Panel Stream: Early American Forms and Formalisms This panel stream interrogates formalism in early American literature following a postcritical turn in the field. One result of literary studies’ recent postcritical turn has been renewed attention to aesthetics, feeling, and form as essential aspects of literary analysis. In early American studies, this reassessment has taken a distinctive shape, particularly in work that foregrounds the formal and aesthetic dimensions of literary culture across the long eighteenth century — from special issues and essay collections (Looby and Weinstein; Cahill and Larkin; Pethers and Koenigs; Pethers and Couch) to monographs (Armstrong and Tennenhouse; Koenigs, Couch, Tawil, Gardner, Garrett). These and similar studies have produced exciting new work that reveals new connections between form and issues central to early American culture, ranging from the politics of serialization to the relationships between aesthetics and democratic practice. Across four panels, this stream continues this conversation.
 
New (Old) Forms in Early American Literature
Early American Literature’s influential 2016 special issue, “Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form,” edited by Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin, was a watershed moment in the investigation of form in early American studies. A decade later, we invite a study of new (old) forms and reflections on the state of the subfield. What are “new” forms of pre-1830 literature? Which forms are overlooked, understudied, or require further consideration? Where does the conversation about literary form and formalism stand in early American literary studies today?

The Feeling of Form in Early American Literature
As many scholars now argue, form is a conditioning possibility of affectivity, which is to say that affect is as much a matter of formal, textual structure as it is subjective experience. Form enables affect’s emergence, providing “a point of contact between the text and the body, between language and affect” (Lee Pierce).  How are literary affects dependent on their formal presentation? How does form engender feeling and give rise to aesthetic experience? Which affects and emotions are prime for study in early American literature?
 
Form and History in Early American Studies
Early American studies is particularly invested in an historicist framework that binds literary texts to their moment of production. However, as Caroline Levine has argued, forms often “survive across cultures and time periods, sometimes enduring through vast distances of time and space.” How might attention to the durability of forms across periods reshape our approaches to early American literature? What might we gain by reading early American texts outside of strictly historicist frameworks? How do critiques of periodization and chrononormativity challenge the ways we read early American literary forms?
 
Early American Forms in the Classroom
The reach of early American literature includes texts that are not strictly “literary”: sermons, political pamphlets, treaties, journals, and many other such historical documents make up the landscape of survey courses, special topics classes, and graduate seminars. Alongside these, the eighteenth century sees the emergence of more typically “literary” genres in America: slave autobiographies, novels, poetry, and plays. How are early American literary forms taught across these different types of texts? How is formalism taken up in the early American literature classroom? How might teaching approaches and practices be considered forms or formalist in their own right? What resonances can be seen in teaching early American literature with other texts, periods, and fields?
 
Please send 300-word abstracts to Daniel Couch (daniel.couch@afacademy.af.edu), David Lawrimore (davidlawrimore@isu.edu), Michelle Sizemore (michelle.sizemore@uky.edu) by 5/18. These panels are guaranteed for the conference.