American Literature Association Research Articles

Edith Wharton Society Panels: Edith Wharton and Beauty at the American Literature Association Conference, Boston, 25–27 May 2023

Edith Wharton Society Panels: Edith Wharton and Beauty at the American Literature Association Conference, Boston, 25–27 May 2023

Poe Studies Association Updates

Other| April 18 2023 Poe Studies Association Updates The Edgar Allan Poe Review (2023) 24 (1): 99–102. https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.24.1.0099 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Poe Studies Association Updates. The Edgar Allan Poe Review 18 April 2023; 24 (1): 99–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.24.1.0099 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Edgar Allan Poe Review Search Advanced Search Happy new year, and happy Year of the Rabbit!I enjoyed seeing some of you at the 138th Modern Language Association Annual Convention in San Francisco, which included our PSA-sponsored session, “Gold Rush!? Poe and 1849,” organized by PSA vice president Emron Esplin. The session featured three outstanding presentations by members Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University), John Gruesser (Sam Houston State University), and Robert Tally (Texas State University) followed by questions and lively discussion. Despite the severe weather events that dominated the news, MLA was a success for the PSA.I hope to see more of you soon in Boston at the thirty-fourth annual conference of the American Literature Association, scheduled for May 25–28, 2023. PSA-sponsored events will include sessions organized by executive committee members-at-large, Margarida Vale de Gato and Renata Philippov, as well as our annual business meeting.The Third International Conference of the Edgar Allan Poe Spanish... You do not currently have access to this content.

Eudora Welty Society

Eudora Welty Society Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy After two years of virtual events during the height of the COVID pandemic, the Eudora Welty Society made a much-anticipated return to inperson conferences in 2022. At the May conference of the American Literature Association (ALA) in Chicago, the Society met and conducted its annual business meeting with current officers presiding: Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy, Presidents; Rebecca Harrison, Vice President; and Laura Wilson, Treasurer. Additionally, the society sponsored two panels, a roundtable, and a reprised dramatic reading of Welty's "Moon Lake," led by adaptor and director Brenda Currin and performed by Welty scholars. (Thereafter, Laura Wilson interviewed Brenda Currin for the Eudora Welty Review volume 14, 2022.) In June, the society sponsored two panels at the biennial conference for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL). The Society also presented a roundtable in October at the ALA Symposium "The Historical Imagination in American Literature" in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The year 2022 marked a transition to a new listserv for the Society, replacing the old listserv hosted by Emory University. All future Society correspondence should be directed to our new listserv at eudorawelty society@baylor.edu. Society members are also eligible for numerous awards sponsored by the EWS. The Society regularly supports young Welty scholars by awarding travel grants to graduate students presenting at ALA. Recipients for 2022 included Jacob Agner, Summer Delgado, Nathaniel Hawlish, and Grace McCright, who each received $100. In conjunction with the Eudora Welty Review, the Society awards the annual Ruth Vande Kieft prize for an outstanding essay on Welty. The 2022 prize of $150 went to Judy Butterfield for her essay "'An Is Different from My Is': The Lost Mother and the Subjectivity of the Motherless Child in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Welty's Delta Wedding," which appeared in volume 14 of this journal. At the 2022 SSSL conference, the society [End Page 193] honored two recipients of the biennial Phoenix Award given to a scholar who has made considerable contributions to Welty studies. Since the pandemic precluded public recognition of the 2019–2020 winner, David McWhirter, the Society recognized both David and the 2021–2022 winner, Mae Miller Claxton. The Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty series published by the University Press of Mississippi released three new volumes in 2022: Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden In Plain Sight (Dec. 2022), edited by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack; The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty (May 2022) by Danièle Pitavy-Souques and editor Pearl Amelia McHaney; and Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty's Photographic Reflections (Mar. 2022) by Annette Trefzer, which won the 2022 Eudora Welty Prize. All three volumes can be purchased on the University Press of Mississippi's website: upress.state.ms.us. For further information about these volumes' contents and contributors, see the Checklist of Welty Scholarship elsewhere in this issue. The Eudora Welty Society will host two panels and a roundtable at the 2023 American Literature Association Conference in Boston. Topics include 1) Material Welty Roundtable, 2) Gender, Objects, and Welty, and 3) The Sensual, Sexual, and Erotic Welty. Below is a detailed list of the conference panels hosted by the Eudora Welty Society in 2022: American Literature Association Conference, May 26–28, 2022, Chicago, Illinois Eudora Welty and Performance Chair: Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston 1. "Stagestruck: Eudora Welty and the Theater," Suzanne Marrs, Millsaps College 2. "'That's me': Eudora Welty and the Performative Self," Katie Berry Frye, Pepperdine University 3. "The (Cinematic) Eye of Her Story: Eudora Welty and Film," Jacob Agner, University of Mississippi 4. "Eudora Welty's Cinematic Spaces: Inhabiting 'Why I live at the P.O,'" Dina Smith, Drake University 5. "On the Process of Adapting Eudora Welty for Performance," Brenda Currin, Independent Scholar, Actress, and Adaptor [End Page 194] Eudora Welty and Ecology Chair: Sarah Ford, Baylor University 1. "'It was said she believed in evolution': An Ecogothic Reading of 'Moon Lake,'" Grace McCright, Baylor University 2. "Eudora Welty's Dual Vision of Arcadia," Pearl McHaney, Georgia State University 3. "Laurel's Influx and Efflux: Reading the Non-human in The Optimist's Daughter," Nathaniel...

