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.
Calls for Papers
2022 Henry James Review Forum: Health, Happiness, Henry James
The 2016 Henry James Review forum issue (37.3) on “Illness, age, and death” brought into sharp focus, as Susan M. Griffin wrote in her introduction, that “Illness, age, and death preoccupy Henry James from the beginning to the end of his writing life” (205). At the same time, the prevalence of illness, age, and death shows that health and happiness held an important place in James’s life as well. His father’s theology framed human existence as “naturally bound to the pursuit of happiness,” as he wrote in Society the Redeemed Form of Man (207). Henry James’s physical ailments motivated him to seek healthy living habits, from horseback riding and spa treatments, to walking and bicycling, to Fletcherizing, for example. His desire for a healthy economic and personal social life shaped his long residence in England. He rationalized his bachelorhood to his mother by implying that despite one friend’s insistence that he “should be ‘so much happier’ if [he] would only marry” (Oct 31, 1880 to MWJ), his happiness would be maintained more readily by avoiding it. He recalled in the opening of A Small Boy and Others that the process of writing the book “meant that aspects [of his past] began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values” (2). In James’s fiction, characters who meet and unhealthy and unhappy end often do so with the intention of achieving happiness and/or health. Roderick Hudson’s end is both unhappy and unhealthy. But “[t]rue happiness” is a consistent subject of the novel, and James introduced it in the first chapter. Likewise, when James leaves Isabel Archer at the conclusion of The Portrait of a Lady she is neither happy nor healthy. But her approach to achieving health and happiness--as well as her need to help others achieve them--is important in understanding her character. Isabel tells her cousin, Ralph Touchett, “that’s what I came to Europe for, to be as happy as possible” (NYE 1: 57). James shows explicitly Hyacinth Robinson’s quest for “happiness” at Medley (NYE 2: 13, 62). Strether and Mme de Vionnet discuss the course of their lives in terms of “happiness” during their meeting just following the Cheval Blanc episode, as The Ambassadors begins to wind down (NYE 2: 282-83).
The Henry James Review invites essays between 1,000 and 12,500 words on any aspect of “Health, Happiness, Henry James.” Contributors might choose to engage the topic, for example, through James biography; characterization; use of “health,” “happiness,” and related terms (e.g., “healthy” and “happy”) as elements of style in fiction, autobiography, travel writing, and/or critical essays; as aspects of Jamesian storytelling and/or story-space, etc.
Contributions should be produced according to current MLA style. Please identify your manuscript as a “Health, Happiness, Henry James” Forum submission. Send submissions to hjamesr@creighton.edu by March 1, 2022.
LEON EDEL PRIZE
The Leon Edel Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar. The prize carries with it an award of $300, and the prize-winning essay will be published in HJR.
The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply.
Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published. Please send the manuscript in Microsoft Word format.
Send electronic submissions to: hjamesr@creighton.edu
Author's name should not appear on the manuscript. Please identify essays as submissions for the Leon Edel Prize. The competition is limited to one submission per author.
A brief curriculum vitae should be included.
Decisions about regular publication are also made at the same time as the prize decision.
Deadline: November 1, 2021