We invite abstracts for a proposed edited collection of scholarship on Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.

Topics of interest include gender, sexuality, race, regionality, reception, pedagogy, performance, and adaptation.,

Spoon River Anthology has reached a scholarly nadir, making it ripe for revisiting. It’s an odd oversight considering the book’s reception and long life. Spoon River Anthology was a bestseller when it was published in 1915. It has never been out of print and is widely anthologized. Within a year of its publication, Amy Lowell called it “the most revolutionary [poetry] that America has yet produced.” Ezra Pound enthused, “[a]t last the American West has produced a poet…capable of dealing with life directly.” In Poetry magazine, Alice Corbin Henderson compared Masters to Robert Frost. Carl Van Doren claimed that the literary “revolt from the village” began in Spoon River.

By the mid 20th century, the book had achieved a canonical status domestically and internationally. Charles Aidman’s 1963 adaptation of Spoon River Anthology appeared on Broadway and Sanford Meisner’s technique for training actors incorporated dramatic readings of the book’s short poems.

A post-war translation of Spoon River Anthology by Fernanda Pivano achieved such popularity in Italy that Fabrizio De André, a popular folk singer, released a concept album in 1971 based on Spoon River Anthology’s Fiddler Jones. The album remains a cultural touchstone in Italy today.

Revisiting Spoon River: 21st Century Research invites proposals from scholars who have rediscovered Spoon River Anthology or seek to revisit the work in contemporary scholarly terms.

Possible themes include:

• Race and Populism in Spoon River Anthology
• Gender and Sexuality in Spoon River Anthology
• Teaching and Performing Spoon River Anthology
• Regional and Transnational Spoon River Anthology

We seek 250-300 word proposals for essays that will be 5,000-7,000 words. Please submit proposals and a short CV by December 1, 2024 to: Caroline Gelmi (cgelmi@umassd.edu) and Jason Stacy (jstacy@siue.edu). If your proposal is accepted, complete essays will be due by July 2, 2025. Questions to the editors are welcome.