Call for Proposals

Anthologies, essay collections and monographs documenting the lives of 19th-century women writers began to appear in the early 1990s. Among the pioneering critics in this field we find Susan Kirkpatrick, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Francine Masiello, Francesca Denegri, Lea Fletcher, Doris Summer, Madeline Gutwirth, Isabelle Hoog Naginsky, Claire Goldberg Moses and Ann Hallemore Caesar, to name just a few. They forged new paths for future generations of critics of nineteenth-century women’s writing. These scholars not only addressed the long overlooked contexts that nourished the fictional output of women writers across Europe and Latin America, but they also shed light on these same writers as intellectuals in their own right.

The critics mentioned above began to analyze and compare women writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rosalía de Castro, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Flora Tristán, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, George Sand, Germaine de Staël, Matilde Serao, and Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso. They investigated these writers’ critical, epistolary, narrative and journalistic production, sparking debates with their fresh perspectives on nineteenth-century women’s issues and their political acumen. They also began to examine the practices of nineteenth-century readers who increasingly read and discussed the works of these writers across national and international networks of women writers and their readers in the long 19th century. Their often-combative works disclosed a decidedly female intellectual position, one that has yet to be fully examined and understood. By offering a venue for transcultural exchanges on the writings of nineteenth-century women authors in France, Italy, Latin America and Spain, “The Nineteenth-Century in 2019. Mapping Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century” invites dialogue among scholars to consolidate and more sharply define these women writers’ contributions to the intellectual life of their countries as well as their wider-ranging influence, while at the same time highlighting the importance of their artistic legacy.

Scholars are invited to contribute papers on the political, artistic, cultural, social, and gendered dimensions of the works of women writers in the long nineteenth century across genres and the transnational space that connected France, Italy, Latin America and Spain. We also welcome papers that showcase digital humanities tools or report on digital humanities projects that have fueled a renewed interest in the lives and works of nineteenth-century women.

Possible topics include:

Translations by and of women authors
Female travelogues
Women and publishing
Women journalistic writing and essays
The Feminist press

Women writers and the twenty-first century canon
Resisting patriarchy: women’s correspondence
Women’s education
Serialized narratives and the woman author

The Making of the self: women’s auto/biographies
Female networks of sociability
Sisterly affection and the printed word
New ways of knowing: digital humanities projects on nineteenth-century women writers