Vol. 41.2/2027 [Open]

Special Issue – Publishing experimental literature: Crossroads, experiences and processes

Submission deadline: 30 April 2027

Guest Editors: Nuno Medeiros (Universidade de Lisboa: FLUL & CEComp) & Sandra Guerreiro Dias (Universidade de Coimbra: CLP | Universidade Politécnica de Beja)

 

This special issue seeks to bring together contributions that focus on the multiple links between publishing (in a broad sense, not just books) and experimentalism in literature. Experimental publishing, with its clear artistic elements and creative, economic-financial and even technological and material impetus, is historically rooted in a desire to subvert, reorient or propose new ways of making languages and aesthetic positions public. These efforts are not isolated from the logic of legitimacy (or counter-legitimacy) in fields such as the artistic or literary (authorial or publishing), nor from dynamics such as market building and development of distribution methods. In different ways, experimentalism in book publishing can push the boundaries of book and non-book making and literary practices or establish new perimeters of creation, manufacture, dissemination and material, authorial, graphic and reading structuring. And to shake up or disrupt systems of standardised consecration.

The editors invite submissions of original research that address this broad theme, considering, among others, the following theoretical and analytical perspectives:

·     Literature and heterogeneous materialities: sound, performance, code, visualism, three-dimensionality, video, etc.

·     The publisher’s role in creating, configuring, and mediating/proposing experimental literary objects.

·     Creating and publishing experimental objects: rethinking publishing and creation.

·     Editions, publishers and publishing houses of experimental literature: case studies.

·     Experimental artists and publishing: case studies.

·     Boundaries of the book.

·     Materialities in experimental publishing.

·     Experimental literature and creation-dissemination networks.

·     History of the book and documentation of experimental practices.

·     Electronic publishing as experimental publishing.

·     Children’s literature as a field of publishing experimentation.

 

Contributions will be accepted in the following languages: Portuguese and English.