American Literature Association

American Literature Association

PSA Honorary Member: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney is a distinguished scholar, teacher, and creative writer who has contributed significantly to Poe studies worldwide through her presentations, publications, and service to the Poe Studies Association over the course of her productive career. Beth’s research and teaching interests are wide ranging—including detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Anne Tyler, feminist narratology, local writing, and poetry.Beth first studied Poe in the context of postmodernist “metaphysical” detective stories. Most of her work on detective fiction, including even an essay on Barbara Wilson’s lesbian detective novel Gaudi Afternoon, and some of her work on Nabokov (another major area of study) incorporate Poe. At some point, after chairing a session at the first international Poe conference and beginning to offer a regular seminar on “Poe’s Haunted World,” Beth became utterly absorbed in his work beyond the detective genre. Her training at Mount Holyoke and Brown University is mostly in twentieth-century American and European literature, but delving into Poe involved immersing herself in his world, so she found herself exploring nineteenth-century phenomena such as natural science, artificial light, optical devices, early photography, public speaking, and ventriloquism as contexts for his work. Coming to Poe “in a backwards fashion,” as she recounted in a Zoom seminar last year, allowed her to be playful and experimental, which resulted in her writing a screenplay based on his courtship of Sarah Helen Whitman and sculpting books out of clay representing the experiences of reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat.” As she wrote to me about her feelings toward the PSA, “I was welcomed by the PSA, and I have met wonderful friends and colleagues” while serving in various leadership roles and participating in many of the PSA’s activities over the years.In addition to the recognition she has received from the PSA for her outstanding research (the Gargano Award for an essay on Poe published in 2018 and in 2020 for a chapter published in a volume that won the Dameron Award), she has contributed significantly to our association by serving as PSA vice president, president, and immediate past president (2007–13), an editorial board member of the Edgar Allan Poe Review, and a member of three international conference program committees, the Gargano and Dameron Award committees, and, most recently, chair of the PSA nominating committee (on which she had served previously as a member). Beyond the PSA, Beth has volunteered her time and expertise to judge the Saturday “Visiter” Awards at the 2022 Poe Fest International. Many of us recall and appreciate seeing or acting in her screenplay about Poe’s romance with Sarah Helen Whitman at the Positively Poe Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. These contributions, as well as her participation as a speaker and a chair at the PSA’s major conferences as well as at PSA-sponsored sessions at the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association, illustrate her longtime engagement with and advancement of Poe studies.For her important contributions to Poe studies and her advancement of the mission of our organization, the Poe Studies Association recognizes Susan Elizabeth Sweeney with PSA honorary membership, which includes lifetime dues, a commemorative plaque, and the well-earned admiration of her peers. I look forward to the opportunity to present this award to Beth, if possible, at the 2023 ALA Convention in Boston.

