CALL FOR PAPERS
Elizabeth Stoddard Society
Beyond "Manifest Domesticity": Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers
and the Hemispheric Turn
American Literature Association Conference
The Westin Copley Place; Boston, MA
May 24-27, 2007

This panel will explore nineteenth-century American women writers who
recognized, imagined, and constructed locations that resisted geographic
distinctions—in essence those writers who took part in what we might
call today a more "hemispheric" understanding of the American landscape.
  Amy Kaplan's landmark essay "Manifest Domesticity" investigated how
the critical deconstruction of separate spheres left intact the
distinction between "foreign" and "domestic." As she demonstrated
persuasively in her essay, women—and especially women writers--played a
"major role in defining the contours of the nation and its shifting
boundaries with the foreign." More recently, American Studies
scholarship has proposed a "hemispheric turn"—-a shift that recognizes
and investigates the spaces in which the domestic and foreign are not so
distinct. For this panel, the Elizabeth Stoddard Society seeks papers
that examine nineteenth-century American women writers whom we might
understand as dismantling distinctions between the domestic and the
foreign in their writing. Although papers examining any
nineteenth-century American woman writer could be accepted, we are
particularly interested in those papers that consider the "Americas"
more broadly than conventional notions of rigid U.S. borders.

Possible topics include
*Women writers inhabiting/constructing the border
*Women writers and sea narratives
*Women's missionary narratives

Please send abstracts in the text of e-mails (no attachments please) by
January 27 to Elizabeth Stockton at stockton_at_southwestern.edu.

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Received on Tue Jan 16 2007 - 17:50:19 EST