FRANCE!!! FRANCE!!!! FRANCE!!!!! FRANCE!!!! FRANCE!!!! And Sedgwick

CALL FOR PAPERS – Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society

SSAWW Conference, Universite Bordeaux Montaigne, France, July 5-8, 2017

The first international SSAWW conference has the following focus:

“Border Crossings: Translation, Migration and Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic and the Transpacific.”

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society wants to submit a complete panel for this conference. Abstracts and cv are due by June 22, 2016 to Lisa West at lisa.west@drake.edu

We accept all proposals for papers addressing

“Border Crossings in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Writings”

Suggestions include:

ways in which Sedgwick’s short writing crosses genre boundaries

travel writing

Clarence’s vision of an international space

crossings of water and landscape in Hope Leslie

cultural crossings in various texts

cross-dressing

religious crossings

narrative borders, innovative narrative techniques

allusions, crossings between and across different texts

marriage or other relationships as interpersonal border crossings

juxtapositions of urban and rural space, or intersections of the New York and Boston worlds

letters in A New England Tale, Hope Leslie or other texts

crossings between the imagination and reality or between this world and an alternative world (in religious or political sense)

escapes

the boundaries of domestic space

From SSAWW General Call for Papers:

“Border Crossings: Translation, Migration and Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic and the Transpacific”

“To maintain a continuity with our previous conference (in Philadelphia, November 2015) on liminality and hybrid lives, we would like this first SSAWW conference in Europe to address the significance of “border crossing[s]” in the lives and works of American women writers. Such experiences have always been important to American women. Early diaries and travel notes left by 17th– and 18th-century women provide us with valuable records of and about their migratory experience to the New World and their lives and experiences in America. Besides offering more records of such experiences, the 19th century also witnessed an explosion in travel writing, fiction, and poetry treating with travel, as growing numbers of American women writers could afford to travel across Europe and more widely.”

“The conference theme invites participants to explore the broad spectrum of possibilities generated by such cross-cultural interactions, as well as the challenge consequently posed to literary canons. How has this experience affected women writers’ worldview and conception of language? To what extent do their modes of exploration differ from that of their male counterparts? How important were such contacts in allowing women writers to develop a consciousness of otherness and/or forge a community of feeling and experience transcending national and/or cultural barriers?”

“Crossings have always involved a necessary stage of transition, transformation, and consequent redefinition of the self that questions the very stability and permanence traditionally associated with women’s conventionalized roles. Thus we are very happy to consider writers using the idea of border crossing and travel symbolically or metaphorically as well as literally: early female travellers, explorers, and adventurers crossed borders in more ways than one, often by transgressing gender expectations, using this experience or awareness to reshape the conventions of many genres.”