Abstract: Julia Ward Howe read voraciously throughout her youth, despite her father's efforts to restrict her reading. She particularly enjoyed perusing the books her brother Samuel brought home from Europe. As she recalled many years later in her autobiographical Reminiscences (1899), "I lived, indeed, much in my books, and my sphere of thought was a good deal enlarged . … Yet I seemed to myself like a young damsel of olden time, shut up within an enchanted castle … [and] my dear father, with all his noble generosity and overweening affection, sometimes appeared to me as my jailer."1 When she characterizes herself as a hapless heroine entrapped by an older, overbearing villain, Howe simultaneously invokes another genre: the ... Read More Keywords: Gothic literature; United States; Great Britain; American literature; Modern Language Association of America.; C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.; American Literature Association. PubDate: 2017-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A generation after the American colonies' violent rupture with Great Britain, the intellectual leaders of the fledgling United States struggled to balance their call for political independence with their desire to maintain certain continuities with the English common law. An emerging American literature likewise struggled with its British legacy and the implications of a revolution that many colonists experienced as a civil war.1 Not surprisingly, authors like James Fenimore Cooper used their fiction to explore the American Revolution's fraught political implications.2 What may be more surprising, however, is that a number of authors turned to the English Civil War to answer their concerns about whether a violent ... Read More Keywords: Gothic literature; United States; Great Britain; American literature; Modern Language Association of America.; C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.; American Literature Association. PubDate: 2017-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Literary critics have often considered the US party politics of Nathaniel Hawthorne's day when they have assessed the broader ideological implications of both The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Yet scholars depart in how they view the relationship between each novel and the party system. The Scarlet Letter, set in an era before the nation—let alone political parties—existed, has been interpreted variously as an intervention into the substantive points of dispute or consensus as the Second Party system (Whigs vs. Democrats) approached its end.1 The historical novel, counterintuitively, has seemed to illuminate more clearly the fundamental political tensions of Hawthorne's own period ... Read More Keywords: Gothic literature; United States; Great Britain; American literature; Modern Language Association of America.; C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.; American Literature Association. PubDate: 2017-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The "Year in Conferences" (YiC) accelerates the circulation of ideas between and among scholars by covering the field's major conferences. Graduate students from across the country collaboratively author an article that appears annually in ESQ's first issue. Now in its eighth year, this report includes MLA, ALA, and C19.The Modern Language Association's annual conference was held in Austin, Texas in January 2016. In his presidential address, "Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future," Roland Greene asked attendees to reimagine the futures of public scholarship and of the publics that scholars study and engage. A range of panels on nineteenth-century topics explored the past as palimpsest, the ways ... Read More Keywords: Gothic literature; United States; Great Britain; American literature; Modern Language Association of America.; C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.; American Literature Association. PubDate: 2017-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The 2016 C19 conference theme was "Unsettling," an indication that the fourth biennial meeting would feature work dedicated to new perspectives and revitalizing critiques. "Unsettling" necessarily called for revisionist approaches "to the methodologies, geographies, languages, and texts that disturb, divert, and reconstitute" the field, and it drew scholars prepared for the occasion. Race was a major analytical vector that helped destabilize such fields as print and material culture, science studies, law, and liberalism. Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality played important roles in topics including urban planning, nationalism, food studies, and religiosity, which unsettled canonical texts and scholarly ... Read More Keywords: Gothic literature; United States; Great Britain; American literature; Modern Language Association of America.; C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.; American Literature Association. PubDate: 2017-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The twenty-seventh annual meeting of the American Literature Association emphasized reconsidering and recovering nineteenth-century American authors' work. Participants expressed particular interest in affect, race, and history and in these concerns' implications for critical and pedagogical practices. Throughout the conference, several scholars explored how contemporary racial and social movements such as Black Lives Matter can inform scholarly work concerning nineteenth-century literature both inside and outside the classroom.Program link: http://americanliteratureassociation.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/06/2016-ALA-program-final2.pdfSeveral panels explored affect and affiliation in nineteenth-century literature, a ... Read More Keywords: Gothic literature; United States; Great Britain; American literature; Modern Language Association of America.; C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.; American Literature Association. PubDate: 2017-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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