CFP: Special Issue “Affect and Intermediality”

Special Issue “Affect and Intermediality” in the journal Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
(ISSN: 2083-2931) 

Editors: Anne Holm (Associate Professor of English, Linnaeus University) and Niklas Salmose (Professor of English, Linnaeus University). Co-Editors: Anna Ishchenko (PhD student in MIDWorld, Linnaeus) and Beatriz Carlsson-Pecharromán (PhD student in Global Humanities, Linnaeus) 

We invite submissions for a special issue dedicated to exploring the dynamic intersections between affect and intermediality. This collection of articles seeks to illuminate how emotional experience is shaped, transmitted, and transformed across different media environments. 

Theme and Scope 

Affect plays a foundational role in shaping human experience, from everyday encounters to large-scale cultural and social networks. In an era deeply defined by mediated communication, affect circulates rapidly across platforms, binding communities, informing public discourse, and animating artistic expression. Understanding how these emotional currents emerge, take shape, and resonate requires close attention to the media through which they flow. 

Contributors may wish to position their analyses in dialogue with established work in intermedial and affective scholarship. Within intermedial studies, foundational and contemporary approaches by Lars Elleström, Werner Wolf, Irina Rajewsky, Jørgen Bruhn, Beate Schirrmacher, Thomas Leitch, Ágnes Pethő, Niklas Salmose, Gabriella Rippl, and Marie-Laure Ryan among others offer diverse conceptualizations of mediality, mediation, and the aesthetics of cross-media relations. Elleström’s modal framework, Rajewsky’s typology of intermedial references, Wolf’s work on transmedial narratology, and Ryan’s perspectives on transmedial storyworlds, for instance, provide fertile methodological foundations for examining how affect travels between, within, and across media forms. Likewise, scholars engaging with affect studies and cognitive approaches to literature and media may find productive intersections with Patrick Colm Hogan’s investigations into emotion and narrative (e.g., Literature and Emotion, 2018), Alexa Weik von Mossner’s explorations of environmentally inflected affect in film and literature (Affective Ecologies, 2017), and Keith Oatley’s empirical work on readers’ emotional and empathic engagement with fictional characters (e.g., The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion, 2022). Bringing these strands together opens possibilities for exploring how affective experience is shaped by media affordances, formal structures, sensory logics, and embodied modes of reception—thereby advancing a more integrated understanding of how emotion and mediation co-produce meaning across the arts. 

This special issue welcomes contributions that investigate how affect is conditioned by the material, aesthetic, and relational properties of media. We are especially interested in scholarship that: 

• examines how emotional responses arise from specific media affordances, 

• analyzes how interactions between bodies, technologies, and environments produce meaningful affective experiences, 

• investigates how intermedial relations—between forms, genres, and modalities—shape or shift affective engagement, 

• considers how artistic and cultural practices mobilize affect across different media contexts. 
 

Potential Topics 

Submissions may address, but are not limited to: 

• Affective resonance in intermedial artistic practices 

• Mediated nostalgia and cultural memory 

• Sensory experience and multimodal aesthetics 

• The role of affect in shaping subjectivity in media interaction 

• Affective representations of illness or vulnerability 

• Mood and atmosphere in various media 

• Affect and authenticity in performance-based media 

• Cross-media analyses of emotion, sensation, or embodied response 

We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including media studies, literary studies, film studies, musicology, game studies, art history, performance studies, and related fields within the Arts and Humanities. 

About the Initiative 

This special issue is inspired by on-going work within the research cluster IMS Affect (https://lnu.se/en/research/research-groups/ims-affect/), part of the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. The cluster brings together scholars engaging with how affect emerges through interactions among media forms, sensory modalities, and material contexts. The special issue extends this inquiry by inviting broader scholarly dialogue on affect’s intermedial dimensions. 

Submission Information 

Scholars at all career stages are encouraged to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief biography of 200 words to niklas.salmose@lnu.se before August 15, 2026. Full submissions for those abstracts that are accepted, are expected on April 1, 2027. 

Sincerely / The Editorial Team