Journal of Literary Theory Vol. 21, No. 1 (2027)

Special Issue: What’s Invisibility Got to Do with It: In/Visibility and Literary Theory

Submission Deadline: 15 July 2026

Call for Articles

»Literature is largely invisible.« (Horowitz 2014, 463) The same holds true for theory. The act of making literature as well as theory ›visible‹ takes place in practice: in the reading and cognitive processing of written texts, in the application of theoretical concepts and approaches, and in the practices of theorising. At the same time, theory offers a way of ›making visible‹ existing, but as yet unrecognised sets of rules. In this regard, theory models structures that are ›invisible‹ because they remain unknown or only insufficiently explained, and yet underlie literary works nonetheless. In this sense, literary theory can be productively situated at the interface of in/visibility.

But what exactly does ›invisibility‹ mean in connection with literary theory, and how can it be theorised? In the sense of something that is present, while also being deliberately or cursorily unseen, overlooked, or rendered invisible, the ›invisible‹ has a fixed place in the formation of theory, insofar as the formerly seemingly ›invisible‹ functions as an impetus for opening up new directions of thought. One might suspect, for instance, that the importance of slow violence for Ecocriticism, or the making visible of diversity is a driving force for the (further) development of Gender and Queer Studies, Race and Critical Whiteness Studies, Disability Studies (Samuels 2003), or Spectrality Studies (Peeren 2014). New or reoriented theories often draw attention to different manifestations of ›inattentional blindness‹ (Mack/Rock 1998) – in a failure to perceive specific aspects because cognitive resources are focused elsewhere – whereby what is in fact visible, even obvious, is not recognised as such. Forms of inattentional blindness may be grounded in trends, schools, or established traditions and practices of theorising and theory reception, just as much as in personal interests, particular funding lines, or preliminary considerations formulated within the framework of commissioned research.

Invisibility Studies, which Françoise Král has described as »a cutting-edge domain of the human sciences in the twenty-first century« (Král 2014, 6), has taken up some of these questions and investigated invisibility as well as strategies of rendering invisible across different visual and material cultures (Grønstad/Vågnes 2019). In narratology, too, first attempts at a theory of invisibility have already emerged (Guttzeit 2025). The JLT special issue ties into this (now quite prominent) trend and invites both researchers working in the field of invisibility studies and interested or critical observers of these approaches to submit contributions that examine the role of in/visibility and in/visibilisation (as condition, practice, or effect) in connection with practices of theorising and the formation of theory. The aim is to draw attention to ›in/visible‹ mechanisms, logics, and practices of theory-building and to explore new developments in literary theory that address aspects of ›invisibility‹ from an intersectional perspective.

Some of the aspects to be addressed in the contributions might include the following subjects and queries, though these should be understood merely as initial prompts:

