The Stephen Crane Society

Call for Papers: Stephen Crane Society Panels at ALA 2022

The Stephen Crane Society will sponsor two sessions at the American Literature Association Conference at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago on May 26-29, 2022.

All topics are welcome. Here, for example, are a few suggestions:

• Crane’s depiction of war
• Crane and the arts (e. g., painting, photography, music)
• Crane’s depiction of the city
• Crane’s poetry
• Crane’s journalism
• the Sullivan County tales and sketches
• the Western stories
• the Whilomville stories
• one of Crane’s lesser-known novels (The Third Violet, Active Service, or The O’Ruddy)
• Crane’s depiction of women
• Crane’s relationship with other writers, e. g., Garland, Howells, Conrad, or Frederic
• Crane’s influence on later writers

Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes.

You may also propose a roundtable discussion on, say, teaching Crane’s short stories.

Please email abstracts or papers of no more than ten double-spaced pages by January 15, 2022, to the program chair:

Paul Sorrentino

psorrent@vt.edu

For more information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org. If you have specific questions about ALA, contact the Conference Director, Professor Leslie Petty, at pettyl@rhodes.edu or the Executive Director of ALA, Professor Alfred Bendixen, at ab23@princeton.edu.

UPDATED AND DEADLINE EXTENDED: 

Call for proposals  

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism 

Editors: Kenneth K Brandt and Karin M Danielsson 

At the end of the 19^th century, American authors such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London were influenced by new advances in science—notably the idea of evolution. Nature and the nonhuman were crucial for these writers, whom scholars   most often group under the rubric of American literary naturalists. Traditional scholarship on American literary naturalism has closely attended to various environmental pressures in urban and wilderness settings, but scholars have paid much less attention to the naturalists’ investigations into the nonhuman, such as animals, plants, landscapes, houses, or weather. To extend and deepen our understanding of this under-researched field, we propose a volume of essays that offers a wide variety of innovative critical approaches to the nonhuman in American naturalist literature. We welcome studies based in ecocriticism, animal studies, new materialism, narrative theory, or ethics. We are receptive to essay proposals focused on the core naturalists from around 1900 as well as more contemporary writers in the naturalist tradition. Proposals may focus on authors including Crane, Norris, London, Wharton, Garland, Dreiser, Chopin, Dunbar, Sinclair, Twain, Glasgow, Frederic, Cather, O’Neill, Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, Petry, Dos Passos, Larsen, Farrell, Hammett, Cain and others. More recent writers may include Oates, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Morrison, McCarthy, Wilson, Pynchon, and others. The editors are particularly interested in proposals on Larsen, Dreiser, Wright, Twain, Petry, and authors in the SF, cyberpunk, and biopunk traditions.  

Call for Papers:   Stephen Crane Symposium

The town of Badenweiler (Baden-Württemberg) and the English Department of the Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg will jointly celebrate the 150^th birthday of American writer Stephen Crane. Crane succumbed to tuberculosis in Badenweiler on June 5^th, 1900, having arrived there only a few days earlier.

The symposium will take place in Badenweiler, Oct. 31^st and Nov. 1^st.

Papers are invited especially on the topic of Stephen Crane’s Europe: He lived in England, travelled to Ireland, passed through France and Switzerland, reported on the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, and he died in Germany. But did he develop a relation to any of these places? How much did he know about where he was, and what he was seeing? And was he even interested? Attempts at placing Crane within the larger context of the Anglo- / American presence along the Upper Rhine are also welcome.

Submission deadline: Feb. 28^th 2021. Successful submissions will be contacted by March 15^th

Sent submissions to: wolfgang.hochbruck@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

 Call for Papers

Stephen Crane Society

ALA 2021

The Stephen Crane Society will sponsor two sessions at the American Literature Association Conference at the Westin Copley Place in Boston on May 27-31, 2021. All topics are welcome. Here, for example, are a few suggestions:

• Crane’s depiction of war
• Crane and the arts (e. g., painting, photography, music)
• Crane’s depiction of the city
• Crane’s poetry
• Crane’s journalism
• the Sullivan County tales and sketches
• the Western stories
• the Whilomville stories
• one of Crane’s lesser-known novels (The Third Violet, Active Service, or The O’Ruddy)
• Crane’s depiction of women
• Crane’s relationship with other writers, e. g., Garland, Howells, Conrad, or Frederic
• Crane’s influence on later writers

Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes.

You may also propose a roundtable discussion on, say, teaching Crane’s short stories.

Please email abstracts or papers of no more than ten double-spaced pages by January 31, 2021, to the program chair:

Paul Sorrentino

psorrent@vt.edu

For more information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org. If you have specific questions about ALA, contact the Conference Co-Director and Executive Coordinator of ALA, Professor Olivia Carr Edenfield, at carr@georgiasouthern.edu or the Executive Director of ALA, Professor Alfred Bendixen, at ab23@princeton.edu.

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

Editors: Kenneth K Brandt and Karin M Danielsson

At the end of the 19^th century, American authors such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London were influenced by new advances in science—notably the idea of evolution. Nature and the nonhuman were crucial for these writers,
whom scholars   most often group under the rubric of American literary naturalists. Traditional scholarship on American literary naturalism has closely attended to various environmental pressures in urban and wilderness settings, but scholars have paid much
less attention to the naturalists’ investigations into the nonhuman, such as animals, plants, landscapes, houses, or weather. To extend and deepen our understanding of this under-researched field, we propose a volume of essays that offers a wide variety of
innovative critical approaches to the nonhuman in American naturalist literature. We welcome studies based in ecocriticism, animal studies, new materialism, narrative theory, or ethics. We are receptive to essay proposals focused on the core naturalists from
around 1900 as well as more contemporary writers in the naturalist tradition. Proposals may focus on authors including Crane, Norris, London, Wharton, Garland, Dreiser, Chopin, Dunbar, Sinclair, Twain, Glasgow, Frederic, Cather, O’Neill, Steinbeck, Wright,
Hemingway, Petry, Dos Passos, Larsen, Farrell, Hammett, Cain and others. More recent writers may include Oates, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Morrison, McCarthy, Wilson, Pynchon, and others.