New Editor for Stephen Crane Studies: John Dudley

After being on hiatus in 2021 due to the global pandemic, Stephen Crane Studies will resume publication in 2022 under the editorship of Dr. John Dudley, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Dakota. We look forward to seeing many of you at ALA in Chicago and welcome your submissions for the journal. For more information, visit https://stephencranesociety.wordpress.com/stephen-crane-studies/.

Stephen Crane Panels and Papers at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, May 26-29, 2022

Updated 4/28/22

Thursday, May 26, 3:00-4:20 p.m.

Session 5-H: New Directions in Stephen Crane Scholarship 
Organized by the Stephen Crane Society
Chair: Steven Frye, California State University Bakersfield

1.     “The ‘Reader of Sounds’: Alliteration and the Production of Types in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” Antonia Clark Halstead, Brown University

2.     “The Ontological Danger of the Work Ethic: Stephen Crane’s Critique,” Ariannah Kubli, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

3.     “Cowardice in The Black Riders and Other Lines,” Carleigh Smith, Clarks Summit University

Saturday, May 28, 1:00-2:20 p.m.

Session 17-I American Literary Naturalism and the Asian(ized) Other
Chair: Adam H. Wood, Valdosta State University
Organized by the Frank Norris Society

1. “Frank Norris’s Yellow Peril Commodities: Feminized Labor and Asian Commodification in Frank
   Norris’s Fiction.” Ryan Wander, The College of Idaho
2. “Stephen Crane’s Orient: Defining the Borders and Etching Our the Orientalist Thought.” Ece
   Ergin, University of Freiburg
3. “Frank Norris’s Sinophobia/Sinophilia.” Sheng-mei Ma, Michigan State University

Burning Boy: Paul Auster on the Extraordinary Life and Work of Stephen Crane, October 28, 6-7 p.m. EST

Thursday, October 28th

6:00 – 7:00 pm EST

Registration link:

Please note: This is a unique registration link for Stephen Crane Society invitees.

Event blurb

LOA Live presents

Burning Boy: Paul Auster on the Extraordinary Life and Work of Stephen Crane

Thursday, October 28th

6:00 – 7:00 pm EST

In a remarkable ten-year career cut short by death from tuberculosis at twenty-eight, Stephen Crane ushered American literature into the twentieth century. Join novelist, poet, and screenwriter Paul Auster, author of the riveting new Crane biography Burning Boy, for a conversation about the singular life story and even more singular genius behind the stories, stark, haunting poems, and indelible The Red Badge of Courage.

REGISTER

CFP: Stephen Crane Society Panels at ALA (Deadline: January 15, 2022)

Call for Papers: Stephen Crane Society Panels at ALA 2022

The Stephen Crane Society will sponsor two sessions at the American Literature Association Conference at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago on May 26-29, 2022.

All topics are welcome. Here, for example, are a few suggestions:

• Crane’s depiction of war
• Crane and the arts (e. g., painting, photography, music)
• Crane’s depiction of the city
• Crane’s poetry
• Crane’s journalism
• the Sullivan County tales and sketches
• the Western stories
• the Whilomville stories
• one of Crane’s lesser-known novels (The Third Violet, Active Service, or The O’Ruddy)
• Crane’s depiction of women
• Crane’s relationship with other writers, e. g., Garland, Howells, Conrad, or Frederic
• Crane’s influence on later writers

Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes.

You may also propose a roundtable discussion on, say, teaching Crane’s short stories.

Please email abstracts or papers of no more than ten double-spaced pages by January 15, 2022, to the program chair:

Paul Sorrentino

psorrent@vt.edu

For more information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org. If you have specific questions about ALA, contact the Conference Director, Professor Leslie Petty, at pettyl@rhodes.edu or the Executive Director of ALA, Professor Alfred Bendixen, at ab23@princeton.edu.

Cancelled: Stephen Crane 150th Anniversary Symposium

Dear colleagues,
For a variety of reasons, with uncertainties about the development ofthe current pandemic situation topping the list, we will have to scrap the Stephen Crane 150th Anniversary symposium. We decided early on that we were either going to have a full-scale, three-dimensional event, or no event at all.

