Calls for papers
Calls for Papers
The Henry James Society
Ninth International Conference
Kyoto
July 2023
Call for Papers
Community and Communicability
It will be a joy for all Jamesians to gather together after a long period of isolation caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic. We are all hyper-aware of the need to re-establish community and to create new communities to restart and rethink our lives, both academic and private. “Community and Communicability” will spotlight issues concerning creating and maintaining communities that are also at the core of James’s writing by exploring the role of language and forms of social relations and networks. It will also focus on questions of nonverbal communications of the body and touching, as well as James’s views of illness and recuperation. We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers addressing any aspect of the topic as suggested below, but other approaches are invited as well.
- James family relationships
- James and the publishing world
- Circulation (e.g., of literary magazines)
- Writers and artists at the end of the 19th century
- What James (or the Jameses) can tell us about the pandemic/ social crisis
- Queer glances and interactions in James's work
- Letters, telegraphs, and other communication tools
- Border-crossing and identity
- Humans and animals
- The living and the dead
- James and film adaptations
- James and life-writing
- James and translations
- Jamesian collaborations: artists, illustrators, writers, directors, etc.
- Social and professional networks
- Women and society in James
- Illness and care / healing
- Isolation / socializing
- Spaces of sociability
- Globalization, migration, mobility, and illness
- The body and the brain in relation to communicability
- Creativity in crisis
- Communal experiments in crisis
- Reading and / or teaching James in the Pandemic
The Ninth International Conference of the Henry James Society will be an in-person conference in Kyoto, Japan, postponed from July 2022 to July 2023.
*Abstracts may be submitted in fall 2023. Please check back in late August for further details.
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