CFP: W.D. Howells panels at ALA Chicago 2024 (deadline 2024.01.15)

CFP: W.D. Howells panels at ALA Chicago 2024

The William Dean Howells Society welcomes proposals for sessions at the 35th annual conference of the American Literature Association, to be held at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, May 23-26, 2024 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend). More information about the conference here: americanliteratureassociation.org/.

OPEN TOPIC

The panel organizers will happily consider any and all approaches to Howells and his works, including but not limited to the following:

• New approaches to Howells’ life, career, and writings
• Reassessments of frequently studied and taught works
• Lesser-known works
• Howells in relation to his contemporaries
• Howells’ public and/or academic standing
• Howells and democracy
• Howells in the classroom

Please send 250-500 word proposals to Paul R. Petrie (petriep1@southernct.edu) no later than January 15, 2024. (Earlier submissions are welcome!)

CFP UPDATED AND DEADLINE EXTENDED: The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism (Deadline 2.17.21)

UPDATED AND DEADLINE EXTENDED: 

Call for proposals  

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism 

Editors: Kenneth K Brandt and Karin M Danielsson 

At the end of the 19^th century, American authors such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London were influenced by new advances in science—notably the idea of evolution. Nature and the nonhuman were crucial for these writers, whom scholars   most often group under the rubric of American literary naturalists. Traditional scholarship on American literary naturalism has closely attended to various environmental pressures in urban and wilderness settings, but scholars have paid much less attention to the naturalists’ investigations into the nonhuman, such as animals, plants, landscapes, houses, or weather. To extend and deepen our understanding of this under-researched field, we propose a volume of essays that offers a wide variety of innovative critical approaches to the nonhuman in American naturalist literature. We welcome studies based in ecocriticism, animal studies, new materialism, narrative theory, or ethics. We are receptive to essay proposals focused on the core naturalists from around 1900 as well as more contemporary writers in the naturalist tradition. Proposals may focus on authors including Crane, Norris, London, Wharton, Garland, Dreiser, Chopin, Dunbar, Sinclair, Twain, Glasgow, Frederic, Cather, O’Neill, Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, Petry, Dos Passos, Larsen, Farrell, Hammett, Cain and others. More recent writers may include Oates, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Morrison, McCarthy, Wilson, Pynchon, and others. The editors are particularly interested in proposals on Larsen, Dreiser, Wright, Twain, Petry, and authors in the SF, cyberpunk, and biopunk traditions.  

Possible topic areas might include but are not limited to: 

• Animal agency    
• Anthropomorphism 
• Nonhuman sentience 
• Ecology 
• Ethology 
• Evolution 
• Farming 
• Forests, trees, plants 
• Houses and other structures 
• Human–nonhuman intersubjectivity 
• Landscape and place 
• Physical or environmental transformations   
• Posthumanism 
• Speciesism 
• Technology’s intersections with the nonhuman 
• Weather and climate 
• Wild, feral, and domestic nonhumans 

The Lexington Books Ecocritical Theory and Practice series editor has expressed a strong interest in the project and has requested a full proposal. It is the publisher’s wish that authors or at least one co-author holds a PhD. 

We invite essay proposals of a maximum of 500 words on any topic relating to the nonhuman in American literary naturalism by the deadline of 17 February, 2021. Please include a title, a maximum of five key words, and a brief biography. We aim to reply to respondents by 25 February 2021, and full drafts of essays (5000–8000 words) will be due 1 September 2021. Please send a 500-word maximum proposal and a brief biography to karin.molander.danielsson@mdh.se and kbrandt@scad.edu by 17 February, 2021. 

CFP: The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

Call for proposals

 The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

Editors: Kenneth K Brandt and Karin M Danielsson

At the end of the 19^th century, American authors such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London were influenced by new advances in science—notably the idea of evolution. Nature and the nonhuman were crucial for these writers,
whom scholars   most often group under the rubric of American literary naturalists. Traditional scholarship on American literary naturalism has closely attended to various environmental pressures in urban and wilderness settings, but scholars have paid much
less attention to the naturalists’ investigations into the nonhuman, such as animals, plants, landscapes, houses, or weather. To extend and deepen our understanding of this under-researched field, we propose a volume of essays that offers a wide variety of
innovative critical approaches to the nonhuman in American naturalist literature. We welcome studies based in ecocriticism, animal studies, new materialism, narrative theory, or ethics. We are receptive to essay proposals focused on the core naturalists from
around 1900 as well as more contemporary writers in the naturalist tradition. Proposals may focus on authors including Crane, Norris, London, Wharton, Garland, Dreiser, Chopin, Dunbar, Sinclair, Twain, Glasgow, Frederic, Cather, O’Neill, Steinbeck, Wright,
Hemingway, Petry, Dos Passos, Larsen, Farrell, Hammett, Cain and others. More recent writers may include Oates, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Morrison, McCarthy, Wilson, Pynchon, and others.

