Call for Book Chapter Proposals: Marginalized Women and Work in 20th- and 21st-Century British and American Literature and Media

Vernon Press invites book chapter proposals for the edited collection: 'Marginalized Women and Work in 20th and 21st-Century British and American Literature and Media'.
The uneasy relationship between women and work in literature is widely studied through the novels published mostly in the 19th century due to women’s participation to the workforce in great numbers, which was considered as a popular topic for women writers. Female factory workers and working-class women are particularly depicted in well-known middle-class writers’ works such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and Work (1873), and Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874). The criticism of such novels is the portrayal of mostly working-class white women’s struggle in the workforce; while women of color, unpaid work, voluntary/ social work, working women and media, and stigmatized work are some of the topics that are neglected in the scholarship about women and work.

To fill this void, the proposed edited volume aims to examine the significant relationship between underrepresented woman and work. We seek critical essays about literary works on woman’s labor written in 20th and 21st-century British and American literature and media. As a cross-cultural study on woman’s work in capitalist economies, the proposed text seeks contributions that discuss works of neglected, marginalized, and underrepresented writers and filmmakers and aims to provide an intersectional approach to previously unconsidered intellectual analysis of non-canonical authors and genres.
Potential contributions include (but are not limited to):

  • Intersectionality of gender, class, and work
  • Works of women of color, indigenous women, post-colonial women, subaltern women
  • Social work and philanthropy
  • Women’s work and well-being of underrepresented communities
  • Stigmatized work
  • Unconventional work and odd jobs
  • Erotic Labour and sex workers
  • Unpaid work
  • Mothering and domestic work
  • Contemporary representation of working women in media
  • Social media and work
  • Activism and work
  • Discrimination at the workplace
  • Glass ceiling
  • Wage gap
  • Working women in academia
  • Working from home
  • Child workers
  • Capitalism, women, and work
Deadline for proposals: July 30, 2020.
Deadline for chapter drafts: November 30, 2020.
How to submit your proposal: Please submit a 250-word abstract and a short bibliographical note to Dr. Hediye Özkan. Complete chapter lengths should be between 5000-7000.
More information is available at www.vernonpress.com. Previously published papers cannot be included.

Contact Info: Dr. Hediye Özkan