Since there is currently no way telling which way the development is going to tilt, and before we actually book the hotel rooms that we only reserved so far, and end up paying a lot of money we don’t have for an event that has to be called off, we decided to abandon the project.

Thank you for your interest in the symposium, and sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Best wishes,

Wolfgang Hochbruck

New Books: The Red Badge to Gettysburg (novel) by Charles LaRocca

The above mentioned book is now available on the Amazon bookstore site as an ebook. The paperback edition will be coming soon. — Chuck LaRocca

The Red Badge to Gettysburg

An Episode of the American Civil War

By Charles LaRocca

The Civil War is in its third year with no end in sight. On every front, the Confederate armies seem to be invincible. At the recent Battle of Chancellorsville, the combination of Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall Jackson” is once again victorious. The much larger Army of the Potomac has been defeated and is in retreat. But Private Henry Fleming of the 304^th New York Volunteers, the “youth” who ran away in Stephen Crane’s novel, The Red Badge of Courage, does not feel defeated. He fought well, even captured a Confederate battle flag for which he is roundly congratulated by his “pards” and by the officers of the Regiment. For his bravery and leadership ability, he will be promoted to the rank of 2^nd Sergeant.

The 304^th New York Infantry marches back to winter camp, licks its wounds and prepares for the summer campaign. Henry returns to the simple log hut where he and his friend Wilson spent the winter along with two other soldiers who did not come back from Chancellorsville. They invite two brothers, Patrick and Paul Walker, to share their cabin and settle down to the normal routine of army life.

 Henry does not have the least idea as to the duties of a 2^nd Sergeant, but he knows that it is a difficult job with a lot of responsibility. He will be taught those duties by 1^st Sergeant Sam Kneely, a recent addition to the Regiment who arrives in camp after the battle. Sam is accompanied by a young Lieutenant named Milnor Brown who will become the new commander of the Company. Both are combat veterans who served in the New York State Militia. But these two men turn out to be much more than they appear. They are special agents sent by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to investigate a very small but dangerous group of Nativists, separate from the Copperhead anti-war Democrats, who are suspected of spreading discord in the army. The Nativists are advocates of white supremacy who want to weaken army moral. They abhor Catholics, especially recent Irish and German immigrants, and seek to undermine Lincoln’s policy of emancipation and his plan to recruit and arm black soldiers.

The Nativists know that working men in the north will oppose the new Enrollment Act of 1863, also known as the Military Draft Act, which makes all males, ages 20 to 45, liable to be drafted into the Union army. The law is very unpopular in part because it exempts from military service anyone who can pay a $300 “commutation fee” or hire a substitute. The well-off can afford the fee but very few immigrant laborers have that kind of money to spare. The Nativists plan to whip up opposition and encourage violent riots to oppose the draft all over the north. They hope to foment a violent insurgency that will undermine the Constitution, bring down the Federal government, and insure white supremacy. They will steal, murder, and incite to riot to achieve their goals.

Henry must learn his new job and deal with the Nativist menace while preparing himself and his men for the battles they all know are coming. Ahead lay events that will change the course of American history.

CFP Updated and Deadline Extended: The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism (Deadline 2.17.21)

UPDATED AND DEADLINE EXTENDED: 

Call for proposals  

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism 

Editors: Kenneth K Brandt and Karin M Danielsson 

At the end of the 19^th century, American authors such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London were influenced by new advances in science—notably the idea of evolution. Nature and the nonhuman were crucial for these writers, whom scholars   most often group under the rubric of American literary naturalists. Traditional scholarship on American literary naturalism has closely attended to various environmental pressures in urban and wilderness settings, but scholars have paid much less attention to the naturalists’ investigations into the nonhuman, such as animals, plants, landscapes, houses, or weather. To extend and deepen our understanding of this under-researched field, we propose a volume of essays that offers a wide variety of innovative critical approaches to the nonhuman in American naturalist literature. We welcome studies based in ecocriticism, animal studies, new materialism, narrative theory, or ethics. We are receptive to essay proposals focused on the core naturalists from around 1900 as well as more contemporary writers in the naturalist tradition. Proposals may focus on authors including Crane, Norris, London, Wharton, Garland, Dreiser, Chopin, Dunbar, Sinclair, Twain, Glasgow, Frederic, Cather, O’Neill, Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, Petry, Dos Passos, Larsen, Farrell, Hammett, Cain and others. More recent writers may include Oates, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Morrison, McCarthy, Wilson, Pynchon, and others. The editors are particularly interested in proposals on Larsen, Dreiser, Wright, Twain, Petry, and authors in the SF, cyberpunk, and biopunk traditions.  