Possible topic areas might include but are not limited to:

• Animal agency  
• Anthropomorphism
• Nonhuman sentience
• Ecology
• Ethology 
• Evolution
• Farming
• Forests, trees, plants
• Houses and other structures
• Human–nonhuman intersubjectivity
• Landscape and place
• Physical or environmental transformations
• Posthumanism 
• Speciesism 
• Technology’s intersections with the nonhuman
• Weather and climate
• Wild, feral, and domestic nonhumans

 

The Lexington Books Ecocritical Theory and Practice series editor has expressed a strong interest in the project and has requested a full proposal. It is the publisher’s wish that authors or at least one co-author holds a PhD.

We invite essay proposals of a maximum of 500 words on any topic relating to the nonhuman in American literary naturalism by the deadline of the
8 January 2021. Please include a title, a maximum of five key words, and a brief biography. We aim to reply to respondents by 25 February 2021, and full drafts of essays (5000–8000 words)
will be due 1 September 2021. Please send a 500-word maximum proposal and a brief biography to karin.molander.danielsson@mdh.se and
kbrandt@scad.edu by 8 January, 2021.

CFP: W.D. Howells panels at ALA 2020

The William Dean Howells Society welcomes proposals for two sessions at the 31st annual conference of the ALA in San Diego, CA from May 21-24, 2020.

HOWELLS OUT WEST

Though born and raised in Ohio, William Dean Howells is often considered the prime shaper and protector of what Nancy Glazener terms the “northeastern urban bourgeoisie” because of his stewardship of the elite east coast literary magazines The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s. Inspired by our transition from Boston back to the West Coast for ALA 2020, for this panel we seek presentations on Howells’s equally important relationship with the American West, broadly construed.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Howells’s upbringing in the Midwest (or the “Old Northwest”).
• Howells’s personal and professional relationships with Western writers like Mark Twain and Bret Harte.
• The representation of Western characters in his novels (their dialect, their worldviews, etc.).
• Comparisons between Howells’s east coast realism and the naturalism of California writers like Frank Norris and Jack London.
• Readings of Western settings in his novels, such as the divorce sequence in A Modern Instance, or a discussion of Howells’s lesser-known The Leatherwood God, which Edwin Cady figured as “his only true Western novel.”

 

READING W.D. HOWELLS (1837-1920) A CENTURY LATER

With the 100th anniversary year of William Dean Howells’ death falling a few weeks before this year’s ALA conference, the William Dean Howells Society welcomes submissions on any aspect of Howells’ life, career, influence, and writing, including but not limited to his novels, short stories, plays, poems, travel writing, and literary and cultural criticism. Papers that situate their particular topics within the history and possible futures of the reading and study of Howells are especially welcome.

 

Please send 250-500 word proposals to jsampso5@jhu.edu by *January 30 2020. *Please note if you will require A/V for your presentation.

CFP: READING W.D. HOWELLS (1837-1920) A CENTURY LATER (NEMLA; deadline 9.30.19)

CALL FOR PAPER PROPOSALS:

READING W.D. HOWELLS (1837-1920) A CENTURY LATER

NEMLA, Boston, MA, March 5-8, 2020

In the 100^th anniversary year of William Dean Howells’ death, NEMLA will hold its annual convention in the city that hosted the Ohioan’s rise to literary success and cultural celebrity. From very early in his career, Howells’ literary achievement has been inextricably intertwined, for better and for worse, with his public reputation and cultural influence. Accordingly, this panel welcomes submissions on any aspect of Howells’ life, career, influence, and writing, including but not limited to his novels, short stories, plays, poems, travel writing, and literary and cultural criticism. Papers that situate their particular topics within the history and possible futures of the reading and study of Howells are especially welcome. The panel is offered in cooperation with the W.D. Howells Society.

Submit paper abstracts of no longer than 500 words by September 30 via the NEMLA website, here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18089. The abstract submission interface opens on June 15. If you do not have a NEMLA account, open one for free here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login.

If you intend to use media for your presentation, be sure to include that information in your user account when you submit your abstract. See the information under “Audiovisual Requests and Wireless Internet” for more information about available AV media, here: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/chair.html#title_1622008448.

