CFP: 19th C American Literary Seekers and Religious Communities
(1/10/07; ALA, 5/24/07-5/27/07)  full name / name of
organization:  Yothers, Brian contact email:  Proposed special
session for the American Literature Association (May = 24-7,
2007; Boston)  Literary Seekers and Religious Communities in
Nineteenth-Century = American Literature  Solitary seekers have
had a distinguished history in American literary = culture, from
fictional characters like Melville's Ishmael to essayists = such
as Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. With the recovery of
= nineteenth-century popular fiction, however, nineteenth-
century = Americanists have become increasingly aware of the
role of religious = communities in shaping fictional worlds--
from the influence of = evangelical piety in such novels as
Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World = to the exposition of the
social ethics of liberal Christianity in = Charles Sheldon's In
His Steps. We invite papers that explore what it = would mean to
develop a reading of nineteenth