Poe Studies Association Updates

Poe Studies Association Updates

Notes on Contributors

Elizabeth Allen is professor and chair of English at the University of California, Irvine. Her book Uncertain Refuge: Sanctuary in Medieval English Literature was published in October 2021. Her essays have appeared in JMEMS, New Medieval Literatures, Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and elsewhere.Katra Byram is associate professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University. Her research centers on narrative theory and German literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, seeking to understand how historically and culturally marked identities and experiences take shape in particular linguistic and narrative forms. Her publications include a book, Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature (2015), and recent articles on gender, genre, and post–World War II memory culture in Germany and on tiny house blogs and the Bildungsroman.Sabine Gross is Griebsch Bascom Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research areas include textual materiality, the reading process, Bertolt Brecht, the detective genre, narratology and stylistics, image-text relations, the human experience of time, theater and performance, and perception and synesthesia. She has published over fifty articles and a number of edited and authored volumes. The most recent are Herausforderung der Literaturwissenschaft: Droste-Hülshoffs ‘Judenbuche’ (coauthored with Ulrich Gaier, 2018) and “Rhythm,” a special issue of Monatshefte coedited with Hannah Eldridge (2021).Dr. JuEunhae Knox recently completed her PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow, pioneering a comparison of digital and traditional poetry in light of new labor capitalism and consumerism through the lens of literary naturalism. Her thesis is the first of its kind to examine Instapoetry in correlation with poe(t/m)-tagging on a visually commodified branding platform such as Instagram, with reference to new labor issues in the context of post-Marxian capitalism. She is collaborating with Dr. James Mackay on the world's first collection of critical Instapoetry essays published by Bloomsbury. They are also writing a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies on international Instapoetry, having led the inaugural global conference #Reading Instapoetry in July 2020, the first of its kind on this subject. This completely online conference won both the Chancellor's Fund Grant and the Community PGR Reward for its innovation and relevance, and has paved the way for multiple panels and conference roundtables with the American Literature Association, Poetics and Linguistics Association, and British Association of American Studies, where she has now served as both peer editor and article contributor. Dr. Knox also created the WorthaThousand Instapoetry Project with the Hunterian and the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections.Susan S. Lanser is professor emerita of comparative literature, English, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. Her book publications include The Narrative Act, Fictions of Authority, The Sexuality of History, and the coedited (with Robyn Warhol) Narrative Theory Unbound. Lanser is past president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020.Ignasi Ribó is assistant professor of comparative literature at the School of Liberal Arts, Mae Fah Luang University (Chiang Rai, Thailand). His research deals with issues in the environmental humanities, bridging across the interdisciplinary fields of ecosemiotics, ecocriticism, and human ecology. He is the author of Habitat: The Ecopolitical Nation (2012) and a contributor to the edited collection Southeast Asian Ecocriticism: Theories, Practices, Prospects (2017). He has also published the textbook Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative (2019), as well as five novels and several academic essays in various international journals.Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is professor emerita of English and comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Her book publications include The Concept of Ambiguity—The Example of James (1977), Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983; rev. ed. 2002), and A Glance beyond Doubt (1996). She is the 2019 recipient of the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.Peter Smyth is a PhD candidate in the history of art at the Ohio State University. The focus of his research is the relationship between comics, literature, and painting.

Abstracts for the Poe Panel at the American Literature Association Conference

Abstracts for the Poe Panel at the American Literature Association Conference

Announcements

The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University continues to coordinate the Steinbeck Letters Project, which aims to create a searchable database listing of John Steinbeck’s letters starting with those in the Center’s possession.Anyone interested in more information or contributing to this project, please contact us at steinbeck@sjsu.edu.Thanks to a generous donation from Mrs. C. Suzette Ditsky, emerging Steinbeck scholars can apply to utilize the outstanding resources in the Ball State University Libraries. The Steinbeck Research Fund has established in honor of Mrs. Ditsky’s late husband, John, who passed away in 2006. Dr. Tetsumaro Hayashi, a longtime friend, said, “He was first and foremost a passionate and dedicated scholar, teacher, and mentor.” Hayashi commented that the Research Fund was “established to honor Ditsky’s long-established legacy of extending a helping hand to emerging Steinbeck scholars.”Recipients will spend a minimum of five days doing intensive research using the Steinbeck collections or other materials at the Ball State University Libraries. The resulting research must be submitted for publication in a professional, scholarly, Steinbeck-related journal and/or presented at a Steinbeck Conference, convention, or lecture at a university.Applicants should submit a Steinbeck-related research proposal (minimum of two pages), a curriculum vitae, a completed-application form (available at https://bsu.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=48465493), and two letters of recommendation from colleagues, faculty members, or others who can speak to your academic qualifications. More details, including guidance for drafting your application, can be found on the application document itself. Completed applications can be emailed directly to libarchives@bsu.edu.The conference committee has begun meeting to organize the next International Steinbeck Society Conference, to be hosted by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies in March of 2023. The theme for this conference will be “John Steinbeck in the Twenty-First Century: Reading, Teaching, and Translating.” More details, including the Call for Papers, will be available soon.In memory of Louis Owens, the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies established this award to honor undergraduate and graduate student work on Steinbeck and related subjects. Undergraduate and graduate students may submit, or faculty may submit on their behalf.Deadline: postmark of January 31, 2023Length: between twelve and forty pagesFormat: MLAAward: $250.00 and consideration for publication in Steinbeck Review Send as attachment to steinbeck@sjsu.edu or by regular mail to: Louis Owens Essay Prize, Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San José State University, San José, CA 95192-0202.The International Steinbeck Society will field two presentations at the upcoming American Literature Association conference, hosted in Chicago during the weekend of May 26–29, 2022. The first is a traditional panel titled “Reading Steinbeck in a Time of Trouble,” and the second is a roundtable session titled “Steinbeck and the Living World.” Readers who can’t attend this conference can look for this work in the Fall 2022 issue of Steinbeck Review.Does your university or organization have an announcement to share with the Steinbeck studies community? Email your entries to Daniel Rivers (daniel.rivers@sjsu.edu) by July 10 (for the Fall issue) or January 10 (for the Spring issue).

