Peer Seminar: Mid-Century Eliot

This year's seminar will be led by Marina MacKay of Washington University in St. Louis. Professor MacKay is the author of Modernism and World War II (Cambridge UP), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, and co-editor of British Fiction After Modernism (Palgrave). She has articles published or forthcoming in such prestigious journals as PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, ELH, Twentieth Century Literature, and the Journal of Modern Literature, as well as in several essay collections.

Call for Papers: Literature and Joss Whedon's Angel (book collection)

Editors: AmiJo Comeford and Tamy Burnett

Recent literary studies have generally assumed that regionalism emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century in response to the consolidation of the modern nation-state, imperial expansion, and industrialization, all of which tended to efface cultural, and to some extent geographical, differences among sub-national communities. Yet during the long eighteenth century, various literary and cultural developments —from newspapers, novels, dictionaries, and poems, to antiquarianism, topography, travel writings, and statistical surveys — reflected, and arguably participated in creating, local and regional forms of community.

On behalf of the Southeastern Medieval Association's Old English session at the upcoming SAMLA conference, we are inviting papers that play upon the idea of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Old English literature. Possible ideas might include confrontations between heroes and villains or saints and sinners, contrasts between characters, ways we view characters in Old English literature, and many other interpretations of this theme. Accepted papers will be notified by June 25, 2009. Those accepted are required to join SAMLA by September 1, 2009.