Calls for papers
Calls for Papers
The Henry James Society
Modern Language Association Convention
Washington, DC
6-9 January 2022
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Henry James Society invites proposals for the following panel.
Trans James
Henry James scholarship has hesitated to engage with the challenges and opportunities presented by the rich and proliferating constellation of thought that is Trans Studies. How might the question of transgender revise, reinvigorate or transform our understanding of James’s writing, and / or of James as a biographical subject?
We welcome proposals addressing any aspect of the topic. Possible approaches might include:
- Transgender and transnationality / expatriatism / cosmopolitanism
- Recognising / theorising transgender subjects in James’s fictional and non-fictional texts
- Maternal identification and the figure of the writer
- Sex, gender, and narration
- Transgender and sexuality
- Transgender and sibling relationships
- Transgender parents, transgender children
- Feminist James/ Queer James/ Trans James: ?
- Transgender and the question of style
Please send 300-word abstracts to victoria.coulson@york.ac.uk and sarah.wadsworth@marquette.edu by March 1.
The Henry James Society
American Literature Association Conference
Boston MA
July 7-11, 2021
CALL FOR PAPERS
A Small Boy and Others: Henry James and the Child*
Children appear in James’s fiction in many different kinds of roles, from the annoying little brother in Daisy Miller to the impressionable girl of What Maisie Knew. He also wrote extensively about his own childhood and those of his siblings. None of these writings are, however, for child readers, unlike the work of Lewis Carroll or Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain or Louisa May Alcott. What opportunities does James find in his representations of children? How does the development of his late style affect these possibilities? These topics are suggestions, but other approaches to the subject are invited.
- Representations of the child in the tales and novels
- Comparisons of James’s child characters with the work of his predecessors and/or contemporaries
- The Victorian child and the American girl
- Autobiographical writings
- The James children in the works of other members of the family
Please send 250 word proposals to Beverly_Haviland@Brown.edu and Sarah.Wadsworth@Marquette.edu by March 15, 2021 (deadline extended). Please note if you will have AV requirements.
*NB: This panel was originally scheduled for the ALA in San Diego, May 2020. Some of the original panelists will present in Boston, but other proposals are welcome now.
The Henry James Society
American Literature Association Conference
Westin Copley Place
Boston, MA
July 7-11, 2021
CALL FOR PAPERS
"Illness, Society and the Self in the Life and Work of Henry James"
In the context of the current viral pandemic, we look with fresh intensity at figurations of the invalid and of disease and disability in James’s fictional and non-fictional writing. With an eye to the cultural and political aspects of public health measures aimed at managing the spread of an infectious pathogen, we ask in particular about the relation in James’s work of sickness, subjectivity and society. How do James’s texts relate social experience to bodily ill-health or impairment? Does James position the invalid as a figure indicative of dysfunction in the larger social body, or suggest, in contrast, that illness or disability may be associated with an excess of social contact, a failure of ‘social distancing’? Or may we identify in James’s work representations of the sick, the disabled or the dying as figures external to social networks, and therefore resistant to political or moralised interpretation?
All approaches to the topic are welcomed. Possible focuses might include:
- Health status and the question of travel
- Isolation and self-isolation in illness and/or death
- Mental health v. bodily hygiene
- ‘Contagion’
- The social visibility of the pregnant woman: ‘confinement’ as metaphor and reality
- Doctor-patient relationships
- The space of the sick room
- Gender, disease and disability
- The 'convalescent' patient and society
- Slow declines and sudden ends: the social temporality of death
Please send 250-word proposals for 15-20-minute papers to victoria.coulson@york.ac.uk and sarah.wadsworth@marquette.edu by March 15, 2021 (deadline extended). Please note if you will have AV requirements.
Call for Papers
2021 Henry James Review Forum:
Henry James and the Nineteenth-century Literary Landscape
In the opening preface to the New York Edition of his fiction, James famously wrote: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so. [. . .] The prime effect of so sustained a system, so prepared a surface, is to lead on and on; while the fascination of following resides, by the same token, in the presumability somewhere of a convenient, of a visibly-appointed stopping-place.”
James’s problem of the artist is also the problem of scholarship: Finding a “convenient . . . stopping-place” that also leads readers “on and on” in their own work and thinking.
This forum issue of the Henry James Review seeks shorter studies/longer notes (1000 words) to longer articles (12,500 words) on such “stopping-place[s]”—topics related to Henry James’s literary biography, fiction, criticism, travel writing, plays—and their relation to the literary world in Britain, the United States, France, Italy, and/or elsewhere from shortly before James’s birth in 1843 to shortly after his death in 1916.
New approaches to Henry James biography, narrative, archival work, data collection, genre, readership/criticism, publication, or professionalism in relation to the nineteenth-century literary world are of special interest.
Send submissions to hjamesr@creighton.edu by March 1, 2021. Please include “Forum” in the subject line.