CFP: What is a woman writer?

SSAWW 2015 – Philadelphia, PA

Abstract submissions due to Julia Dauer (jdauer@wisc.edu) by January 30, 2015

As attention to the book as an object continues to thrive in literary studies, questions about who

counts as a women writer take on new dimensions. This panel invites papers considering

“women writers” working as editors or artists to hybridize existing texts, and especially the way

those working in the 20th and 21st centuries make use of 19th-century archives. How, for example,

does Kara Walker’s “reading” of nineteenth-century culture in her silhouette work conceptualize

race and fantasy in the archive? How does the work of Maureen Cummins, Ann Lovett, and

other book artists challenge us to think about books and the women who produce them in new or

different ways? In what ways does women’s work as editors, archivists, or artists preserve or

transform literary traditions? What agency or creative power do women writers and artists gain

by working with existing materials to fashion new accounts of historical experience? How does

this work impact our view of the history of women’s writing, or of women writers’ relation to the

American past?

This panel welcomes papers addressing women working as

 artists

 book artists

 scrapbook makers

 diarists

 archivists

 newspaper, periodical, or giftbook editors

 illustrators

 bloggers

 or other in other roles that rely on textual remixing or hybridization