CFP: Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century

Deadline for Proposals: July 15, 2014

 We are interested in exploring how texts that are written for girls, or represent girls, participate in the work of reform through an evangelical agenda.   This collection seeks to contribute to the burgeoning field of childhood studies in U.S. nineteenth-century literature and culture, which has been complicating the boundaries between adult and child and asking what happens when we foreground the child. We are especially interested in essays that explore the cultural work this evangelical literature performs, through its representations of, for example, childhood, kinship structures, discipline, authority, disability, education, race, and class. While our focus is on the U.S., we are also interested in work by British and Canadian writers.

We are seeking essays of 6,000-7,000 words. Please submit proposals of 500 words and a brief CV to Robin Cadwallader (RCadwallader@francis.edu) and Allison Giffen (Allison.giffen@wwu.edu) no later than July 15, 2014.  We are planning a quick turn-around with this collection and the deadlines will be tight once essays are selected. We will notify you of acceptance and timeframe shortly after the deadline for submissions.

Possible Topics

Children’s series books

Anti-Catholicism

Evangelicalism

Post-bellum representations of the South and the plantation novel

Children’s abolitionist literature

Treatment of animals

Missionary work, or missionary periodical

Discipline

Representations of kinship relations

Education, The common school movement or the home school movement

The American Sunday School Movement

The American Tract Society

Possible Writers

Lydia Sigourney

Lydia Maria Child

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Maria Cummins

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Susan Warner

Annie Fellows Johnson

Martha Finley

Louisa May Alcott.

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