Minutes from the MLA 2019 Executive Board meeting are here:
You can find these and all the minutes from previous meetings under Membership – EWS Business: https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/membership/ews-business-2/
“My dear, after twenty, all life is pretending, and it’s easier to pretend in a good house, than alone in a garret!” advises Lady Uske, urging our heroine Kate to return home to her husband, in Edith Wharton’s long-lost drama. Written 20 years before The Age of Innocence earned her the first Pulitzer Prize for Literature to be awarded to a woman, Wharton’s The Shadow of a Doubt contains kernels of the socially conscious characters and themes of her later masterpiece novels.
[read the rest at https://www.redbulltheater.com/the-shadow-of-a-doubt]
Reposting because the deadline is in 1 week!
Edith Wharton Society Call for Papers
American Literature Association
May 23-26, 2019 Boston, MA
The Edith Wharton Society will sponsor two panels at ALA in 2019. Scholars whose proposals are accepted must be members in good standing of the Edith Wharton Society by the time of the conference, and individuals may participate in only one panel.
The Case for Comparisons
The Edith Wharton Society solicits proposals for a roundtable discussion, comprised of 2 single-spaced-page position papers outlining arguments for studying Wharton’s work in relation to a particular writer and that author’s specific works. What specific works of Wharton and another author pose compelling possibilities for teaching and/or scholarly work? What theories or histories or contexts would this comparison engage? What do we gain from studying Wharton’s work comparatively? What potential pitfalls, if any, await us? 250 word proposals, with titles, by Jan. 7 to Melanie Dawson at mvdaws@wm.edu.
Wharton and the Family
The Edith Wharton Society invites proposals for 15-20 minute papers on “Wharton and the Family” for inclusion in the ALA 2019 program in Boston. Proposals may approach any aspect of Wharton and the family, including issues of maternity, paternity, childrearing, sibling relationships, queer families, and more. Papers may also compare Wharton’s representations of families with those of her contemporaries. Titled proposals (approx. 300 words) are due to Jennifer Haytock (jhaytock@brockport.edu) by January 7, 2019.
Call for Papers: “Modernism and Diagnosis” (prospective cluster for the Modernism/modernity Print Plus platform)
Edited by Lisa Mendelman and Heather A. Love
Proposed titles & abstracts due March 15, 2019
Selected essays due June 15, 2019
We seek proposals for short, provocative essays addressing the topic of “Modernism and Diagnosis” for a prospective peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform.
The first decades of the twentieth century saw the proliferation of popular and scientific diagnoses. Ushered in by a standardizing culture of physical and mental health, individual and social measures of wellbeing and pathology abound during these years—from psychoanalysis and eugenics to self-help and the physical culture movement. Contemporary cultural productions drew from and commented on this evolving slew of analytics. Think, for example, of the representations of shell-shocked and institutionalized bodies in print, on stage, and on screen; formalist experiments that play with new models of selfhood through stream-of-consciousness narration and (sincere or satiric) primitivist aesthetics; and sweeping social diagnoses like Gertrude Stein’s “you are all a lost generation.”
This Print Plus cluster invites papers that meditate on these period dynamics and their implications for understanding modernism’s legacy. Individual essays might focus on questions of identification, categorization, epistemology, or ontology raised by modernist aesthetics (e.g., “cases,” dialect, primitivism), popularized discourses like psychoanalysis and eugenics, and evolving academic disciplines including psychiatry, sexology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. Authors might also engage with the recent turns to cognitive neuroscience and sociology in literary studies, conversations about research methodology, modernist cultures of feeling / affect, and narratives of diagnosis as they pertain to contemporary analytic trends and enduring social categories including race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.
Papers should be inventive, provocative gestures, along the lines of a conference roundtable (2000-3000 words). We particularly welcome submissions that draw on the unique possibilities afforded by the digital setting of the Print Plus platform. Please send a titled, 300-word abstract and a brief biography to lisa.mendelman@menlo.edu and heather.love@uwaterloo.ca by March 15, 2019. 6 to 8 contributors will be invited to submit essays, after which the entire cluster will be sent out for peer review.
News of possible interest:
The Shadow of a Doubt
Phoebe Fox, Francesca Annis and Paul Ready star in the world premiere of a newly discovered play by Edith Wharton from 1901. Former nurse Kate Derwent carries a terrible secret.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000xfl
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pj44y
Thanks to Laura Rattray and Sue Hart-Stevens for alerting the EWS to these performances.
Edith Wharton Society Call for Papers
American Literature Association
May 23-26, 2019 Boston, MA
The Edith Wharton Society will sponsor two panels at ALA in 2019. Scholars whose proposals are accepted must be members in good standing of the Edith Wharton Society by the time of the conference, and individuals may participate in only one panel.
The Case for Comparisons
The Edith Wharton Society solicits proposals for a roundtable discussion, comprised of 2 single-spaced-page position papers outlining arguments for studying Wharton’s work in relation to a particular writer and that author’s specific works. What specific works of Wharton and another author pose compelling possibilities for teaching and/or scholarly work? What theories or histories or contexts would this comparison engage? What do we gain from studying Wharton’s work comparatively? What potential pitfalls, if any, await us? 250 word proposals, with titles, by Jan. 7 to Melanie Dawson at mvdaws@wm.edu.
Wharton and the Family
The Edith Wharton Society invites proposals for 15-20 minute papers on “Wharton and the Family” for inclusion in the ALA 2019 program in Boston. Proposals may approach any aspect of Wharton and the family, including issues of maternity, paternity, childrearing, sibling relationships, queer families, and more. Papers may also compare Wharton’s representations of families with those of her contemporaries. Titled proposals (approx. 300 words) are due to Jennifer Haytock (jhaytock@brockport.edu) by January 7, 2019.
