Call for Papers

Archival Poetics: Fragmentation, Organization, Multimodality

 Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture (Issue 17, 2027)

University of Lodz, Poland

Co-editors of the issue: Wojciech Drąg, PhD (University of Wrocław), Elin Ivansson, PhD (Sheffield Hallam University)

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• the use of documents and photographs in literary works,
• the link between archives and multimodality,
• the function of archives in digital/electronic literature,
• conceptual writing and documental poetry,
• ontological hoaxes,
• literary works that follow alphabetical structure (a glossary, an encyclopedia, a bibliography, an index),
• literary uses of lists, inventories, and catalogues,
• archival artefacts in graphic novels and comics,
• postmodernist critiques of the archive (historiographic metafiction),
• reader-oriented analyses of how archives are perceived,
• archival poetics as a creative writing practice,
• the archive and the Anthropocene,
• the digital versus analogue—archive and database aesthetics.

An abstract [300-500 words] should be submitted as an email attachment to: wojciech.drag@uwr.edu.pl , elin.ivansson@mail.com, and text.matters@uni.lodz.pl.

In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, the title of the proposal, abstract, 5 keywords, and a brief bio note.

Important deadlines:

Deadline for submission of the abstract: 31 January 2026

Deadline for editors’ acceptance/rejection of proposals: 7 March 2026

Deadline for submission of full articles (max. 6000 words): 7 September 2026

Deadline for peer review and final acceptance/rejection of articles: 1 December 2026

Deadline for submission of final versions of articles: 1 February 2027