We are seeking submissions for the EDIS Panel at the 2024 C19 Conference (Pasadena, California, March 14-16, 2024) on the following topic:

Rather than consider how poetry in America’s long nineteenth century might thematize or imagine endings (Millenialist or otherwise), this proposed panel investigates how their forms enact them. Much as Neil Hertz’s book on psychoanalysis (from which we take our title) seeks to explore the limits of the sublime as a mode of understanding, this panel also considers the degree to which line endings might reveal historical, conceptual or formal insight. Considering recent work in historical poetics, new formalism and new historicism, our proposed panel invites papers that explore particular poem or line endings and their entanglements with larger cultural and political contexts. Given that Emily Dickinson writes the majority of her poems during the 1859-65 period and given poetry’s importance to anti-slavery movements writ large, we invite papers that either work from her poems as a point of departure or work comparatively between Dickinson and other poets of the long nineteenth century, such as Phillis Wheatley Peters, Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Moses Horton, to name a few possibilities. We are particularly interested in how poetic form works both with and against Millenialist imaginaries.

Please send a 250 word abstract and brief bio to Elizabeth Petrino at epetrino@fairfield.edu> and Wendy Tronrud at Wendy.Tronrud@qc.cuny.edu> by August 15th.