests, ‘unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema’, ambient literatures ‘take place in the everyday shared world’. In response we may ask what–and how genuine–is the separation between the theatre and our ‘everyday shared world’? These definitions of Ambient Literature prompt us to consider this term and its definitions in relation to other genres and literature from other time periods. 

This call for papers invites explorations of the historicity, significance and politics of ambient literatures. We welcome contributions exploring any genre and time period. Has the book not always been a location-based technology? What differences exist between situated, ‘place-based’ and location-based literatures? Does ambient literature repurpose our idea of literary labour? Are the roles of reader and writer in literary creation recalibrated when we attend to the ambience of the reading site? What are the political and social implications of ambient literature? Is the contemporary conception of ambient literature merely a means of naming a much more established aesthetics of political/social subversion? Are ambient literary ideals somehow politically transgressive? 

Suggestions 

• Modernist and postmodernist iterations of ambient literature
• How authors ‘stage’ scenes 
• The framing of performance spaces  
• The reflexivity of reading and writing  
• Adaptation studies 
• The pastoral 
• National and regional literatures 
• Eco-criticism 
• Second-person literature 
• Reading in a climate emergency 
• Spatial poetics and peripatetic poetry 
• Situationist writing and urban wandering 
• Literary coteries 
• Digital literature 
• Cognitive poetics 

  Academic articles should be 3000-5000 words. All submissions should use MHRA style referencing and include a bio.  

  Deadline: 22^nd February.

  Call for Reviews: 

  We are also seeking reviews of poetry, novels, plays, film adaptations, and critical monographs relating to the theme of ambience. 

  Suggestions for review:   

  ·           Ali Smith’s Summer 

  ·           Zadie Smith’s Intimations 

  ·           Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices 

  ·           Ecodramaturgies 

  ·           Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital 

    Reviews should be 1000 words. All submissions should use MHRA style referencing and include a bio. Note: constructive feedback will be provided for all submissions whether successful or not. 

  Deadline: 22^nd February. 

  Ambience – Call for Creative Writing Submissions  

  Moveable Type invites submissions of your creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction and drama relating to the theme of ambience for its Autumn 2021 issue.  

   We welcome submissions about  

• the sites of reading and writing 
• the blurring of art and reality  
• literature’s limits 
• place-based writing 
• immersion  
• the experience of reading  
• writing and the political moment 
• landscape or eco-writing  

   Creative submissions should be 2500 words at most. All submissions should use MHRA style referencing where necessary and include a bio.  

  Deadline: 22^nd February. 

All submissions can be sent to editors.moveabletype@gmail.com

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