This panel addresses the American romance in light of recent developments in early American studies. While many Britishists accepted the ascendancy of the anglophone novel, others challenged this teleology, and the transatlantic turn has invited us to consider whether the romance genre survived the New World. The existence of a colonial romance would challenge the “birth” of the American genre in the wake of Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), and revising that literary history could in turn broaden American romance beyond a hoary pro-slavery ideology. Post-WWII critics arguing for an American romance tradition often cite Hawthorne’s own christening of his novels as “romances” as a key piece of evidence. Nina Baym, on the other hand, has argued that the novel/romance distinction was one that mid-twentieth century critics invented retroactively to privilege certain (white, male) authors and reproduce the ideology of American exceptionalism. These trends and controversies (with the exception of Gretchen Woertendyke) ignore the hemispheric turn in American studies and the potential to locate an American romance formation borne of cross-lingual literary exchanges. They also ignore publications by David Quint, David Heller-Roazen, Victora Kahn, and others that redefine romance in formal, not thematic, terms. Finally, American romance scholarship has an opportunity to address emergent theoretical paradigms: posthumanism, the anthropocene, and object-oriented ontology, just to name a few . The time is ripe to revisit the American romance, and I welcome papers that offer a theory of genre, case study, or critique of methodology. Please submit a 250-word abstract and CV to express interest. For the sake of simplicity, I am requesting traditionally formatted papers without audiovisual elements.

Full name /name of organization: Society of Early Americanists (SEA)

Deadline for submissions: August 30, 2016

Contact email: amanda.l.johnson@rice.edu

Critical topics and methods have changed in countless ways from the heyday of the formalist critics of the 1940s and 50s. Writers such as Wellek, Brooks, Wimsatt, Frye and Matthiessen were continuously challenged by later generations who questioned the ideological, gendered, and ethnocentric assumptions guiding the critical preoccupations and methods of the Formalist school. This panel seeks papers focused on the possibility for questioning, intervention, or reversal implicitly or explicitly expressed in the interpretive models and rhetorical form of one or more standard texts from this era of American literary criticism, such as The Well-Wrought Urn, American Renaissance, The Verbal Icon, Theory of Literature or Anatomy of Criticism. Depending on one’s current methods and materials, is this text now a classic or a dinosaur? How do the poetics, aesthetics and theoretical principles of these works compare to the key texts and methods of the last twenty years? Papers may consider one or more of the major critical texts of the era (1940-1960), or provide an exposition regarding a lesser known, though significant work.

Location: Baltimore, Maryland (Marriot Waterfront)
Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association

Contact Email: inksaudible@gmail.com

Registration now open for a symposium at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

Dates: Friday 23rd & Saturday 24th September 2016.

Keynote speakers: Michelle Martin, University of Washington, and Gabrielle Cliff-Hodges, University of Cambridge.

Published in 1976, Mildred Taylor’s best-known work Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry continues to be highly celebrated and challenged. A Newbury Award Winner, appearing in school curricula in both the US and UK, Roll of Thunder also appears on the infamous ‘banned books’ lists. Taylor’s work has been discussed by a range of academics in education and literary research, and this symposium will explore multiple strands of thought and dialogue on this landmark text and related themes and issues in children’s literature.

Day Two of the symposium will focus on educational issues, bringing together researchers with teachers, trainees and other practitioners to share ideas about Roll of Thunder and children’s literature more generally.

Deadline for submissions: September 23, 2016

Organisation: Cambridge/Homerton Research & Teaching Centre for Children’s Literature, Cambridge University (UK)

Contact Sarah Hardstaff at sflh2@cam.ac.uk or Dawn Sardella-Ayres at ds632@cam.ac.uk.

