Please consider submitting 250-word abstracts to the following panel at the 2016 MLA in Austin, Texas.

We invite essays focusing on representations of death and/or violence in U.S. religiously-inflected fictions of the nineteenth century.

Essays might examine consider, for example:

-the ways authors associated with religious traditions have embraced or rejected imagery commonly associated with death and/or violence

-the kinds of spaces in which violence and/or death are figured

-death and/or violence as metaphors for religious experience

-the rhetorical strategies deployed to use religion as a justification for sectional, racial, and territorial violence

-how struggles for political representation are waged via religious representations, and the connotations that accompany particular religious traditions.

Given that religious connotations are subject to revision, this panel also welcomes papers that evaluate how representations change over the long-nineteenth century, and how violence committed by or against particular sects is re-coded in works of fiction.

Submit 250-word abstracts and a c.v. by March 15. Email both documents to either James Van Wyck (jvanwyck@fordham.edu) or Will Fenton (fenton@fordham.edu).