We are pleased to announce that our panel for ALA:  “Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century” is now sponsored by The Children’s Literature Society.

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

Proposed Panel for ALA, May 22-25, 2014, Washington D.C.

Deadline for abstracts: Jan 13, 2014

Childhood studies had been steadily growing as an important field in US nineteenth-century literature and culture, complicating our understanding of the  boundary between adult and child and asking what happens when we foreground the child. Taking this as our starting point, we are interested in exploring how texts that are written for girls, or that represent girls, participate in the work of reform through an evangelical agenda. More specifically, what kind of cultural work does this evangelical literature perform through its representations of childhood, kinship structures, discipline, authority, education, race, and class?

Possible Topics

Children’s series books

Anti-Catholicism

Treatments of evangelicalism

Post-bellum representations of the South and the plantation novel

Children’s abolitionist literature

Treatment of animals

Missionary work

Treatments of 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, and Louisa May Alcott.

Please send a 500-word abstract and brief CV to Robin Cadwallader (RCadwallader@francis.edu<mailto:RCadwallader@francis.edu>) or Allison Giffen (Allison.giffen@wwu.edu<mailto:Allison.giffen@wwu.edu>).