April 16-19, 2009 West Virginia University Morgantown, West Virginia

Region, History, Environment: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Her Contemporaries Write the Natural World

The eighth biennial meeting of the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society will focus on Woolson’s knowledge of and interest in the natural environment as she rendered it in her travel sketches, fiction, poetry, and letters. All papers are welcome, but participants might consider the ways in which Woolson’s contemporaries were engaging specific physical locations, as well as more generally depicting land and landscape.

Possible topics include but are not limited to these:

landscapes, real and imagined tourism as industry swamps, coastlines, mountains, rivers the development of regional identities urban/rural tensions travel writing the idea of wilderness writing Appalachia women and mechanized industry natural science, plants, collecting railroads, mass transportation botany in the nineteenth century late nineteenth-century industrialization literature and ecology the environmental consciousness of Woolson’s contemporaries, beginning with Rebecca Harding Davis, Mary Murfree, and Sarah Orne Jewett

Please send 250 word abstracts to Kathryn McKee (kmckee@olemiss.edu) at the University of Mississippi, Department of English, University, MS 38677 by October 1, 2008.