Authors of accepted proposals will be notified in early October; finalization of panel, with confirmed participants, will be completed by October 15. Presenters’ NEMLA membership/registration must be completed by December 7 for their names and paper titles to be included in the conference program.

 

 

CFP: William Dean Howells Society – ALA 2019

William Dean Howells Society – ALA 2019

deadline for submissions:

January 15, 2019

full name / name of organization:

William Dean Howells Society

contact email:

ball@math.harvard.edu

The William Dean Howells Society will host two panels at the upcoming American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 23-26, 2019.

1. William Dean Howells and the Affective Turn

In her recent work, Emotional Reinventions: Realist Era Representations Beyond Sympathy, Melanie V. Dawson argues that Howells and other realists introduced a new approach to the analysis and portrayal of affect. This new method, she contends, departed from sentimentalist conventions and anticipated the modernist emphasis on alterity and insular subjectivity.  For this panel, we seek presentations on matters of feeling, emotion, or embodiment in the work of William Dean Howells, as well as those that examine his writing from the perspective of affect theory. How did Howells’s treatment of affects diverge from earlier American literature? How have the critical reorientations of the affective turn shed new light on Howells and American literary realism?

2. New Approaches to The Rise of Silas Lapham

In honor of the recent publication of Paul R. Petrie’s new Norton Critical Edition of The Rise of Silas Lapham, we seek presentations that respond to the topics addressed in its selections, including (but not limited to) gender and genre, the politics of realism, and representations of class antagonism in the novel. We are also interested in presentations on teaching the novel, as well as new critical approaches to The Rise of Silas Lapham.

Please send abstracts to Andrew Ball (ball@math.harvard.edu) by January 15.

CFP: Howells Panels at ALA 2018

The William Dean Howells Society welcomes submissions for two panels at the 29th Annual American Literature Association Conference to be held in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2018.

Panel 1: William Dean Howells and Democracy 

Historically, the subject of Howells’s politics has been a matter of dispute. For some—most notably H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis—Howells evinced a contemptibly timid conservatism that was an impediment to political progress. Whereas for others, like Timothy Parrish, Howells stands as the Gilded Age’s “most politically radical writer.” What is incontestable, however, is that politics remained a constant concern for Howells, from his early days as a legislative correspondent, to his time as consul, and finally as the nation’s preeminent critic and novelist. In his polemical criticism, for example, he framed Realist aesthetics as a means to actualizing America’s democratic ideals. In his column of July, 1887 he writes, “Democracy in literature is the reverse of [aristocratic aesthetics]. It wishes to know and to tell the truth…it does not care to paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. Men are more like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity.” Late in his career, political matters took center stage for Howells. Alone among his peers, he famously risked his reputation and position by defending those accused in the Haymarket Affair. However, though he’d become an avowed socialist and outspoken opponent of economic inequality who sided with workers in labor disputes, Howells was critical of strikes and direct action. In The World of Chance (1893) he writes, “the right way to universal prosperity and peace is the political way…we must have the true America in the true American way, by reasons, by votes, by laws, and not otherwise.” Throughout his career, Howells’s political sensibilities evolved, but his preoccupation with democracy was unwavering. For this panel, we invite proposals for presentations that examine the subject of democracy in Howells’s work.

Potential topics could include but are not limited to:

• Howells on the American presidency
• Howells on protectionism vs. cosmopolitanism and globalization
• Howells on the American nation, nationhood, citizenship
• Howells on American exceptionalism
• Howells’s critique of the Spanish-American War
• Howells on foreign and / or domestic policy
• Howells on social organization, utopianism, class struggle, direct action, etc.
• Howells’s politicized aesthetics
• Howells on American pluralism and diversity
• Howells’s relation to political figures like Henry Adams, Henry George, John Hay, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., among others

Panel 2: Open Topic

For this session, we invite proposals for presentations concerned with any aspect of Howells’s life and work.

Please submit 300-500 word abstracts to Andrew Ball (ajball79@icloud.com) by January 24. The subject of the email should be “Howells ALA 2018” and the proposal should include any A/V needs you will require.

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/01/16/update-howells-and-democracy-ala-2018-deadline-extended

CFP: Howells Panels at ALA 2018

The William Dean Howells Society welcomes submissions for two panels at the 29th Annual American Literature Association Conference to be held in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2018.

