Over the last century, literary studies has undergone a profound transformation. Once grounded in broadly universalist assumptions about literary value, aesthetic experience, and human meaning, the discipline has increasingly turned toward difference: toward historically marginalized voices, minoritized literatures, experimental forms, decolonial critique, feminist and queer reading practices, Indigenous epistemologies, and the politics of representation itself. While this turn has fundamentally reshaped literary scholarship for the better, it has also left in its wake unanswered questions about the authority, scope, and public role of literary criticism in the contemporary world alongside, perhaps, an enduring but cautious desire for some kind of reformed universalism that might unify literary practices, literary scholarship, and literature’s many diverse publics and readers.
This special issue of the Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings emerges from a series of events tied to Prof. Roland Greene’s Francqui International Professorship at Ghent University (alongside VUB, UCLouvain, and KU Leuven), including his inaugural lecture, “Literary Studies After Universalism: A History and a Manifesto”, and a series of seminars conducted at the four host universities on the histories, afterlives, crises, and possible futures of universalism within literary studies broadly conceived.
The special issue invites contributions that interrogate what remains of universalist thinking after the discipline’s ethical, political, and epistemological transformations since the mid-twentieth century. How should literary criticism understand its public role in an era defined by fragmentation, global inequality, and contested democratic values? What forms of authority, expertise, or public legitimacy remain available to literary studies? Can concepts such as universality, collectivity, or shared human experience be rehabilitated without reproducing the exclusions historically associated with them? Conversely, what is lost when universalism is rejected outright?
The deadline for abstracts is 15 June 2026.
Please find more information here.