CFP: Edith Wharton Panels at ALA 2023
American Literature Association Conference
34th Annual Conference
May 25-28, 2023
The Westin Copley Place
10 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02116
Edith Wharton and Beauty
The Edith Wharton Society invites papers that explore Wharton’s engagement with beauty in her works. Panelists are encouraged to consider the role of beauty in her writing on design, gardens, and travel as well as her novels and stories. All theoretical approaches are welcome. Proposals might consider (but are not limited to) the following questions:
- What does beauty mean or how is it constituted in Wharton’s work?
- How do questions of shape, color, or form inflect Wharton’s perspectives on design, art, or fashion?
- How does affect relate to beauty in Wharton’s works?
- What is the role of natural beauty in Wharton’s texts?
- How are Wharton’s characters affected by beauty?
- How is beauty gendered, raced, or classed in Wharton’s work?
- What is the relationship between beauty and cosmopolitan taste in Wharton’s texts?
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a brief CV by January 5, 2022. Please include any requests for AV needs in your proposal. Scholars whose proposals are accepted must be members in good standing of the Edith Wharton Society by the time of the conference.
Please send to mjjessee@uab.edu
Edith Wharton and Weather: Culture, Climate, and Change
There’s a lot of weather in Edith Wharton’s writing: storms, snow, heat, and wind. Among other questions, proposals might consider the following:
- How do climactic phenomena trigger, mirror, provoke human behaviors and reactions?
- How do Wharton’s sensibilities as a traveler, gardener, and interior designer inform her approaches to weather and vice versa?
- How does weather figure into Wharton’s status as realist, sentimentalist, satirist, or modernist?
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a brief CV by January 5, 2022. Please include any requests for AV needs in your proposal. Scholars whose proposals are accepted must be members in good standing of the Edith Wharton Society by the time of the conference.
Please send to mjjessee@uab.edu and mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu.
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies in English
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Office: University Hall 5055
Secretary, The Edith Wharton Society
Mailing Address:
University Hall
1702 2nd Avenue South
Birmingham, AL 35294-1241