Politics & Fiction redefines the customs of academic publishing by exploring the disciplinary and generic boundaries between 'academic' and 'non-academic', including openness towards creative contributions. The cornerstone of the series is a yearbook with a particular thematic focus and/or based on open calls for contributions.
The series takes up the impetus of the project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe” (CAPONEU). CAPONEU assesses the political novel as an important element of our global political, social and cultural heritage. It examines how people in different national and cultural contexts engage with contemporary political issues and thereby have their share in shaping societies and politics.
The initial focus is on the political novel, but the series will simultaneously open up to other genres of political fiction. CAPONEU understands the political novel as a set of practices through which a novel is coded and decoded as political within a specific constellation of circumstances – epistemological, historical, literary, national, political and linguistic. It is identified less as a particular genre than as a dynamic process of becoming and transformation that involves the reappropriation, repositioning and reorganisation of different circumstances.
The project deals with political fiction in general and the political novel in particular from the following research perspectives: 1) literary genre and reception studies; 2) history, sociology and gender; 3) political philosophy; 4) travelling knowledge and global epistemologies; 5) cultural engagement with democracy and authoritarianism; 6) cultural production and politics in digital environments; 7) the role of political fiction in educational settings and policy development.
Politics & Fiction includes not only research articles and reviews but also prose, poetry and essayistic writing. The latter are not merely pieces of entertainment between the prose of academic articles proper, but are performatively concerned with the ways in which political thought can be formulated. We assume that this boundary is already blurry, and is becoming even more blurred in our time, since so many poets have academic training and many academics also try to employ a different, more explicitly political écriture in their work. This is not entirely new, of course (Toni Morrison is a good example), but we assume that this (non-)field, created by people who intentionally cross and blur this line, is currently growing. And we envisage our series as a place where these movements are discussed and reflected upon.
All research articles undergo an anonymous double-blind reviewing process before being accepted for publication.
After the editors have made an initial screening of the submissions and/or members of the Editorial Board prepared special issues, the selected academic articles are reviewed by members of the Editorial Board and/or Committee of Editorial Consultants. In the case of articles not covered by the disciplines represented in the board members, the submissions are forwarded to external reviewers.
The review process is coordinated by the editors who provide the series manager Alessandra Tosi with the reports.
Non-academic submissions will undergo an editorial review.
The CAPONEU Consortium, composed of universities from Eastern and Western Europe as well as Central and Southern Europe, along with its Global Advisory Board, is committed to an inclusive research and publication policy, which is why Politics & Fiction is a multilingual series.
Printed versions of individual volumes are prepared monolingually (either English or another language), with additional digital material linked to the book containing translation or original versions of the texts in other languages.
• Politics & Fiction uses OBP Style.
• Consistency within a paper is the main priority.
• Articles need not be fully formatted at the submission stage, but if accepted, the author will be expected to follow the instructions set out in the OBP Guide.