In Memoriam

I first met Joel Myerson in an elevator at an American Literature Association Conference in Boston: he was wearing his famous Hawaiian shirt. Thereafter, I recognized his presence at various Alcott venues at ALA conferences: he always had something significant to remark upon after the talks were given. When I became more involved with the Alcott Society, I realized how sociable, warm, witty, and helpful he was at Alcott sessions and dinners. I remember an organized outing from an ALA meeting in Boston to the Alcott Orchard House in Concord, and he was clearly the life of the party.In terms of my scholarship on Louisa May Alcott, I could not have done as much without his co-edited collections (with Daniel Shealy) on Alcott’s letters and journals. This also holds true for his significant work on Margaret Fuller: I found his Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New York–Tribune, 1844–1846 (co-edited with Judith Mattson Bean) indispensable to several articles I wrote on Fuller. He knew and wrote so much about the Concord circle I admire, and he will forever be missed.Monika Elbert, Montclair State University One sheer delight of academic conferences was to come upon Joel Myerson, of course for conversation and commentary but to see what ghastly Hawaiian shirt he would be wearing. I think it actually glowed, but I may be wrong.Joel has done so much for so many. I recently came across Studies in the American Renaissance for 1994, which I believe he began to edit in 1983, and was staggered by the number of scholars within its pages. It is probably his monumental contribution to American Studies in all its many shapes and sizes and will remain a major repository of critical thinking. I gasped when I found an article I’d written, and he’d accepted, “The Romance of Mesmerism: Hawthorne’s Medium of Romance,” which helped launch me deeper into Hawthorne studies and beyond.Joel was a convivial and sharp-eyed mentor, good-humored and helpful. So many of us owe him so much. Here’s to you, Mr. Myerson. We couldn’t have done it without your thoughtfulness, patience, perspective and assistance. Thank you. You done real good!Sam Coale, Wheaton College Dr. Joel Myerson was an acclaimed editor and critic of nineteenth-century American literature. In Hawthorne Studies, Myerson edited an important work of Hawthorne’s collected writings, The Selected Letters of National Hawthorne (Ohio State UP, 2002). The titular collection he donated to the University of South Carolina Library includes early editions of Hawthorne’s works, as well as signed letters. Despite Myerson’s scholarly achievements, though, I most remember him because he helped solidify my career trajectory in American literature studies. As an MA student at the University of South Carolina, I signed up for his American Transcendentalism seminar one semester after doing poorly in a Renaissance Literature course. I wasn’t sure if graduate school was right for me. Myerson’s class only had doctoral students enrolled. This experience was the first time I had to collaborate and compete with them. From the moment the course started, I was transfixed. Everything he taught about Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, and other nineteenth-centuryists spoke immediately to me—and I held my own in that course. After class, we would hold conversations on Thoreau’s theory of plant crystals or discuss how far south both Emerson and Thoreau had traveled. His compliments to me on my work were not liberally dispersed, but I hung on to every such word, including when he noted my “eloquence.” He had other acolytes in that class, several of whom, including myself, have gone on to become full-time English faculty. His guidance led to that success.Myerson eventually became my MA thesis advisor and provided general advice on that project, one that argues for Emerson’s unacknowledged influence on Proust, the latter whom Myerson seemed to dislike in the context I placed him. Later, he composed a letter of recommendation that ensured my admission to doctoral programs. I want to emphasize how powerful he was as a pedagogue and educator, at least immediately to us students, more so than his role as a scholarly editor. I had never known him to refuse a graduate student asking for mentoring or help. He left an indelible mark at the University of South Carolina; I can’t disassociate Myerson from my thoughts of that institution.Michael S. Martin, Nicholls State University

