https://jasna.org/agms/cleveland2024/call-for-papers.php

Through this Call for Papers, the JASNA Ohio North Coast Region invites submission of proposals for breakout sessions at the 2024 AGM, and applications for the New Voices Breakout Speaker grant.

The AGM theme is “Austen, Annotated: Jane Austen’s Literary, Political, and Cultural Origins.”

At this AGM we will focus on Austen’s world and how it influenced her novels, juvenilia, and letters. While we only know with certainty some few of the books, plays, letters, and newspapers she read, we also know there must have been so much more she absorbed from the rich, revolutionary culture in which she lived. Her family were great novel-readers, and her own novels offer clues about the fiction and other genres that influenced her. She grew up in a house that doubled as a school preparing boys for university, with a father writing sermons and managing a farm. She had brothers in the Navy, at university, at least one taking the Grand Tour of continental Europe, and one in banking. She knew about war, enslavement, and revolutions that toppled monarchies. She benefited from discoveries in science and changes in commerce and industry. She was almost certainly exposed to new ideas about the role of women in society.

We will gather to explore Jane Austen’s origin story: where she came from, the world of ideas in which her genius was steeped, and the revolutionary world that inspired her to lead her own revolution through her chosen art form, the novel.

Please follow the website link for more information and submission guidelines.