Call for Papers

Stet Issue 5

MADNESS

Stet, the online postgraduate journal for the English Department at King’s College London, is now accepting submissions from current postgraduate students for its fourth peer- reviewed publication. In this issue, we will present articles from an international pool of students on the concept of madness.

Madness has haunted culture for millennia, from Socrates’ ‘Ship of Fools’ to Shakespeare’s King Lear to Ginsberg’s generation ‘destroyed by madness’. This year we invite contributions that engage with the questions and problems of madness and its representation in fiction, film, poetry, theatre, life-writing, visual culture, and beyond. How is madness represented and how has this representation changed? What does it mean to be mad? How is the term ‘madness’ problematic? What do representations of madness say about society? What is the relationship between cultural and psychiatric representations of madness? We wish to explore the concept of madness, in both the narrow and broad sense, in literary and cultural studies from an interdisciplinary, international, cross-period perspective. All submissions from King’s students will be considered for the King’s College London Graduate Essay Prize of £200; this will be judged by a member of staff. Submissions might address (but need not be limited to):

• Fictional representations of madness in novels, poetry, theatre etc.
• Factual representations of madness in life-writing, documentaries,auto-biography, and other forms of self-representation and self-expression etc.
• Madness as social criticism
• The cultural implications of psychiatry, neurology or psychoanalysis
• Outsider Art
• The politics of retrospective diagnosis
• The problems of terminology

Please send articles of no more than 5,000 words in MHRA style*, along with a brief biography, to oisin.wall@kcl.ac.uk or faith.eaton@kcl.ac.uk by January 31, 2015.  Please also direct any queries to the same email address.

*If in doubt, the latest MHRA style guide can be downloaded for free from here: http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/download.shtml