• What does ›invisibility‹ mean in connection with literary theory, and how can it be systematically explored?
• How is it possible to approach the uses of the term ›in/visibility‹ in contemporary literary and cultural studies, and which of these uses are particularly relevant to literary theory? This term has been applied with reference to different object levels (social phenomena and groups; natural processes; fictional characters or events in fictional worlds; components of cognitive processes, such as premises, thought patterns, or prejudices; causal mechanisms in nature or society). Sometimes the term’s application is literal, sometimes metaphorical. There also appears to be a specifically pragmatic means of speaking about the concept of in/visibility: if something is described as invisible, this may be an attempt to unmask it or to assert a claim as to its visibility, which had been previously denied.
• Which forms of invisibility and/or processes of invisibilisation are relevant for literary theory, and how does literary theory engage with different forms of invisibility? Especially welcome here are contributions that employ the concept of ›invisibility‹ from intersectional perspectives in order to reflect on current approaches in Ecocriticism and/or Postcolonial/Critical Race/Gender/Disability Studies, among other theoretical approaches. To what extent do debates within these approaches exist which place the significance of the in/visible at the centre of theory-building, such as current research on embodiment in Cognitive Literary Studies and/or critical reflections on the relevance of (visualisable) data in Digital Humanities?
• Which (un/visible) politics of in/visibilisation shape theory-building today, or can be traced in the history of literary theory? What ›invisible hands‹ are at work in the making of theory? And what are the ›Jekylls‹ and ›Hydes‹ of literary theory? In the context of debates on decolonizing the canon, for instance, the question arises as to whether a ›canon‹ of literary theory can be established apart from (in/visible) ethnocentric patterns of thought in the West and non-West, and to what extent a canon of theory (communicated in the form of anthologies and handbooks) is needed at all (Dwivedi/Young 2025).
• Processes of theory-building are often invisible in that they are not made explicit – in theoretical debates, for example, for which JLT seeks to create a forum – but rather take shape through schools, preferences, specific funding lines, or even by accident. To what extent does engaging with in/visibility offer a starting point for an archaeology of literary theory that could yield new insights for today’s practices of theorising?
• What role do invisibility studies play in a time of postcritique (Anker/Felski 2017), which increasingly relies on surface reading? Do invisibility studies reintroduce precisely those notions of hidden deep structures from which postcritique and surface reading sought to move away?
• Are visibility and invisibility opposites (or a continuum)? Particularly interesting here are the turning points in literary theory when the invisible is made visible, or conversely. But one could also ask: how does such a historiographic use of the concept of in/visibility connect to related terms by which the history of literary theory can be narrated, like terms such as paradigm shift or turns?
• Are there regimes of in/visibility (e.g., citation cultures, concealment of sources) that can be traced in the history of literary theory or that today’s literary theory addresses, or should address? It would seem there are no ›surveillance technologies‹ (Steiner/Veel 2015) in literary theory – or are there (apparently) after all (or should there be) in the age of generative AI?

Contributions need to be submitted by 15 July 2026. Please submit your contribution to the editorial office (JLT@phil.uni-goettingen.de). Please note that articles that address topics on literary theory but do not respond to a specific call for papers, can be submitted to JLT at any time. They will be considered for publication for the general research section in one of the upcoming issues.

Articles are selected for publication in a double-blind peer-review process. Submissions will be evaluated by two reviewers, based on their originality and relevance to the focus of JLT. For further information, please visit the website of the journal (https://jltonline.de/) or the publisher (https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jlt/html).

JLT publishes scholarly articles that deal with a wide range of aspects of literary theory, the methodology of literary studies, and the methods of scholarly interpretation of literary texts. In addition, we welcome articles exploring the history of disciplines concerned with literature and articles empirically examining the actual research practice of these disciplines. JLT is open to interdisciplinary contributions that address questions related to literature and literary theory, including those from linguistics, digital humanities, media and cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, and the arts.

JLT has a dedicated and exclusive theoretical focus. Case studies will not be considered for publication. Case studies are studies dedicated to individual authors, literary texts, or problems of literary history. Even if such case studies address theoretical questions or methodological problems as a prerequisite for the actual investigation and even if, in a common understanding of the term, they ›apply‹ a given theory to a literary text or body of texts, JLT is not the appropriate journal for them.

Please contact the editorial office if you have further questions.

References

Anker, Elizabeth S./Rita Felski, Critique and Postcritique, Durham/London 2017.

Dwivedi, Divya/Robert J.C. Young, Decolonising the Theory Canon: Literary Theory Outside the Norton Anthology, Parallax 30:3 (2024), 289–294, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2024.2476256.

Guttzeit, Gero, In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility Since the Eighteenth Century, 2025 [forthcoming].

Grønstad Asbjørn/Øyvind Vågnes (Hg.), Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture, Cham 2019.

Horowitz, Evan, Literary Invisibility, New Literary History 45:3 (2014), 463–482, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542736.

Král, Françoise, Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature and Culture: The Fractal Gaze, Basingstoke 2014.

Mack, Arien Mack/Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness, Cambridge, MA 1998.

Peeren, Esther, The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility, Basingstoke 2014, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375858.

Samuels, Ellen Jean, My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9:1 (2003), 233–255, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/40803.

Steiner, Henriette/Kristin Veel, Negotiating (In)Visibilities in Contemporary Culture: A Short Introduction, in: H.S./K.V. (Hg.), Invisibility Studies: Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture, Oxford 2015, xvii–xxix.