The (Roaring) Twenties (Cultural Intertexts vol.X. Special issue)

CULTURAL INTERTEXTS started in 2014, as a result of a yes, we can kind of attitude. The name of the journal was meant to reflect the multi-layered textuality of the world embedded in cultures and embedding cultures in its turn. The first two issues came out at Casa C?r?ii de ?tiin?? Press in a single volume (1-2/ 2014) of 373 pages, with 23 papers on Literature and Cultural Studies, and 11 dealing with Linguistics and Translation Studies. They had all been presented during the 2014 edition of the annual Doctoral Conference of “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania. Six years have passed, and seven more issues have been added to the collection. As the tenth issue of the journal is to be published in 2020, we feel that it’s high time for statistics.

• 6 years;
  9 issues, both in print and electronic OA edition;
  1573 pages;
  133 peer-reviewed scientific articles and reviews;
  Contributors from: the Czech Republic, Greece, Georgia, Italy, India, Israel, Kuwait, Moldova, Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Tunisia, Ukraine, the UK and USA;
  Indexing: presence in the following international databases: ERIH+, Ebsco, DOAJ, ProQuest, Index Copernicus, CEEOL; under evaluation by Clarivate Analytics.

Eclecticism is what best characterises the nine issues published so far. Feeling that many areas of expertise may fall under the generous name of the journal, we have accepted a wide range of topics.

But the times are a-changing and we are changing with them; therefore, for the 10th issue of Cultural Intertexts, we invite our contributors, for the first time, to submit papers under a unifying theme. And what could be more appropriate in 2020 than… the (Roaring) Twenties?

Although the name is borrowed from the boisterous years following the Great War in the United States, we welcome papers on cultural matters from all geographical and cultural spaces of the 1920s and 2020s, with an aim to create a hundred years’ bridge between then and now. If it’s still too eclectic, it’s because this is what we did in the 1920s and are (still) doing in the 2020s.

We dreamed the American Dream with Fitzgerald, roamed the Parisian avenues with the Lost Generation, spent time in speakeasies accompanied by jazz, while drinking moonshine, experimented with narrative and poetic forms alongside Joyce and Eliot, and asked for women’s right to a room of [their] own with Virginia Woolf. We did everything we could to recover after an exhausting war.

And now? Now we’re Brexit-ing, alongside a nation that didn’t seem to know what they had voted, we’re Meghan-Markle-ing, casting away the timeless/obsolete traditions of the British royal family, we’re Trump-ing, raising walls between us and the others, we’re still Coca-colonizing and Hollywood-izing the rest of the world, while also being concerned with the state of the planet, war refugees, environment, globalization, literature of the previously silenced and, once again, women’s rights. We are plunging into fantasy novels made famous by video games and Netflix series, we are reading and watching satirical and political dystopias, fooling ourselves that they’re only fiction, we are mourning for Notre Dame, for Australia and for the victims of terrorist ‘incidents’. We have invented political correctness. We are bracing ourselves for another world war with every piece of breaking news from Russia or the Middle East.

These topics and others which we may have omitted may stand at the core of the research papers that we would gladly gather between the covers of the 10th issue of Cultural Intertexts, provided that they meet the scientific standards of our editorial staff and pass the double-blind peer review process. Please send your 4,000-6,500-word contribution (including abstract, references and endnotes) as editable Microsoft Office Word document to cultural.intertexts@gmail.com by 30 June 2020.  Book reviews covering critical materials of the periods under focus are also welcome.