Bulletin Board

Information must reach the editors at least six months before listed deadlines.

Announcements

Proposal Call for ChLA Sessions

As an allied organization of the Modern Language Association, ChLA regularly sponsors two program sessions at the annual MLA meeting. Proposals for session topics for the December 1996 meeting in Washington, D.C., should include the title of the proposed session, one or two sentences describing the session topic, the name of the person proposing the session, and an indication of willingness (yes or no) to chair the session. The person who chairs should not be presenting a paper at that session. Proposals for topics should be sent by 15 May 1995 to:

Rod McGillis, V.P. ChLA
Department of English
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4
e-mail: rmcgilli@acs.ucalgary.ca

A subcommittee will review the proposals and announce topics and chairs at ChLA's 1995 conference in June.

The three new MLA Children's Literature Division sessions for the 1996 meeting are about children's poetry, drama, and gay/lesbian issues. The new Children's Literature Division delegate to the MLA legislative assembly is Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Eastern Michigan University; the new member of the Children's Literature Division executive committee is Sandra Beckett, Brock University, Ontario.

1991 Book Award

The Children's Literature Association Book Award Committee is pleased to announce that it has awarded first prize to Barbara Wall's The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction (St. Martin's) and second prize to Virginia Wolf's Louise Fitzhugh (G.K. Hall/Twayne). The honorable mentions are Claudia Nelson's Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917 (Rutgers UP) and Patricia Demers's P. L. Travers (G.K. Hall/Twayne).

NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers

Subversion and Socialization in American Children's Literature, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 20 June to 12 August 1995. This seminar will explore texts written primarily for adolescent readers between 1780 and 1914, attempting to define the strategies and implications of authorial efforts to guide moral conduct through fiction. We will be chiefly interested in texts by American authors (e.g., Cooper, Stowe, Alcott, Twain, Alger, and Burnett), but will give substantial attention to European influences, including the influence of Rousseau and other radical innovators in theories of education. We will also consider British novels intended for adult readers, by Dickens and Charlotte Brontë among others, which were influential on American writers. We will survey many cultural criteria—including attitudes toward gender roles, adult authority, and domestic life—that shaped texts now considered classics of children's literature. Teachers of American Studies and nineteenth-century American literature (or other disciplines interested in cultural contexts) are encouraged to apply as well as those whose primary interest is in children's literature. For further information, please write: Professor John Seelye (Director), Department of English, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. For information and applications, write:

Kathy Harp
6032 Sanborn House
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
e-mail: Kathy.Harp@Dartmouth.edu

Paper Call

Christine Lac and Gwen Barnes-Karol solicit essays for a collection focusing on the changing textual and rhetorical construct of the female self in didactic literature for and about girls becoming women. The editors intend the collection to be interdisciplinary and cross-cultural and invite scholars from a wide variety of Western literary traditions to participate. The collection focuses on genres such as children's literature, sermons, domestic fiction, conduct books, didactic treatises, pamphlets, and periodicals. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the training of girls for their future moral, domestic, social, and/or professional roles; the image of the "angel in the house" and its subversion; competing discourses about women's roles within their time and culture (from 1500 on); and the elaboration of new images and models for girls and women.

Essays should be 15-25 pages in length and should conform to the MLA Style Manual. Inquiries and early submission of 500-word abstracts are highly encouraged. Deadline for receipt of completed essays and vitae is 1 May 1995. Send two copies of inquiries, abstracts and/or completed essays to:

Christine...