CFP – ALA Fall 2022 Symposium – Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society – Deadline: 9.1.2022American Literature Association – Fall 2022 Symposium“The Historical Imagination in American Literature”

October 27-29, 2022

Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe, NM

The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society is seeking papers for a panel at this year’s American Literature Association’s Fall Symposium: “The Historical Imagination in American Literature.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prolific writer, lecturer, and women’s rights activist. The reach and influence of Gilman’s impact can be seen across a broad range of scholarly and literary discourses. Her articles, essays, letters, papers, theory, as well as fiction is taught in a range of classroom settings from literature survey courses, introductory sociological courses, composition courses, Women and Gender Studies courses, and others. Drawing from this symposium’s broader focus on the “usable past,” this session invites papers that consider the ways that philosophical, psychological, and political factors shaped the way that Gilman was received in her own time, as well as the ways that reception has shifted over time. How has the reception of Gilman’s treatment of subjects such as race, class, and gender in her writing changed? In what ways is Gilman’s writing still useful for scholars and students as we continue to make sense of, as well as shape our own, historical realities? What obligations do scholars and educators have in wrestling with the complexity of Gilman’s writerly past? What is the future of Gilman studies and how can further examination of her past writing advance those aims?

All topics are welcome. Examples include:

• papers incorporating historical and biographical data
• Gilman’s influence and impact on other writers, society, fields of study
• Comparative approaches between Gilman’s work and her contemporaries and/or 20th/21st century contemporary writers
• Gilman’s writings and lectures addressing race
• new approaches in the fields of intertextuality, materialist studies, ecofeminism, and gender studies as they relate to Gilman
• pedagogical approaches to Gilman in the non-literature classroom  

Please email abstracts by September 12, 2022 to Danielle Cofer at coferd@lindsey.edu.

For more information about the symposium, please visit the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org