“Invisible Secrets in Pre-1865 American Literature” (SAMLA)
Recent scholarly approaches in antebellum American literature emphasizes the role of secrets and secrecy, as in Dominick Mastroianni’s Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature (2022); essays on secrecy in Emily Dickinson’s poetry (Jeffrey Simons, Paul Scott Derrick, 2011); and the secret lives of nineteenth-century literature (Harper, Dickinson, Melville, 2022) in digital media, as Kayla Shipp has argued. This panel explores the way that unstated ideas, points, or secrets are exchanged in antebellum American literature. “Secrets” could be considered as gossip, or social exchange, in texts; hidden codes or alternate forms of discourses in various forms of writing; covert, extratextual meanings in texts, and much more.