Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS FRAME 40.1 “(Be)Longing”

Do you ever find yourself harkening back to your ‘good old days’? Maybe you enjoy losing yourself in that fantasy novel that filled your childhood with wonder, or try to evoke the time before its author be-came controversial. Maybe The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway or The Secret History’s Richard Papen, with their endless reminiscing and yearning for the promises of long-gone pasts, suddenly appear relatable to you—painfully so. How do you shape those past comforts? In times of hardship, one is wont to reminisce, to yearn for ‘simpler times.’ Such retrospection may seek to alleviate; to reconcile the past and present; to reconfigure what a time once was to what it might have been—all in the name of recollecting affective forces that inspire longing and nostalgia. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym coins these mechanisms as restorative nostalgia, or a way to internally rewrite a past, and reflective nostalgia, the act of dwelling on longing from within. Yet desiring the past or indulging in the bittersweetness of that longing, proves to be a problematic impulse, as to fixate on what no longer exists and shirk the present is to dwell on memories that risk paralyzing the self. As Marcel Proust succinctly wrote in Swann’s Way (1913), “the places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience” (579). Those ‘places’ are liminal suspensions that arise from a disturbance in the now and create a need to visit a before state.

The contemporary is unprecedented, defined by political uncertainty, ecological crisis, and rapid technological development, making the desire to return to a place, a feeling, or a time, intensified across global contexts. From the revival of early internet aesthetics and analogue technologies to the persistent cultural fixation on recycling moments such as the ‘summer 2016’ trend, nostalgia circulates as both product and coping mechanism. It manifests in the resurgence of retro media like the VHS and Walkman and the popularity of reboots and remakes. Their displacement from their temporality, however, becomes an aesthetic pastiche that does not truly embody a past but rather, as Frederic Jameson explains in his seminal Postmodernism (1989), a nostalgic mode that only stylizes the past, a symptom of capitalism’s commodity culture. Nostalgia, in this sense, reflects not only a yearning for stability but also an unease with the present and a diminished capacity to imagine the future.

Due to its intertwined nature with remembering, or ‘looking back,’ nostalgia has been theorized within a complex structure of memory, desire, and temporality. Marianne Hirsch examines its relationship to postmemory and collective memory in The Generation of Postmemory (2012), emphasizing how inherited and mediated pasts shape subjec-tivities across generations, whether the memory has been experienced personally or not. Work on multidirectional memory has highlighted the entanglement of histories across cultural and geopolitical boundaries, while studies of transmedia storytelling have traced how memory circulates through literature, film, visual culture, and digital environments. At the same time, theoretical engagements with spectrality, as in the case of Derrida’s hauntology and its later reworking by Mark Fisher, have reframed nostalgia as a response not only to lost pasts but also to unrealized futures. In this framework, nostalgia becomes a mode of mourning for both what was and what could have been. Psychoanalytic approaches further complicate this understanding, positioning nostalgia as a form of desire structured by lack: a longing for an imagined fullness that was never fully present. Jacques Lacan, for example, believed that longing stems from lack, a word which seems to hint at something that was owned but lost, but is actually reflective of a fantasy of ownership, of a belonging that never was.

In this issue of FRAME, we invite scholars of literary studies and other related fields to engage with the topic of nostalgia and longing in literature. How do narratives of reimagined pasts across fictional genres disrupt linear temporal frameworks? In what ways do transcultural and transmedia practices produce layered and contested memoryscapes? How does nostalgia in literature mediate the tension between regret and reconciliation, comfort and loss? How can a work like Glenn Albrecht’s Solastalgia (2007) explain the emotional toll of environmental change and the unmaking of a home in literature?

Themes and topics related to these questions might include, but are not limited to:

  • Transcultural transmission
  • Transmedia memory
  • Reimagined pasts/Historical fiction/Speculative fiction
  • Multidirectional temporality
  • Postmemory and collective memory
  • Spectrality and haunting
  • Solastalgia and environmental memory
  • Planetary amnesia/Extinction
  • Archives
  • Diasporas and homesickness
  • Life-writing/Auto-fiction/Memoirs
  • Desire and/or Limerence
  • Escapism
  • Regret
  • Reboots/Remasters/Remakes
  • Postcolonial nostalgia
  • Longing/Belonging

The above questions and concerns are only a few of the many themes that could be explored in the upcoming issue. However, we would like to stress that while FRAME encourages interdisciplinary and creative approaches, every submission should show a clear connection to literary studies, as we are a literary journal first and foremost.

If you are interested in writing for FRAME, please submit a proposal of max. two pages including a brief abstract of max. 300 words, accompanied by a structured outline by 4 September 2026. Proposals should include a thesis statement, general structure, and a preliminary reflection on the argument’s theoretical framework. On the basis of all proposals, contributors whose proposals are accepted will be notified by 11 September 2026, and asked to submit a draft version of the paper by 30 October 2026. Be mindful that we hold the right to reject draft versions to ensure consistency and coherence across all contributions to the issue.

We also invite visual artists and writers to submit creative works to our Gallery Section. If you are submitting a work of visual art, please include a brief explanation (max. 500 words) of your piece and its relationship to the theme. If you are submitting a piece of creative writing (poem, short story, personal essay, autoethnography, etc.) or a more experimental academic essay please submit the full piece (max. 3000 words).

The deadline for the article’s first full version is 11 December 2026, after which the editing and peer review process begins. Articles in our main section, which is reserved for scholars with a doctoral de-gree, have a word limit of 6000 words, including bibliography and footnotes. For our masterclass section, graduate and PhD students are invited to write up to a maximum of 4000 words.

Proposals are to be submitted through our Openjournals website: https://platform.openjournals.nl/frame/about/submissions. More information about our journal, as well as our submission guidelines, can be found on our website: https://www.frameliteraryjournal.com/. Please feel free to contact us at info@frameliteraryjournal.com, should you have any questions.

NOTE: Visual art submissions can currently not be submitted through the Openjournals site, please send these submissions to info@frameliteraryjournal.com.

 

Works Cited

Albrecht, Glenn. “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity.” PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature, vol. 3, pp. 45–59.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 2012.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.

Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1. Edited by William C. Carter, translated by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, Yale UP, 2013.