See the symposium webpage here for further details and booking: https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/events/conferences/rollofthunder40/

I invite proposals for a collection of essays that examines the theme of revenge in American fiction, film, and television. Vengeance – that quest for violent reciprocity – is one of storytelling’s oldest and most enduring plots. But in the modern American imaginary the familiar shape of retribution assumes a new form. Over and over, avengers on page and screen desire not only blood but also symbolic victories. In Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) a troubled protagonist named John Smith yearns to kill the one “white man [who] was responsible for everything that had gone wrong” for Native Americans. In Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), an outraged financial analyst assassinates a billionaire who upset the “balance” of global capitalism. For these characters, personal grievance turns into political statement, and payback evolves from a selfish drive into a systemic reckoning. From bloodthirsty class warriors in The Iron Heel (1908) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) to anti-patriarchal furies of Beloved (1987) and Foxfire (1993) to contemporary assailants in The Wire (2002-2008) and Django Unchained (2012), avengers haunt American narratives.

Despite vengeance’s popularity across 20th- and 21st-century fiction, television, and film, little research on the topic exists. While scholars have thoroughly examined the classical, dramatic traditions of revenge tragedies – especially those from Attic and Elizabethan/Jacobean periods – they have left modern American iterations of the genre largely unconsidered. In fact, no book-length study dedicated to American revenge narratives exists in recent criticism.

Reckonings fixes this scholarly blind spot by historicizing the revenge genre’s unique transformations in American culture over the long century. For this anthology, I welcome essays that theorize the complex visions of retributive justice found in the nation’s stories. The volume will occupy a unique place in literary and American studies, offering critics and cultural historians a revenge genre study of unprecedented depth.

Some topics of interest are (but not limited to):

Revenge in American modernism
Revenge in graphic novels
Philosophies of retribution in contemporary fiction
Feminism, vengeance, and film
Lesser-known or avant garde treatments of the revenge genre
Avengers and environmentalism
Revenge in serial television
Depictions of vengeance and the American justice system
Science fiction and revenge
Psychology, narrative, and the science of payback
Vengeance and morality
21st century re-imaginings of the revenge tragedy
Please send a 500-700 word chapter abstract and CV to Kyle Wiggins (kwiggins@bu.edu) by September 6, 2016. I expect to include approximately 10 essays of 8,000 words each. Accepted authors must submit completed chapters by January 17, 2017.

Publication discussions with an intererested press have begun.

Deadline for submissions: September 6, 2016
Full name / name of organization: Kyle Wiggins, Boston University
Contact email: kwiggins@bu.edu

Louis Owens (1948-2002) was one of the major voices of contemporary Native American literature and scholarship. His work includes five acclaimed novels, scholarly studies, and some one hundred essays. The extensive oeuvre Owens produced includes writing on themes of mixed-blood identities, working-class life, travel, the western American landscape, the environment, survivance, tricksters, story-telling, and memory. Owens was a scholar of international stature on John Steinbeck, a figure who strongly influenced his own realist fiction.
This edited collection of critical essays will provide an opportunity for new understandings of the contributions of Louis Owens as a story-teller and scholar. We are soliciting essays dealing with such topics as his gothic and noir modes of fiction; re-workings of Euro-American and indigenous cultures; misunderstanding and non-communication between two worlds; tribal beliefs and Choctaw culture; post-Indianism; dispossession, alienation, and exilic existence; historiographic imaginings; violence and evil; environmental despoliation; representations of place and space; and colonial ghosts.

While most of the volume will concern Owens’ fictions, the editors will be interested especially in essays addressing the scholarship of Louis Owens, theoretical contributions, and treatments of his work in comparative global contexts. We welcome and encourage theoretical discussion, but essays should employ clear and accessible language.

Please send 250-word abstracts, or full draft manuscripts of previously unpublished material, to the co-editors no later than January 31, 2017 for consideration. Include a 100-150 word bio. Authors will be notified by February 15, 2017. Final drafts of selected abstracts or manuscripts will be due on June 30, 2017. Essays should not exceed 10,000 words; bibliography in Chicago style; and 11 pt. Courier font with one inch margin. Anticipated date of manuscript completion to be submitted to the publisher for peer review is planned for December 1, 2017. Revisions will be required in early fall of 2017. Publication of individual manuscripts cannot be guaranteed.

Send proposals and submissions as Word file attachments via email to both Joe Lockard (Joe.Lockard@asu.edu), Department of English, Arizona State University, and Irene Vernon (Irene.Vernon@colostate.edu), Chair, Ethnic Studies Department, Colorado State University. Queries are welcomed.