The Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel
Workshop Description/Call for Papers
„The Resilience of the Form: Reading the Anglophone Novel in the Twenty-First Century”

Workshop dates: 12-13 November 2026
Workshop venue: Faculty of Letters, 31 Horea St., Cluj-Napoca, Romania
CSMAN webpage: https://csman.centre@ubbcluj.ro

      The Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel, affiliated with the Faculty of Letters of Babeș-Bolyai University, was founded in November 2006 by Professor Sanda Berce as The Centre for the Study of the Contemporary British Novel, and soon became a welcoming terrain for academic debates, for ideas and sketches for research projects or joint publication ventures, as well as for organizing scientific or cultural events. Undoubtedly evidencing the success of the Centre’s proposed mission, the growth of our scholarly community led us to realize that both the intellectual interests of its members, and wider shifts in current scientific priorities, warranted an extension of the historical and geographical ambit of its investigations. Our enlarged focus on the modern histories and contexts of the Anglophone novel involved not only a name change, but also an effective restructuring of our team’s alignment to the latest trends in literary studies. Over the past two decades, the Centre has become a hub for Anglophone studies in Cluj and in Romania, hosting international experts as associate members or visiting guests, and attracting young scholars who are energizing our work in new directions. It is therefore not only befitting, but – we think – also important to mark its twentieth anniversary by hosting a discussion on the persistence of the novelistic genre in the twenty-first century, at a time of seismic change for literature, for the humanities as contributors to societal debate and for the world at large, when the questions of the novel’s readership and of reading practices are met with generalised anxiety.
      Addressing ways in which we (still) read novels in the twenty-first century, we follow Peter Boxall’s take on both the “conditions which make literature possible”– the historical and social regimes of visibility and knowledge that prescribe how writing functions – and the possibilities opened up by literature (1), the fresh ethical and cognitive vistas it affords as we face the “near compulsory inarticulacy” (10), as well as the crisis in legibility triggered by the breakdown of legitimating frameworks or by multiple threats of universal extinction. Despite such justified anxieties, we believe that throughout its history, the novel has exhibited a radical capacity to harness the invisible, to challenge rules of reading and summon readerly modes of thought and feeling that illuminate the world’s intelligibility while simultaneously pointing to its limits. Alertness to the novel’s repurposable and renewable potentialities of form entails, as Caroline Levine (7) reminds us, resonating with the ways in which its latent aesthetic “affordances” or capabilities may be activated by pressing sociopolitical arrangements, from climate emergency to global warfare, while dominant patterns are pushed into remission. As the editors of a recent collection emphasise, “historical practices of close reading” perform exercises of attention that could counteract the distraction of the digital age and expose inherent cognitive biases (Thain and Jones 20-21), thus placing the humanities in a privileged position to respond to the collapse of political and social consensus we are witnesses to. Just like attention, reading is not just a solitary act: it requires or subverts collective norms, it is regulated by shared cultural contexts and is often a communal activity. The historical forms of the novel, with its complexity, its varying lengths, and its realization of literature’s “multimodal sensory input” (Thain and Jones 21) are the best qualified to galvanize and rehearse twenty-first century attempts to understand the past, the present and the future.
      The discussions (15-20 minutes per presentation, followed by Q&A sessions), will take place within the framework of thematic panels, which could include, but will not be limited to the following topics:
– the experimental potential of the novel form as the foundation of generic continuity/metamorphosis;
– regionality, (semi-)periphery and cultural circulation as the guarantee of novelistic survival and reception endurance in the twenty-first century;
– resurgences of historical novelistic modes in the twenty-first century; anticipating future forms;
– the afterlives and twenty-first-century rereadings of earlier novels: changing canons, new ethical and political frameworks, adaptation, translation, re-edition, digital circulation, and transformations in readership;
– reading the novel (both past and present) at the intersection of politically and ethically “committed” modes of interpretive attention and the current “postcritical” orientations interested in an open and hospitable valorisation of the texts’ affordances;
– close reading against distant, computational, and AI-assisted reading practices, and the changing value of literary attention in contexts shaped by post-truth, disinformation, and generative AI.

Works Cited:
Boxall, Peter. The Possibility of Literature. The Novel and The Politics of Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Levine, Caroline. Forms. Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Thain, Marion, and Ewan Jones, eds. Close Reading as Attentional Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2026.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Prof. Matthew Feldman (Teesside University, Liverpool Hope University, Anglia Ruskin University)
Dr. David Vichnar (Charles University, Prague)
Dr. Louis Armand (Charles University, Prague)