The Historical Fictions Research Network (historicalfictionsresearch.org) is pleased announce the arrival of the Journal of Historical Fictions. The Journal will be published twice a year, with the first issue to be presented in February 2017 at the second conference of the Network.

Call for abstracts: 1:1 Narrative Constructions of the Past

In the study of historical fictions, there is increasing critical recognition of convergences between the philosophy of history, narratology, popular literature, historical narratives of national and cultural identity, and cross-disciplinary approaches to narrative constructions of the past in diverse media.

Narrative constructions of the past constitute a powerful discursive system for the production of cognitive and ideological representations of identity, agency, and social function, and for the negotiation of conceptual relationships between societies in different times and lived experience. The licences of fiction, especially in mass culture, define a space in which the pursuit of narrative and meaning is permitted to slip the chains of sanctioned historical truths to explore the deep desires and dreams that lie beneath all constructions of the past. Historical fictions measure the gap between the pasts we are permitted to know and those we wish to know, interacting between the meaning-making narrative and the narrative-resistant nature of the past.

This journal welcomes inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary articles from (but not confined to) archaeology, literature, film, history, media studies, art history, musicology, reception studies, and museum studies. We welcome proposals that cross historical periods, and encourage ambitious approaches of high quality, using new methodologies to support research into larger trends. The journal aims to foster more theoretically informed understandings of the mode across historical periods, cultures, media and languages.

The journal is supported by an inter-disciplinary core of researchers, to generate a collective discourse around historical fictions in a range of media and across period specialities.

Please send abstracts of no more than 800 words for articles for this Open Access, peer-reviewed journal, to journalhistfics@gmail.com, by 30 June, 2016, with a view to submitting a full article of 6000-8000 words by 30 September 2016.