Call for Papers
NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention – “Empowering Communities”
March 6–9, 2027 | Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island 

Panel Title: Female Grief in Literature and the Arts

Primary Area / Secondary Area: Comparative Literature / Women’s and Gender Studies 
Modality: Hybrid
Organizers: Beatrice Fiducia, Maria Irene Fiducia

This panel explores gendered expressions of grief across literatures and historical periods through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens.

Juliana Schiesari's Gendering of Melancholia (1992) has shown that, historically, male suffering has been portrayed as noble and reasonable, while women's suffering continues to be discredited as hysteria.

From ancient women's lament and its "masculinization" in Greek tragedy (Gregory Nagy, “Ancient Greek Elegy,” 2010, p. 32), to the reinvention of Petrarchan tropes in Vittoria Colonna's mournful poetry, to confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, to contemporary works like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, "mourning has been women's work since at least classical antiquity" (Melissa Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy, 1997, p. 12).

Yet, women's literary and artistic expressions of grief have not received nearly the same scholarly attention as the more canonical works of their male counterparts: poetry of loss, from Orpheus, the prototypical elegist, to influential authors such as Dante and Petrarch, has been standardized as an eminently male endeavor, in which the mourned, silenced by death, is either female or symbolically feminized. In this phallogocentric tradition, male suffering is seen as both intellectually and artistically productive, while women's grief, cast as hysterical, is rendered either silent or a cacophony of sounds without meaning. In this sense, women writers have had to reinvent from within a masculine tradition which consistently silenced them.

We welcome contributions exploring the theme of female grief across literature and the arts, in any historical period, genre, or medium.

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2026

Please submit abstracts via the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22720

(membership is not required to submit an abstract)

For more information, please contact the panel chairs at bef13@hi.is and maria_irene_fiducia@brown.edu.