Welcome to the Bishop-Lowell Studies Journal

Dear readers,Allow me to welcome you to the first issue of our new journal. It is exciting to finally see the tangible results of an idea raised casually in pre-Covid times during informal conference discussions at the American Literature Association and given momentum during further conversations with potential contributors and supporters at the “Robert Lowell in Europe: The Centennial Conference” hosted at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, at the end of March 2017. I am pleased to have steered that idea through to this present moment, especially as I can put on record my thanks to those who helped me along the way. Chief among these people are Steve Axelrod and Tom Travisano who proved so open to and supportive of this venture and who have kindly provided a prologue to our journal. I also want to thank the organizers of that Lowell Centennial Conference, Thomas Austenfeld and Aurélie Zurbruegg, as well as its participants for helping me confirm the viability of this venture and being supportive of it. I am grateful to Ben Leubner for taking on the book review editing duties and to my contacts at Penn State University Press who have been excellent to work with. Indeed, the journal would not exist without the help of Rachel Ginder, Julie Lambert, Diana Pesek, and Patrick Alexander.This emphasis on contacts and the people who can help realize an ambition and fulfil a need brings me to an appeal I wish to make to you as this journal’s editor. The quality of a journal is reliant on its submissions and the only way to secure those submissions is by spreading the word among your own contacts, networks, students and colleagues. I cannot underestimate how important and valued that process is and I invite you not only to submit your own work but to encourage others to do so. I welcome hearing from you personally about your own future publications related to Bishop or Lowell so I can keep abreast of current work and organize adverts and reviews. I am also open to any features you wish to see appearing in the journal in the future, and that you can contribute to, be it a regular bibliography or, like Bethany Hicok’s column in this issue, a reflection on ongoing research in the archives, future conference preparations or teaching experiences you would like to share. Ideas for guest-edited and themed issues are also welcome and I hope you find that my door is always open to proactive suggestions for content and improvements.I sincerely hope you enjoy the journal and the opportunity this gives us to continue promoting the rich legacy of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

EDITOR’S NOTE

EDITOR’S NOTE

Edith Wharton Society Panels at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, 2022

Edith Wharton Society Panels at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, 2022

