Prospero Rivista di Letterature e Culture Straniere. A Journal of Foreign Literatures and CulturesCall for Papers: Volume XXXI (2026): NARRATIVES OF CRISIS IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN-LANGUAGE LITERATURES The deepest and broadest meaning of the term ‘crisis’ is illuminated by its origin, now more than ever:the Greek root κρίσις encompasses the ideas of choice, judgement and the critical stage of an illness, andperhaps no other word in our present age holds such urgent significance. At the same time, the idea ofcrisis is so deeply embedded in the very concept of modernity that it has become an essential category inthe cultural reflection of diverse traditions. Modernity has, in fact, been built around the concept of crisis,from the paradigm shift caused by the great scientific revolutions and geographical discoveries thatcollapsed the ancient episteme between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to the greatrevolutions of the late eighteenth century, the epistemological rupture of Darwinism and the profoundtensions of the late nineteenth century, to mention only the most decisive ones, and literature hasconsistently interpreted this awareness, particularly from the early twentieth century onwards.As some sixty years ago, according to Lyotard, postmodernism emerged precisely from a ‘distrustof metanarratives’, from the crisis of the grand narratives of science, religion and history, the link betweenthe diagnosis, awareness and analysis of the crisis and the forms of narration is part of every cultural andartistic attempt to address the crisis as a category and/or paradigm of a civilisation’s development. Therelationship between modernity, progress, the philosophy of history and crisis has been at the heart ofphilosophical debate throughout the twentieth century, from Existentialism to the Frankfurt School, toReinhart Koselleck’s idea of the perpetual crisis of modern society, as a ‘structural condition of thecontemporary world’.Moreover, the very idea of crisis has always been conceived on different levels – economic,political, social, cultural, religious, humanitarian and environmental – which in turn can influence andgenerate further crises in terms of identity, values and epistemology. This diversity and constanttransformation at the heart of the problematic definition of a ‘modern civilisation’ has fuelled and shapedliterature, and continues to be interpreted through literature, as a response to crisis. This apparentlycommonsensical statement has perhaps not received enough critical attention in terms of the crucialrelationships between literary productions and forms of crisis in their manifold articulations andimplications, and within various theoretical frameworks. Or, at the very least, it still offers ever-newavenues of inquiry. Literary periods identified as ‘literatures of crisis’—from Decadence to 20th-centuryEuropean Modernism as the most classic examples—have been followed by other contemporary formsof reflection that have produced narratives of and on the epochal, transformative and ‘perpetual’ crises,aimed at articulating the urgency of an ever-evolving concept generating ever new meanings, thoughoften rooted in history and history-related.From the literary periods identified as ‘literature of crisis’, from Decadence to twentieth-centuryEuropean Modernism as the most classic examples, other contemporary forms of reflection that haveproduced narratives addressing epochal, transformative and ‘perpetual’ crises, aimed at identifying andcreating forms capable of articulating the urgency of a constantly evolving concept, while it is oftengenerated and bound by historical roots. Finally, a fundamental dimension of the literary conception ofcrisis is that of the tension between a ‘conjunctural’ (Gramsci, Williams, Jameson) and a ‘constitutive’,epistemological vision (De Man, deconstructionist readings, but also Rita Felski’s post-critique), to citejust a few references among many.Building from the various conceptions of crisis as a hermeneutic concept, and of narration as amode of representing and understanding phenomena across time and space, the critical reflection on theidea and state of crisis in literary production can also focus on the evolution of genres, and on the waysin which literature responds to the crisis of the present and the past, shaping our understanding anddefinition of it. From this perspective, volume XXXI (2026) of Prospero aims to reflect on theconstitutive link between crisis and narrative in English- and German-language literatures, inwhich the very meaning of crisis is conceived as a hermeneutic process generating forms ofrepresentation, and, as such, is absorbed and transformed within the imagination.Among the many possible lines of inquiry, the proposed contributions may consider thefollowing areas in English and German literature:
