Volume 41.1/2027 [open]

Special issue – The Short Story as a Transnational Literary Genre in Portuguese Language Countries

Submission Deadline: Extended until october 30 [31 September 2026]

(The journal welcomes submissions on a rolling basis for the “Varia,” “Review,” and “Interview” sections)

Guest Editors: Joana Passos (Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho) & Gonçalo Cordeiro (CRILUS | Université Paris Nanterre)

This volume invites submissions that examine the Portuguese-language short story as a transnational literary genre, with particular attention to its condensed and kaleidoscopic form and its capacity to reflect the complexities of contemporary societies. In a global context marked by intensified circulation and growing cultural interconnectedness, the short story emerges as a privileged form for capturing fragments of experience and for engaging with both historical memory and contemporary modes of textual production and dissemination, especially within digital environments.

The issue seeks to explore the diverse configurations of the short story across Portuguese-speaking contexts, encompassing not only Europe and South America but also Africa and Asia. We particularly welcome contributions that foster dialogue between different cultural spheres within the Lusophone/ Portuguese language world, highlighting asymmetries, tensions, and processes of displacement, circulation, and reinvention.

Submissions may address authors and works from the mid-twentieth century to the present, enabling reflection on the impact of major historical transformations — such as the postwar period and the processes of decolonization — on the development of the genre. Contributors are encouraged to consider how the short story has responded to and interpreted these transformations, as well as the ways in which its formal brevity engages with the acceleration of modernity and with emerging modes of textual production, circulation, and reception in digitally mediated environments.

The dossier also invites reflections on whether the short story embodies the literary values identified by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988)—including lightness, rapidity, precision, and multiplicity—and whether it may be regarded as a particularly representative genre of the present millennium.

While maintaining a strong focus on contemporary contexts, this issue also aims to reassess the short story’s role as a site for the transmission, reconfiguration, and critical interrogation of memory, as well as for the articulation of historical and cultural experiences that have often been marginalized or silenced. The objective is to map the multiple forms and functions of the Portuguese-language short story today, highlighting its aesthetic vitality and its engagement with current cultural and educational challenges.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Formal and aesthetic transformations of the contemporary short story
• The short story and experiences of mobility, migration, and cultural nomadism
• Circulation of authors, texts, and imaginaries within the Portuguese-speaking world
• The short story as a medium for recovering historical and cultural memory
• Representations of cultural heterogeneity in contemporary societies
• Short-form writing in dialogue with digital environments and new publishing practices
• Comparative approaches across Portuguese-language literatures
• Memory, post-coloniality, and identity reconfigurations in the contemporary short story
• The short story as a pedagogical tool in current cultural and educational contexts
• The short story in the teaching of Portuguese as a first or foreign language

Submissions are accepted in Portuguese and English.

Authors must follow the submission and formatting guidelines of the journal: https://revistas.uminho.pt/index.php/diacritica/about/submissions