cfp.english.upenn.edu

The Women

Thirty years ago, the new fields of Women’s Studies and Feminist Criticism looked with interest at the fiction of Henry James. For many, his work offered an exception to the general misogyny of American male writing; for others, the Master’s oeuvre was irredeemably patriarchal. Those early studies re-oriented our critical understandings of Henry James. Recent archival, biographical, critical, and creative work have again shifted how we understand James’s life and writing and re-opened this topic. The Fall 2010 special issue of the Henry James Review seeks to explore, broadly, how we read James with women in the twenty-first century.

Some possible topics include:

• Women’s Studies’ Henry James vs. Gender Studies’ Henry James
• Letters to, from, and about women
• Women’s love, loving women
• Female bodies: beauty, sex, motherhood, health, disability
• James and female writers: predecessors, contemporaries, and followers; borrowings, criticism, influence, depictions
• Women artists’ James/James’s women artists: depiction, criticism, translation
• Fashion, clothing, interior decoration, objects
• Gendered politics: suffrage, nationalism, feminism, the law
• Women and money: work, consumption, inheritance, gifts, ownership, commodification
• Actresses: depictions, correspondence, casting, performances
• Hospitality: hostesses, salons, visits, parties
• Female family: mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces

Contributions should be submitted in duplicate and produced according to MLA style. Please enclose a cover letter identifying your manuscript as a Forum submission. Also include return postage. One-page proposals or short (10-12 pages) essays should be sent by March 1, 2010, to:

Susan M. Griffin, Editor
Henry James Review
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292
USA