Founded In    2006
Published   3/year
Language(s)   English
     

Fields of Interest

 

literature, culture, the arts and "American Studies," history, social sciences, and international relations

     
ISSN   1991-9336
     
Affiliated Organization   European Association for American Studies
     
Editorial Board

The Director of this publication is the President of the European Association for American Studies, Professor Philip John Davies, The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, London davies@eaas.eu.

Editor for literature, culture, the arts and “American Studies”: Marek Paryż (Poland)

Associate editors

John Dumbrell (Great Britain)

Andrew Gross (Germany)

Roxana Oltean (Romania)

Jean-Yves Pellegrin (France)

Editor for history, social sciences and international relations: Jenel Virden

Book Reviews Editor: Theodora Tsimpouki (Greece) tsimpouki@enl.uoa.gr

Editor for web presence: Cara Rodway (Great Britain)

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

EJAS publishes both solicited and unsolicited articles. The editors also welcome proposals for special issues.

All submissions should be addressed to the Senior Editorial team in the first instance: Dr Marek Paryż (m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl), Dr Jenel Virden (J.Virden@hull.ac.uk) and Dr Cara Rodway (cara.rodway@bl.uk).

EJAS publishes articles under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. The full terms and conditions of the license can be viewed athttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/.

Articles must be in English. Contributions should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words, unless previous arrangements have been made with the editors. The article should be preceded by a short abstract. Bibliographical references and general presentation should follow the MLA style sheet for literature, culture and the arts, and the Chicago Manual of Style for history, social sciences and international relations. In-text references should be indicated in the typescript, between parentheses, by giving the author’s surname followed by the year of publication and a page reference if necessary.

All articles will be made anonymous and handed over to two referees whose reports shall be synthesized by the editorial team and provide the basis for acceptance or rejection. In both cases the author shall be given immediate notice. Reports will be provided to authors upon request. Even when an article is accepted, the editorial board reserves the right to ask for changes, both in form and scope.

     
Mailing Address
     

Marek Paryż (m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl)
Jenel Virden (J.Virden@hull.ac.uk)
Cara Rodway (cara.rodway@bl.uk).

Contact person responsible for updating content for ASA:
Roxana Oltean (roxana.oltean@upcmail.ro)

European Journal of American Studies

EJAS is the official, peer-reviewed academic journal of the European Association for American Studies, a federation of 21 national and joint-national associations of specialists of the United States (http://www.eaas.eu) gathering approximately 4,000 scholars from 27 European countries.

EJAS aims to foster European views on the society, culture, history, and politics of the United States, and how the US interacts with other countries in these fields. In doing so the journal places itself firmly within the continuing discussion amongst Europeans on the nature, history, importance, impact and problems of US civilization. As part of this task, EJAS wants to contribute to enriching the contents, broadening the scope, and documenting the critical examination of “American Studies” in and outside of the United States. EJAS welcomes contributions from Europe and elsewhere and endeavors to make available reliable information and state-of-the-art research on all topics within its broad field of interest. As a matter of policy, the journal will pay particular attention to objects, phenomena and issues less documented or less often debated in the United States, as well as to innovative cultural modes and the diversity of reception of United States culture abroad. Associated with this outlook, it welcomes submissions that elaborate and renew critical approaches, paradigms and methodologies, and that express varied and pluralist views.

While intended for the entire American Studies community, EJAS aims in particular to provide space for the rapid publication of quality scholarship by doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. The journal hopes to constitute a genuine forum for European Americanists of all generations, national origins and disciplinary affiliations.

 

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EJAS 11.1 2016 Special Issue: Intimate Frictions: History and Literature in the United States from the 19th to the 21st Century, Volume 11, Number 1

Encounters are both the object and form of this special issue of The European Journal of American Studies. Edited by a historian and a literary scholar of the United States trained in France, this issue is designed as a place of encounter and simultaneously takes “encounter” as an analytical object in itself, specifically the articulation or dis-articulation between the disciplines of literature and history, the intersection between aesthetics and politics, and the dialogue between historical versions of the past and their literary reenactment.

