Call for Papers: Upcoming Special issue
Women's Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism

Editor: Anne Fernald
Deadline for Submission: 1 March 2012

Too often, students of medieval English literature unnecessarily categorize Old and Middle English as completely disconnected, highlighting Beowulf and Chaucer as the exemplary markers, with little in between. This panel seeks instead to explore moments of interaction across the spectrum of earlier and later medieval English literature. Examples may include parallel literary forms, English identities, linguistic developments, and the ways that they interact with historical, religious, and social frameworks.

Human-Animal Relationships in Literature in the Nineteenth Century

When William Makepeace Thackeray included pictorial initials and drawings in his 1847 novel Vanity Fair, the author could hardly have anticipated the text's adaptive afterlife in contemporary cinema. While scholars from Stam to Elliott have framed various approaches to the novel/film debate, scholarly attention towards the burgeoning genre of the Victorian cinematic novel has been underexplored. The recent tide of Victorian films, including Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and Fukunaga's Jane Eyre have offered modern viewers a cinematic privileging of canonic novels.

Studies of British modernism often tend to orient themselves around questions of urbanity, cosmopolitanism, and globalism, reflecting the shifting cultural and geographical location of Britishness in the twentieth century. But many novelists and poets continued to take inspiration from the natural environment of the British homeland, and this panel asks what alternative modernisms can emerge from their writing, and how they can contribute to current environmental and literary discourse. What is the role of spaces of retreat or repose in modernism, or the importance of the local and the rural? What is the dynamic between experimentation and conservation in the modernist aesthetic?

The South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Women's Studies session invites papers that explore the 2011 conference theme, "The Power of Poetry in the Modern World," and its connection to Women's Studies, broadly defined. Presentations may address, among other topics, poetry in the Women's Studies classroom, poetry as feminist intervention, poetry and the construction/exploration of gender, and any other topics exploring intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class in light of the conference theme. Additionally, proposals on any other aspect of women's and/or gender studies and its intersections with pedagogy, literature, rhetoric and composition will be considered if there are not enough proposals focused on the conference theme.