Tag Archives: TEXT Journal

Angular shapes painted navy blue, yellow, pink and white intersect on a wooden board.

TEXT (Vol 29, No 1) April 2025 edition 

TEXT (Vol 29, No 1) includes scholarly contributors from Australia, New Zealand and the United States: Carrie Tiffany reflects on the mechanical intertext in relation to her award-winning novel Exploded View; Lilian Roberts explores Nachträglichkeit in poetic autobiography; Anders Villani contributes new thinking on trauma and poetics in Kate Lilley’s Tilt and his own collection, Totality; Patricia Webb discusses the inclusion of social justice themed texts in writing courses; Annabel Wilson reads for re-arrangement in Lynn Jenner’s Lost and Gone Away; Ruth Jackson writes on walking and travel writing in Ethiopia; Marija Pericic looks at sumazdat reading practices within the Soviet Union (USSR); Shelley-Anne Smith considers emotional contagion and embodied empathy in literary posthumanism; and Soren Tai Smith writes on self-shedding and decreativity in Kafka and Weil.

This issue also includes prose and poetry by Caitlyn Stone, Jacqueline Exbroyat (trans. Patricia Worth), Brid-Áine Parnell, Ian C. Smith, David Thomas Henrey Wright, Nat Kassel, Inez Baranay, Yuxin Zhao, Rebekah Clarkson, Shady Cosgrove, Gay Lynch, Julia Prendergast, Billie Travalini, Cassandra Atherton, Dominique Hecq, Jen Webb, Katrina Finlayson, Eugen Bacon, Paul Hetherington, Owen Bullock, Jessie Seymour, Martin Langford, Annabel Wilson, Verity Oswin, Beth Spencer, Ella Jeffrey, and Les Wicks.

And in our reviews section, Samuel J. Cox reviews Contemporary Preoccupations in the Australian Novel by Nicholas Burns and Louise Klee (eds.), Tarla Klamer reviews Leaf by Anne Elvey & Ways to Say Goodbye by Anne Kellas, Andrew Leggett reivews Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq, Philip Harvey reviews Lands of Likeness & Dark-Land by Kevin Hart, Jake Sandtner reviews Juice by Tim Winton, Jodi Vial reviews Flight by Shady Cosgrove, Colin Dray reviews A to Z of Creative Writing Methods by Deborah Wardle et al. (eds.), Amanda Tink reviews Raging Grace by Andy Jackson, Esther Ottoway and Kerri Shying (eds.), Denise Beckton reviews Thinning by Inga Simpson & Something About Alaska by JA Cooper, Moya Costello reviews The Season by Helen Garner, Carolyn Booth reviews Images of Water by Eugen Bacon (ed.), Jen Webb reviews Mishearing by David Musgrave and we publish a letter to the editors from James Shea and Grant Caldwell in response to Owen Bullock’s review of The Routledge Global Haiku Reader (TEXT Vol 28, No 2).

Read this and other issues via the TEXT website here

Call for Papers: Text Special Issue

Call for Papers, TEXT Special issue: ‘Isn’t it Romantic’, inspired by the RWA 2024 academic symposium

Romance is a powerhouse genre, a $1.4 billion dollar industry in 2022 (The National Herald). Sales of romance print books increased 52% in the 12-months ending May 2023 (Global Newswire) and according to Nielsen BookScan in Australia the ‘Romance and Sagas’ genre more than tripled in sales 2017-2023, showing an increase of 230%, while New Zealand saw a 270% increase in the same period. Popular Romance Studies is of growing scholarly interest and there are increasing numbers of Higher Degree Research students in the field, particularly doing Creative Writing PhDs. This is a call for papers inspired by the themes of the academic symposium hosted by Flinders University and Assemblage Centre of Creative Arts at the Romance Writers of Australia conference in August 2024. We invite scholarship on popular romance fiction in all its incarnations, including its intersections with colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, power, disability, and queerness, and explorations of genre and subgenre. Both scholarly articles and creative work will be considered. 

Papers are encouraged, but not limited, to explore the following:

  • Popular romance fiction tropes 
  • Popular romance fiction and questions of genre/subgenre 
  • Romance fiction and colonialism  
  • Romance fiction and race 
  • Romance fiction and gender 
  • Romance fiction and sexuality 
  • Romance fiction and dis/ability  
  • Romance fiction and queerness 

Abstract Submissions

Abstracts for scholarly papers should be 200 words in length and sent to the editors at degreesoflove@flinders.onmicrosoft.com with the subject line:‘EOI for Isn’t It Romantic Special Issue of TEXT Journal.’

Scholarly papers should be 6,000 – 8,000 words as per TEXT guidelines (including endnotes). Please include a brief biography with your abstract (100 words max, in TEXT style) and ensure that you include your email address for reply. 

EOI for Creative Submissions

Creative submissions will also be considered for this Special Issue. Final prose works would be 2,000 – 3,000 words. Creative EOIs should include a short synopsis/description of the proposed work, its relation to the theme and focus of the Special Issue, and a 200 – 300 word (10 – 20 lines) creative sample. 

EOIs should be sent to the editors atdegreesoflove@flinders.onmicrosoft.com with the subject line:‘Creative Submission EOI for Isn’t It Romantic Special Issue of TEXT Journal.’ Please include a brief biography with your abstract (100 words max, in TEXT style) and ensure that you include your email address for reply. 

Deadline for Abstracts and EOIs: Friday, 6th September 2024

Deadline for completed, accepted works: Friday, 1st November 2024

We welcome early submissions

References 

Bhowmik, Ananyaa. “Era of Romance: Exploring the Unprecedented Boom in the Popularity of Romance Novles.” The National Herald, 2023. Retrieved June 1st, 2024, from thenationalherald.com.  

Baur, Erick. “From Laggard to Leader: Record Sales of Romance Books Reflect Next Generation of Contemporary Readers.” GlobeNewswire, 2023. Retrieved June 1st, 2024, from globenewswire.com. 

Program for the RWA ‘Trope Actually’ academic symposium: 

https://willorganise.eventsair.com/2024-romance-writers-of-australia/friday-workshops