The Editorial Board of the Journal of Post-graduate Department of English invites submissions of scholarly articles, book reviews and dream aloud(s) for the peer-reviewed thematic issue “Of World Wars and Everyday Hope: Representations in Literature”

Concept Note:

“Life is what it is about;/I want no truck with death.” (Neruda’s “Keeping Quiet”)

This Concept Note is a response to the present wartimes that we fail to comprehend in an ‘always already’ moment of polycrisis. Anxiety is what we feel and ‘anxiety’ according to Freud ‘is a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one’ (2011, 38). And this preparation at microlevels is our only potent way of staying relevant in the face of war-torn history before being devoured by it. How do we the litterateurs – controlled (but not devastated) by the warmakers without any logical explanations – make use of this Freudian anxiety who have been tutored to believe that pen is mightier than sword, song is louder than cannonball, house/street/prayer house/cemetery/bazar/asylum/hospital/campus holds more information than battlefield, and literature preserves more hope than any other form of knowledge? The writers on the eve of the two world wars took up their pens to sing these everyday spaces to affirm the transcendent power of hope under pressure. Time has come to revisit their writings with the purpose to subvert war histories into narratives of resistance and resilience. The present Volume proposes to analyse world war literatures, schools or/and movements that centre around everyday lived/imagined lives wherein disillusioned hope-mongers become the subjects rather than the objects of world war narratives. In so doing, this Volume seeks to look forward to the past world war times to comprehend how indeed the then ordinary people, writers and critics engaged in pursuit of the art of hoping.

Everyday hope, according to Gronstad and Johanessen, is to ‘dream forward, to imagine differently albeit on small scales in anticipation that the imagination transitions into the observable imaginary, social, aesthetic, political or otherwise’ (2026, 3-4). As a psychosocial term, Duggleby et al understand hope as an uncertainly certain futuristic expectation which family caregivers of terminally ill patients practise on an everyday basis (2009). Everyday hope is (perhaps) more than a choice: It is small and brief, slippery and deferred, but is part and parcel of the larger action. And literary articulations can show (without pontificating) the surprising twists and turns of the everyday hope that ordinary humans perform. In times of hopelessness, literary pursuits can weave the valuable but complex patterns of everyday hope to uphold invisible interstices of micro-utopias without being preachy or naive. Anxiety is a fact of war, and we invoke the present-day writers to imagine everyday hope on small scales and to sing of us, the ordinary hope-mongers of the world (who has chosen not to discuss the nature of World War III and strategic theories but to adopt ingenuous ways of preserving domestic LPG, petrol and diesel on an everyday basis). Meanwhile, this Volume invites articles, book reviews, and dream aloud(s) that engage with Everyday Hope in World War Literatures with a focus on literary forms, formulations, movements and schools to underscore the value of utopian thinking on a daily basis. In so doing, this thematic issue aims to open a literary discussion on how to imagine, to build, to interact, to socialize, to pray, to serve, and to sustain smaller units of the broader world under the pressure of world-war threats.

Suggested (but not limiting) thematic areas:

• 1. The ‘Lost Generation’ and War
• 2. Dystopian Literature and War
• 3. Dadaism, Surrealism, Existentialism, the Absurd and War
• 4. Genocide and Witness Literature
• 5. War Memoir
• 6. Campus Novel and War
• 7. Gender and War
• 8. Mothers in Wartimes
• 9. Queer Literature and War
• 10. Indigenous Literature and War
• 11. Feminism and War
• 12. Postcolonial Literature and War
• 13. Domesticity and War

Bibliography:

• 1. Briganti, Chiara & Kathy Mezei. Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young. Ashgate, 2006.
• 2. Das, Santanu. “War and Postcolonial Studies.” War and Literary Studies. Ed Anders Engberg-Pedersen & Neil Ramsey. CUP, 2023.
• 3. Duggleby, Wendy, et al. “Renewing Everyday Hope: The Hope Experience of Family Caregivers of Persons with Dementia.” Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 30:514–521, 2009.
• 4. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Ed Todd Dufresne & Trans. Gregory C. Richter. Broadview Press, 2011.
• 5. Freud, Sigmund. Reflections on War and Death. B & R Samizdat Express, 2012.
• 6. Grønstad, Asbjørn, & Lene Johannessen. “Microutopias and Everyday Hope.” Microutopias and Everyday Hope. Ed Asbjørn Grønstad & Lene Johannessen. Bloomsbury, 2025.
• 7. Haytock, Jennifer Anee. At Home, at War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature. Ohio State University Press, 2003.
• 8. Higonnet, Margaret R. Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. Yale University Press, 1987. 2-7.
• 9. Jones, Sonya L (Ed). Gay and Lesbian Literature since World War II: History and Memory. The Hawthorn Press, 1998.
• 10. Peterson, Elmer. Tristan Tzara: Dada and Surrational Theorist. Rutgers University Press, 2008.
• 11. Roberts, Priscilla. Voices of World War I: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life. Bloomsbury, 2003.
• 12. Rosner, Jennifer: Once We are Home: A Novel. Flatron Books, 2023
• 13. Szabo, Magda. Abigail. MacLehose Press, 2020.
• 14. Schuetz, A.D. Hans. Davai, Davai!: Memoir of a German Prisoner of World War II in the Soviet Union. McFarland, 1997
• 15. Wellner, Cathryn J. Witness to War: A Thematic Guide to Young Adult Literature on World War II, 1965-1981. Scarecrow Press, 1982.

The journal strictly follows its ethics policy and plagiarism, if found, will lead to the blacklisting of the author.

The Editorial Board reserves the right to accept or reject any contribution and to make suitable alterations and amendments.