PAMLA 2026 Steinbeck’s Complicated American Imagination
This panel invites discussions of Steinbeck's complicated imagination of American life and culture in his novels and nonfiction. Alternately fraught and adoring, critical and laudatory, his works attend with specificity to Americanness as a unique and discernible identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Especially encouraged are papers that attend to the tensions and disjunctures in Steinbeck’s descriptions of American society, including his treatment of gender, decolonial readings of his novels, and approaches that expose often contradictory relationships that extend among people, places, and power in his body of work.
Part of the PAMLA Conference in Seattle, WA from November 12, 2026 - November 15, 2026.
