Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies

Vol. 47 No. 2 | September 2021

Call for Papers

Shakespeare and Translation

Guest editors

Jonathan Locke Hart (Shandong University) & I-Chun Wang (National Sun Yat-sen University)

Deadline for Submissions: April 15, 2021

Shakespeare’s poetic dramas were first performed in an English capital inhabited by a considerable number of resident aliens at a time when, as Stephen Greenblatt has put it, “the boundaries of national identity were by no means clear and unequivocal.” Much of his writing reflects this porousness, and some of it—notably The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest—engages imaginatively with the expanding multiethnic and colonial cultures of trade and labor in the renaissance era. But if Shakespeare’s poetic scripts (and their performances) were often marked from the start by histories of border-crossing, this aspect is now even more conspicuous as a result of the translations—in multiple senses—which these texts have undergone. The great German romantic translations by Schlegel and Tieck, the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s twentieth-century adaptations of Shakespearean tragedy, Congo-Brazzaville writer-director Sony Labou Tansi’s La Résurrection rouge et blanche de Roméo et Juliette (1990) are examples of Shakespeare and cultural translation. In many other responses and multifaceted cultural and linguistic situations, Shakespeare has been in a constant state of metamorphosis.

The linguistic afterlife of Shakespeare’s writing across the world has been the subject of seminal books by Gary Taylor and Jonathan Bate and, more recently, the field has been enriched by the multiauthor volume of essays edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross, Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace (2009), and by Dirk Delabastita’s chapter on language and translation for The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Language (2019). Shakespeare and Asia (2019) edited by Jonathan Hart brought together fifteen authors from Asia to explore Shakespeare in East-West and global contexts.

For this special issue of Concentric, we invite submissions that address any aspect of Shakespeare in translation. Diverse theoretical and practical modes of criticism are welcomed, but possible loci and foci include the importance of Shakespeare’s translation and/or adaptation for an understanding of local and global culture; Shakespeare translated via performance; poetic or anti-dramatic Shakespeares; multilingual and creole Shakespeares; non-European Shakespeares, including Asian Shakespeares; Shakespeare’s place in theories of world literature; and Shakespeare translated into cyberspace.

Please send complete papers of 6,000-10,000 words, 5-8 keywords, and a brief biography to concentric.lit@deps.ntnu.edu.tw by December 31, 2020. Manuscripts should follow the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Except for footnotes, which should be single-spaced, manuscripts must be double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman. Please consult our style guide at http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/submissions.php.

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Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, indexed in Arts and Humanities Citation Index, is a peer-reviewed journal published two times per year by the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Concentric is devoted to offering innovative perspectives on literary and cultural issues and advancing the transcultural exchange of ideas. While committed to bringing Asian-based scholarship to the world academic community, Concentric welcomes original contributions from diverse national and cultural backgrounds. In each issue of Concentric we publish groups of essays on a special topic as well as papers on more general issues. http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/.

For submissions or general inquiries, please contact us at: concentric.lit@deps.ntnu.edu.tw.