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Panel on Maria Cummins for 2008 American Literature Association Conference
| Location: | California, United States |
| Call for Papers Date: | 2008-01-10 (Archive) |
| Date Submitted: |
2007-09-17 |
| Announcement ID: |
158397 |
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“Maria Susanna Cummins: A ‘Scribbling Woman’ Reconsidered.” In writing The Lamplighter (1854) Maria Cummins achieved two memorable feats: she wrote one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth-century, and she inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notorious condemnation of the “d——d mob of scribbling women” whose “trash” was devoured by the masses. Cummins’s other three novels, while not as popular, were perhaps also less “trashy” for Hawthorne, if by this we mean they were increasingly dark and conflicted in psychological and political terms. While all four of Cummins’s novels are grounded in the era’s taste for sympathy and sentiment, their artistic polish barely conceals Cummins’s struggle with contemporary issues no less urgent than those that preoccupied pessimistic male writers like Hawthorne. This panel invites papers that penetrate the paradoxes and aporias lying just below the surface of sentiment in four novels that, while seeming on first glance conventional in theme and tone, contain knotty reflections on race, class, gender, art, language, and other facets of nineteenth-century American culture. Steven Hamelman, Department of English, Coastal Carolina University, steveh@coastal.edu.
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Steven Hamelman
Department of English
Coastal Carolina University
PO Box 261954
Conway, SC 29528-6054
843-349-2623
Email: steveh@coastal.edu
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