Poe Studies Association Updates

This past year has presented our organization with a series of challenges. However, our members have responded with ingenuity and flexibility so that we could continue the work of our mission: to support the scholarly and informal exchange of information on the life, works, times, and influence of Edgar Allan Poe.First, I’m pleased to announce that our 2020 American Literature Association presenters were able to postpone their presentations and joined us for this year’s conference. Both of our sessions were prerecorded, and instructions on how to access them will be provided as soon as we have the information. Please note that the American Literature Association has changed the weekend: the conference will take place July 7–11, 2021. As usual, we will hold our annual business meeting, and members will be able to attend virtually. I want to thank Cristina Pérez and Sławomir Studniarz, our members-at-large; Travis Montgomery, our secretary; and our presenters for their work throughout this year to make these sessions possible.Second, “Poe Takes Boston: The Fifth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference” has been rescheduled for April 7–10, 2022, in Boston at the Omni Parker House, a beautiful hotel with an impressive literary legacy. Paul Lewis, Richard Kopley, and Philip Phillips have succeeded in renegotiating our venue contract and rewriting our CFP timeline so that we will be in the best position to hold an in-person conference. We are grateful to them for their time, patience, and planning over the past year, and we hope to gather once again with our friends and colleagues to celebrate Poe.Finally, we plan to continue our monthly PSA online forums via Zoom. When Richard Kopley first proposed this idea to the executive committee, I admit that I was uncertain about how well the idea would be received. With hindsight I can see that my initial response was unwarranted. These sessions provide opportunities for our colleagues around the world to engage in discussions about various topics related to Poe, and I feel like I have been able to get to know so many more of our members through this series. For more information and access to recordings of our previous sessions, you can visit the link under Conferences on the PSA website, https://www.poestudiesassociation.org/conferences.Please watch our listserv for updates on these events and many more. I look forward to seeing you soon—whether online or in person.On January 7, 2021, more than thirty PSA members and other colleagues from sites across the globe joined together via Zoom for the organization’s annual MLA session—this year, a roundtable on “Revisiting Poe’s Poems.” Our four presenters—Maria Ishikawa, Stephen Rachman, Les Harrison, and Edward Whitley—discussed everything from Eureka to beating hearts, from creating an edition of Tamerlane to considering Whitman’s Poe. The dialogue that followed, we hope, will be a prequel to future conversations that take Poe’s poetry seriously and attempt to read it in new and compelling ways. The PSA session at the upcoming 2022 MLA Convention will be titled “Reading Poe Now.”Two panels will be presented at the 2021 American Literature Conference in Boston: “Poe in the Wireless Classroom” and “Poe’s Environmental Humanities.” I will chair the former, which will be prerecorded by the following PSA members: Susan Amper, Bronx Community College, presenting “Wi-finding Poe for the Thumb Generation”; Helciclever Barros da Silva Vitoriano, National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (Anisio, Brazil), presenting “‘The Raven’ Online: Mapping Reprints as well as Literary and Artistic Translations over the Internet”; Les Harrison, Virginia Commonwealth University, presenting “Editing Poe in the DH Classroom”; and Lesley Ginsberg, University of Colorado Springs, presenting “Teaching Poe with Digital Resources in 2020.” I plan to attend ALA in person, so maybe I will see you there for a conversation … six feet apart!As of February 22, 2021, we have 183 members. The checking account has $27,589.81. Restricted funds include: the Leslie Dameron Award, $1,501.88; the Gargano Award, $3,260.10; and the Quinn Award, $2,425.93. Restricted funds total $7,187.91. We hold three CDs, in the amounts of $6,322.74, $2,384.27, and $10,005.89. Adding the CDs to the checking account, we have a total of $46,302.21, but deducting the restricted funds, we have $39,114.30 in available funds.Please remember to renew your membership when due and notify me of change of mailing or email address. Tax-deductible donations to PSA are welcome.

American Literature Association Conference

American Literature Association Conference

Editor's Comment

There is perhaps no more dramatic evidence of the growing vitality of fiction in American creative writing than the fact that The New York Times devoted the entire magazine section of the Sunday paper on July 12, 2020 to original short stories. Linking the concept of a special issue of this type to the publication of Boccaccio's The Decameron in the fourteenth century, the editors hailed a similar triumph of art over illness with the publication of these innovative examples of contemporary literature. Although, as they have demonstrated continuously in their weekly book review section, they are largely innocent of the long history of the short-story cycle as well as the scholarly volumes that discuss it in detail, they use the coronavirus epidemic as a link to the bubonic plague that devasted Florence in 1348. Both occasions, they explain, produced an important body of contemporary stories unified not only by the circumstances of composition but by setting, character, and theme, many of them with plots that explore the vagaries of tragic love. The editorial comments do not go on to discuss what principals of unification bind the new narratives together, which leaves work for energetic young scholars to pursue, but they do provide an impressive list of stories by working authors making their way into the canon. These include Sophy Hollington, Abang, Richard A. Chance, Marly Gallardo, Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants, Alexander Harrison, Klaus Kremmerz, Kyutae Lee, Maria Medem, Linda Merod, and Monica Ramos. It is gratifying for a scholarly journal, in its first volume of publication, to be able to welcome such an impressive contribution to the growing body of modern short fiction made by the most important newspaper in America. We offer our congratulations.As editor, I had anticipated devoting this column in the autumn of 2020 to the panels the society had sponsored at the American Literature Association convention in Boston in May, but it was finally sacrificed to the problems surrounding a world-wide pandemic, including the injunction against gathering large groups in an indoor setting. For the same reason, we were also forced to cancel the international conference scheduled for October in Austria under the able leadership of Gudrun Grabher, the head of the department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. It was clear from even the preliminary plans for the event that it would have been a major contribution to literary studies with papers from scholars in more than a score of countries, important keynote addresses, discussion sessions, and informal gatherings in one of the most celebrated cities in the world. Its cancellation is a loss that must be borne, but we will move ahead with the planning of another international convention when the health situation permits. In the meantime, we are moving ahead to sponsor our usual panels and activities at the annual ALA convention in Boston in May of 2021.We are delighted to offer the articles and notes in this second number of the first volume of SASS. Our readers will find a broad range of subjects and approaches in our essays as well as a bibliography of important books by members of the society, a list that answers the numerous requests we have received over the last year. As this issue went into production, we immediately began the process of soliciting material for the spring number of volume 2 and evaluating the steady stream of essays that have been submitted to the journal. We hope to have a complete issue in hand by the beginning of March and to move ahead to reading submissions for the autumn number. Journal editors always sleep more comfortably when they are confident of filling the required pages for the upcoming production cycle with original and insightful scholarly investigations. We invite everyone to join us in this important process.

