European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Upcoming Meeting

We are please to announce that this year's meeting of the European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature will take place at the University of Zagreb, Croatia on 8-9 November 2024. The focus of our discussion will be The Whole Family (1908), a collaborative novel by twelve authors (including William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Henry James). In the open domain, the text is available for download
We invite contributions to the discussion of the novel not only from "a comparative approach across gender” (Kilcup 6), but also across class and race, reflecting on connections, affiliations and disaffiliations among the contemporaneous writers; further topics include but are not limited to: playfulness and play-acting; the representation of affect and emotion; the repudiation of the excesses of sentimentalism; the literary market and its demands; the idea of collaborative writing; canonicity and the politics of scholarship.

The deadline for submission of titles and abstracts is 15 May 2024. Abstracts are sent for 15-20 min presentations and should not exceed 500 words (incl. references). Please send your abstracts to both the following addresses:
Jelena Sesnic jsesnic@ffzg.unizg.hr and Verena Laschinger verena.laschinger@uni-erfurt.de

About the Study Group

The European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature was established at the 2006 conference of the European Association of American Studies (EAAS) in Cyprus by a group of European Americanists, among them Magdalena Zapedowska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland), Marie-Claude Perrin-Chenour (Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre-La Défense, France), Ralph Poole (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria), Asuncion Lopez-Varela (Complutense University Madrid, Spain), Mariana Net (Romanian Academy, Romania), Ausra Paulauskiene (LCC International University Klaipeda, Lithuania), and Verena Laschinger (Erfurt University, Germany). The group has received enthusiastic support of academics from all over Europe. Participants from the Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, Italy, Austria and the US made the group’s annual sessions a great success. In the course of a three day long get-together the group usually focuses on lesser-known texts by American women writers of the nineteenth century, which thus far included works by Fanny Fern, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Phoebe Cary, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Jacobs, and Edith Wharton. All meetings were moderated by leading US-scholars of 19th-century American literature (Marianne Noble, Cynthia Davis, Paula Bernat Bennett, Jeffrey Steele, Gary Williams, Farah Griffin, Daniel Walkowitz), whose expertise helped to make the touring project an arena for transnational scholarly exchange. The meetings, which allow both an informal and interactive exchange of ideas and a more formal lecture proceeding, provide an excellent opportunity for scholars specializing in 19th-century American literature to engage in a supportive and inspiring intellectual community, which constitutes a forum for the exchange of information and ideas leading to further research and publications in the area.

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