Introduction: Encounters


Encounters are both the object and form of this special issue of The European Journal of American Studies. Edited by a historian and a literary scholar of the United States trained in France,i this issue is designed as a place of encounter and simultaneously takes "encounter" as an analytical object in itself, specifically the articulation or dis-articulation between the disciplines of literature and history, the intersection between aesthetics and politics, and the dialogue between historical versions of the past and their literary reenactment. By arranging these encounters across the Atlantic and across disciplines, we have not tried to round off angles or to deemphasize the singularities of approaches, and certainly not to erase differences in methods honed over centuries. To the contrary, building on the Old French term encontre, meaning "meeting; fight; opportunity," we hope to attend to frictions, tensions, and disagreements.

American Schools of Interdisciplinarity: History and Literature Programs and Their Early Twentieth-Century Traditions


Interdisciplinary study, because it runs counter to the dominant culture of specialization and professionalization upheld within the modern research university, is often presented as an innovative and experimental renegotiation of an outdated organization of knowledge. This essay qualifies such claims about the forward-looking ambitions of interdisciplinarity by examining the institutional history and traditions which they tend to obscure. Taking on the special case of the study of American literature, this essay argues that its belated recognition as a discipline, in the 1920s, framed it in the meantime as the one remaining province of the generalist amidst the rise of expertise that had come to characterize academic culture as of the end of the nineteenth century. If this delay helps explain ongoing commitments to an interdisciplinary study of American literature and history, the essay shows more specifically how this interdisciplinary project is buttressed by references to scholars and programs from the early twentieth century, a moment which is cast not as the decisive turn towards disciplinarity but as the last moment of indecision in which to recover the dissident forms, methods and pedagogy of interdisciplinarity. Even while interdisciplinarity seems to "teach itself", relinquishing the narrow set of tools and methods through which a discipline trains its practitioners, it is by acknowledging some of the backwards-looking trends in the interdisciplinary study of history and literature in America that we can recover the ideals of scholarship it seeks to transmit.

“A Tract in Fiction”: Woman Suffrage Literature and the Struggle for the Vote


This paper examines some of the ways suffragists used literature to negotiate empowerment in the context of their political campaign. The texts under scrutiny functioned as political tools on many levels: they mocked and subverted male authority, they expressed women's views, they tried to educate and galvanize supporters. They point to a belief in the power of the word to change the world, both on paper and in the streets.

From One Crisis to the Other: History and Literature in The Crisis from 1910 to the Early 1920s


This essay investigates the role of literature and the links between literature, news-reporting, and history in the NAACP magazine The Crisis between 1910 and the early 1920s. We do not study literature per se and do not provide an analysis of the literary style, nor do we assess the literariness of the short stories and poems printed in the 1910s. Rather, we examine the place accorded literature in the Crisis and its role in relation to the rest of the magazine, from news commentary, political essays, and echoes of the African past, to illustrations and advertisements. Top of page Index terms

A Phosphorous History: William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain


Through a reading of William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain (1925), this paper seeks to look at the questions raised by the writing of history in the modernist context and to explore Williams' particular definition of history. Williams' historical project turns history into a literary question through a text that is a collage of very different voices, narratives, and shifts of perspective, thus raising the question of how to write history. Williams' foreword suggests the impossibility of writing a true history and points rather to the desire to capture an evanescent reality, what he calls "the phosphorus of the life". Williams attempts to write the history of a "homemade world" to use Hugh Kenner's eloquent phrase; rather than looking at Europe as his friend Pound was doing at the time, the text presents variations on recurring motifs of American history, problematizing the notion of a "new" continent and of the discovery of place. Williams' poetic repossession of history calls for a reflection on the type of history he sought to write. In the American Grain looks at the "beginners" that have made American history, from the Spanish explorers to Poe, and questions the naïve notion of "beginning". William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain is a biography of the American cultural imagination that puts in dialogue the national epic with a perspectival counter history.

“Black Matters”: Race and Literary History in Mat Johnson’s Pym


After being denied tenure for expanding his teaching of race and literary history beyond exclusively African American texts, Chris Jaynes, the protagonist of Mat Johnson's novel Pym (2011), sets out to retrace the voyage from Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. This essay examines how Johnson uses Jaynes' own shipwreck -- he and his crew are stranded in Antarctica -- to posit the history of race in the United States as a national disaster that overdetermines contemporary social dynamics. Using intertextuality and satire, Johnson follows Toni Morrison's precedent in depicting blackness and whiteness as constructs that are inextricably bound and that cannot be understood one without the other. Central to this claim are Johnson's mirroring of the progressive, 21st-century African American Jaynes with his narrative foil: the pickled, ancient Anglo American Arthur Gordon Pym. I contend that Johnson not only revisits Morrison's argument but also expands upon it; for, as Jaynes and his fellow characters confront the thorny legacy of race and racism in the United States, they must also face a future in which the country's changing demographics will render questions of identity more, rather than less, complicated.