Panel 1: William Dean Howells and Democracy 

Historically, the subject of Howells’s politics has been a matter of dispute. For some—most notably H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis—Howells evinced a contemptibly timid conservatism that was an impediment to political progress. Whereas for others, like Timothy Parrish, Howells stands as the Gilded Age’s “most politically radical writer.” What is incontestable, however, is that politics remained a constant concern for Howells, from his early days as a legislative correspondent, to his time as consul, and finally as the nation’s preeminent critic and novelist. In his polemical criticism, for example, he framed Realist aesthetics as a means to actualizing America’s democratic ideals. In his column of July, 1887 he writes, “Democracy in literature is the reverse of [aristocratic aesthetics]. It wishes to know and to tell the truth…it does not care to paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. Men are more like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity.” Late in his career, political matters took center stage for Howells. Alone among his peers, he famously risked his reputation and position by defending those accused in the Haymarket Affair. However, though he’d become an avowed socialist and outspoken opponent of economic inequality who sided with workers in labor disputes, Howells was critical of strikes and direct action. In The World of Chance (1893) he writes, “the right way to universal prosperity and peace is the political way…we must have the true America in the true American way, by reasons, by votes, by laws, and not otherwise.” Throughout his career, Howells’s political sensibilities evolved, but his preoccupation with democracy was unwavering. For this panel, we invite proposals for presentations that examine the subject of democracy in Howells’s work.

Potential topics could include but are not limited to:

• Howells on the American presidency
• Howells on protectionism vs. cosmopolitanism and globalization
• Howells on the American nation, nationhood, citizenship
• Howells on American exceptionalism
• Howells’s critique of the Spanish-American War
• Howells on foreign and / or domestic policy
• Howells on social organization, utopianism, class struggle, direct action, etc.
• Howells’s politicized aesthetics
• Howells on American pluralism and diversity
• Howells’s relation to political figures like Henry Adams, Henry George, John Hay, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., among others

Panel 2: Open Topic

For this session, we invite proposals for presentations concerned with any aspect of Howells’s life and work.

Please submit 300-500 word abstracts to Andrew Ball (ajball79@icloud.com) by January 8. The subject of the email should be “Howells ALA 2018” and the proposal should include any A/V needs you will require.

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/11/09/howells-and-democracy-w-d-howells-society-ala-2018

 

CFP: Howells Panels at ALA 2017

The William Dean Howells Society welcomes submissions for two panels at the 28th Annual American Literature Association Conference to be held in Boston, May 25-28, 2017.

Panel 1: On the Neglected Works of William Dean Howells

Though “the Dean of American letters” is acknowledged as a key figure in the history of American literature, critics have primarily focused on a small number of well-known works such as The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Haz- ard of New Fortunes. For this panel, we invite proposals for presentations that examine texts from Howells’s extensive body of work that have re- mained largely neglected, or those devoted to topics that have received less

attention. Potential topics could include but are not limited to:

•   Howells’s late poetry
•   Howells’s YA literature for children and adolescents
•   Howells’s drama – his plays, farces, and sundry theatrical works
•   Howells’s creative nonfiction
•   Howells’s travel writing
•   Howells’s journalism – from his political journalism to his criticism and editorial work
•   Howells and the beneficiaries of his mentorship and critical praise

  such as, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris among many others

•   Howells and his contemporaries, such as James and Twain
•   Howells as tastemaker – as combatant in the “Realism War” or pro-

  moter of European authors

•   Howells and Modernism
•   Howells and regionalism

  Panel 2: Open Topic

  For this session, we invite proposals for presentations concerned with any aspect of Howells’s life and work.

  Please submit 300-500 word abstracts to Andrew Ball (aball @ linden- wood.edu) by January 15. The subject of the email should be “Howells ALA 2017” and the proposal should include any A/V needs you will require.

CFP: W. D. Howells Sessions at ALA (Deadline 1.31.15)

Call For Papers: William Dean Howells Society Panels for ALA May, 2015

The William Dean Howells Society wel- comes submissions for two panels at the 2015 American Literature Association conference in Boston in May 2015.

Panel 1: A Radical Howells

We are seeking papers on the political di- mensions of William Dean Howells’ work. We are especially interested in accounts of Howells as a writer engaged with the radical ideas of his day, and we welcome fresh discussions of his lesser- known works under this rubric. Topics may in- clude the democracy of Howellsian realism, his defense of the Haymarket anarchists, his encoun- ters with Tolstoy – including the Russian’s em- brace of nonviolence and economic equality—late 19th century socialism, his views on women’s suf- frage, his membership in the NAACP, his social novels of the 1890s, and his anti-imperialism.

Panel 2: Open Topic

We are looking for insightful, original papers that address any aspect of Howells’s work.
Please submit your 200-250 word abstract and a current CV (or any questions) to Dan Mrozowski at

daniel.mrozowski @ trincoll.edu

by January 31, 2015.