Possible topic areas might include but are not limited to: 

• Animal agency    
• Anthropomorphism 
• Nonhuman sentience 
• Ecology 
• Ethology 
• Evolution 
• Farming 
• Forests, trees, plants 
• Houses and other structures 
• Human–nonhuman intersubjectivity 
• Landscape and place 
• Physical or environmental transformations   
• Posthumanism 
• Speciesism 
• Technology’s intersections with the nonhuman 
• Weather and climate 
• Wild, feral, and domestic nonhumans 

The Lexington Books Ecocritical Theory and Practice series editor has expressed a strong interest in the project and has requested a full proposal. It is the publisher’s wish that authors or at least one co-author holds a PhD. 

We invite essay proposals of a maximum of 500 words on any topic relating to the nonhuman in American literary naturalism by the deadline of 17 February, 2021. Please include a title, a maximum of five key words, and a brief biography. We aim to reply to respondents by 25 February 2021, and full drafts of essays (5000–8000 words) will be due 1 September 2021. Please send a 500-word maximum proposal and a brief biography to karin.molander.danielsson@mdh.se and kbrandt@scad.edu by 17 February, 2021. 

CFP: Stephen Crane Symposium (Deadline: February 28, 2021)

Call for Papers:   Stephen Crane Symposium

The town of Badenweiler (Baden-Württemberg) and the English Department of the Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg will jointly celebrate the 150^th birthday of American writer Stephen Crane. Crane succumbed to tuberculosis in Badenweiler on June 5^th, 1900, having arrived there only a few days earlier.

The symposium will take place in Badenweiler, Oct. 31^st and Nov. 1^st.

Papers are invited especially on the topic of Stephen Crane’s Europe: He lived in England, travelled to Ireland, passed through France and Switzerland, reported on the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, and he died in Germany. But did he develop a relation to any of these places? How much did he know about where he was, and what he was seeing? And was he even interested? Attempts at placing Crane within the larger context of the Anglo- / American presence along the Upper Rhine are also welcome.

Submission deadline: Feb. 28^th 2021. Successful submissions will be contacted by March 15^th

Sent submissions to: wolfgang.hochbruck@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

Happy birthday to Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871)

Happy birthday to Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871)!

CFP: Stephen Crane Panels at ALA 2021

 Call for Papers

Stephen Crane Society

ALA 2021

The Stephen Crane Society will sponsor two sessions at the American Literature Association Conference at the Westin Copley Place in Boston on May 27-31, 2021. All topics are welcome. Here, for example, are a few suggestions:

• Crane’s depiction of war
• Crane and the arts (e. g., painting, photography, music)
• Crane’s depiction of the city
• Crane’s poetry
• Crane’s journalism
• the Sullivan County tales and sketches
• the Western stories
• the Whilomville stories
• one of Crane’s lesser-known novels (The Third Violet, Active Service, or The O’Ruddy)
• Crane’s depiction of women
• Crane’s relationship with other writers, e. g., Garland, Howells, Conrad, or Frederic
• Crane’s influence on later writers

Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes.

You may also propose a roundtable discussion on, say, teaching Crane’s short stories.

Please email abstracts or papers of no more than ten double-spaced pages by January 31, 2021, to the program chair:

Paul Sorrentino

psorrent@vt.edu

For more information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org. If you have specific questions about ALA, contact the Conference Co-Director and Executive Coordinator of ALA, Professor Olivia Carr Edenfield, at carr@georgiasouthern.edu or the Executive Director of ALA, Professor Alfred Bendixen, at ab23@princeton.edu.