Abstracts for the Poe Panels at the American Literature Association Conference

Abstracts for the Poe Panels at the American Literature Association Conference

Editor's Comment

The Society for the Study of the American Short Story was established in 2010 at the annual American Literature Association convention. A group of us at that meeting lamented that despite the burgeoning scholarly attention to the genre, there was no professional body devoted to its study, no recurring meetings for the exchange of information about the field, no opportunity to engender fellowship among people with shared interests. With the cooperation of ALA, especially the leadership of Alfred Bendixen and Olivia Edenfield, we were able to establish an annual presence in the convention with two panels for the presentation of research and a business meeting to discuss organizational logistics.In due course we were nearly overwhelmed with the interest in presenting papers on our panels, so much so that we began planning a regional meeting devoted entirely to the American short story. Our first international symposium was directed by Olivia Edenfield, and it was held in beautiful Savannah in 2016, a walking city of enormous historical interest. It was attended by 140 academics from some 40 countries, and the conversations during the “off” hours were every bit as animated and engaging as those that were part of the formal program. At one of the luncheons, Dante James, a movie director, showed an original film based on Charles Chesnutt's “The Doll.”The growing involvement of international professors and graduate students prompted us to agree to a European venue for our next symposium, and Oliver Scheiding directed “The American Short Story: New Horizons” in Mainz, Germany, in October of 2017. In 2019 our international meeting was in New Orleans, and 127 scholars from 27 countries presented papers, served on panels, and participated in roundtable discussions of the genre. At the business conversations at that meeting we agreed to accept the invitation from the University of Innsbruck to host an international symposium in October of 2020. Gudrun M. Grabher, Chair of the Department of American Studies, will direct the event, which promises to further expand the reach of our organization throughout Europe.It became clear to us that the enormous momentum of interest in the American short story would justify the creation of a journal devoted to the subject, and after several months of discussions with possible publishers, we decided on the Pennsylvania State University Press, which had in place an impressive list of major periodicals. In conversations with the editorial staff of the press, we decided we would publish two issues each year, Spring and Fall, and the journal would be distributed in both paper and digital formats. We are thus delighted to celebrate the publication of our first issue, one reflecting the diverse interests and approaches of our members. In the future, our readers can expect to see standard articles and notes but also interviews, manuscript sections, photographs, bibliographies, and transcripts of discussion groups devoted to the genre.We interpret that genre in the broadest of terms, reaching back to the oral forms of Native Americans, the yarns and tales of rustic populations, and extending to the innovations of storytelling evident in the twenty-first century. In length, we are interested in everything from brief anecdotes to the novella, from religious parables to fables for children, from the raucous humor of the mining camp to the genteel recitations of the coffee table. But the central focus is likely to remain the traditional short stories published in popular magazines and in collections of fiction, including the enormously popular short-story cycles that have come to rival novels in the major national reviews. In their various forms, short stories, a form of literature a great deal older than the novel, have come of age, and we intend to study all of them.The cover of SASS features a photograph of Pattee Library at Pennsylvania State University, the central research collection for an historic graduate program. Fred Lewis Pattee was the first Professor of American Literature in the United States, a position he assumed after he had completed his M. A. at Dartmouth College. He held this seat from 1894 until 1928, when he was forced to retire because of age. Among his many books are A History of American Literature Since 1870 (1915) and, most pertinently, The Development of the American Short Story (1923), the first comprehensive study of the genre. Indeed, as even a quick glance at the book quickly reveals, Pattee knew thousands of American stories, and his chronicle of their history reveals his astonishingly perceptive reading and his humane good judgment. He certainly knew more about the subject than anyone else in the world, and his early work lies in the background of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story and this new scholarly journal. With humility and respect, we dedicate this issue to his memory.

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