Since Ellen Moers' original designation of the Female Gothic, the term continues to evolve: The amalgamation of femininity's depiction in literature and Gothic studies does not conclude with Literary Women (1976). Therefore, this panel will concentrate on the female body's involvement in what is considered Gothic; as Moers denotes, what "predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite auctorial intent: to scare." At the root of this fear is a woman's anxiety of childbirth and the subsequent call to motherhood, according to Moers. This fear can be dealt with in a variety of ways: avoidance, elimination, and torture.

The peer-reviewed journal Studies in American Jewish Literature: A Journal of Literary Criticism and Theory is devoting a special issue to the subject of Canadian Jewish writing. Submissions are invited that consider the poetry, prose, drama, life writing, and creative non-fiction of Canadian Jewish writers. Papers on Yiddish writers, French writers, "lost" and lesser-known writers, canonical writers, and contemporary writers—poets, novelists, dramatists, memoirists, and essayists—are welcome.

Recent publication of The Arcadia Project, an anthology of "North American postmodern pastoral," highlights the interest of contemporary writers in pastoral artifice. In highly original compositions, these writers repurpose and self-consciously misuse pastoral conventions to evoke simulations of pastoral in the contemporary world. Paradoxically, these simulations are more real than the pastoral fantasies on which they are based. For example, the pastoral simulation called suburbia continues to expand in unsustainable ways, and to degrade our environment.