A Conversation with Peter Coviello


Peter Coviello has kindly agreed to have a conversation with Hélène Quanquin and Cécile Roudeau via email about the questions discussed in the research group "History and Literature" based at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and Université Paris-Diderot. Peter Coviello is Professor of American Literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the editor of Walt Whitman's Memoranda During the War (2004) and the author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (2005) and Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (2013). With Jared Hickman, he co-edited a 2014 special issue of American Literature entitled "After the Postsecular."

Other Issues

EJAS 15.2 Summer 2020 , Volume 15, Number 2
EJAS 15.1 2020 Special Issue: Truth or Post-Truth?, Volume 15, Number 1
EJAS 14.4 2019 Special Issue: Spectacle and Spectatorship in American Culture Volume 14, Number 4, Volume 14, Number 4
EJAS 14.3 2019 Special Issue: Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Home, the Nation, and the Wilderness, Volume 14, Number 3
EJAS 14.2 Summer 2019, Volume 14, Number 2
EJAS 14.1 2019 Special Issue: Race Matters: 1968 as Living History in the Black Freedom Struggle, Volume 14, Number 1
EJAS 13.4 2018 Special Issue: Envisioning Justice: Mediating the Question of Rights in American Visual Culture, Volume 13, Number 4
EJAS 13.3 2018 Special Issue: America to Poland: Cultural Transfers and Adaptations, Volume 13, Number 3
EJAS 13.2 Summer 2018, Volume 13, Number 2
EJAS 12.4 2017 Special Issue: Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music, Volume 12, Number 4
EJAS 12.3 2017 Special Issue: Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds , Volume 12, Number 3
EJAS 12.2 2017 Summer Special Issue: Popularizing Politics. The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, Volume 12, Number 2
EJAS 12.2 Summer 2017 , Volume 12, Number 2
EJAS 12.1 Spring 2017 Special Issue: Eleanor Roosevelt and Diplomacy in the Public Interest, Volume 12, Number 1
EJAS 11.3 2016 Special Issue: Re-Queering The Nation: America's Queer Crisis , Volume 11, Number 3
EJAS 11.2 2016, Volume 11, Number 2
EJAS 10.3 2015 Special Issue: The City , Volume 10, Number 3
EJAS 10.2 Summer 2015 Special Issue: (Re)visioning America in the Graphic Novel, Volume 10, Number 2
EJAS 10.2 Summer 2015, Volume 10, Number 2
EJAS 10.1 Winter 2015 Special Issue: Women in the USA , Volume 10, Number 1
EJAS 9.3 2014 Special Issue: Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism, Volume 9, Number 3
EJAS 9.2 Summer 2014, Volume 9, Number 2
EJAS 9.1 Spring 2014, Volume 9, Number 1
EJAS 8.1 2013, Volume 8, Number 1
EJAS 7.2 2012 Special Issue: Wars and New Beginnings in American History, Volume 7, Number 2
EJAS 7.1 Spring 2012, Volume 7, Number 1
EJAS 6.3 2011 Special Issue: Postfrontier Writing, Volume 6, Number 3
EJAS 6.2 2011 Special Issue: Oslo Conference, Volume 6, Number 11
EJAS 6.1 Spring 2011, Volume 6, Number 11
EJAS 5.4 2010 Special Issue: Film, Volume 5, Number 4
EJAS 5.3 Summer 2010, Volume 5, Number 3
EJAS 5.2 2010 Special Issue:The North-West Pacific in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Volume 5, Number 2
EJAS 5.1 Spring 2010, Number 5, Volume 1
EJAS 4.3 2009 Special Issue: Immigration, Volume 4, Number 3
EJAS 4.2 Autumn 2009, Volume 4, Number 2
EJAS 4.1 Spring 2009, Volume 4, Number 1
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