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FYI:

Dear Members of the Twentieth-Century American Literature Group:  I thought you would be interested in this project:

Call for Critical Essay Submissions: Working Women

 

For a book to be published by a major publisher, I am inviting essays on working women in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century American literature. The volume will focus on the American working woman and how she has been represented and underrepresented in American realistic and naturalistic literature during this period, as well as by authors from other periods influenced by realism and naturalism. Points to be explored may include:  the available kinds of work for women during this time (factory workers, seamstresses, maids, teachers, writers, prostitutes, etc.); the ways in which literary representations of female work have been distorted; the manner in which such representations inform the lives of working women today; and ways in which the genders of working women are portrayed, including queer theory analyses. These essays should relate to current feminist thought and take into account the historicity of the context. Authors discussed may include Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Anzia Yezierska, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather.  A variety of genres may be explored: novels, short stories, other forms of fiction, biographies, autobiographies, and narratives.

 

Length of essay: Maximum of 22 pages (about 10,000 words)

 

 

Goal: A collection of eight to ten original essays by literary, historical, and cultural critics about working women in the United States and how they have been imagined in realistic and naturalistic literature versus the realities of working women of that period.

 

Working title:

 

American Realisms: Essays on Genders and Literature, 1865 – 1950

 

 

Some notes: In the introductory essay, I will deconstruct the term “working women in the United States”:  What is “working”? What is “women”?  What is the “United States”? Among other topics, I will discuss the genderized division of labor in the United States, explore the historical and cultural definition of work, and then redefine the term “work in America” through the lens of genders.

 

Contact:

 

Miriam S. Gogol, Ph.D.

Professor of Literature

mgogol@mercy.edu

[Author]

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