Research Society for American Periodicals Panels at Recent and Upcoming Meetings

American Literature Association, Boston, MA, May 2009

Panel 1: Poetry and American Periodicals

Chair: Kim Martin Long, Shippensburg University

• "Poetry and Publius: Newspaper Poetry during the Ratification Period," Geordan Patterson, University of Alberta

• "American Newspaper Poetry at the Rise of the Penny Press," Elizabeth Lorang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• "Rethinking the Occasional: 19th Century Black Women's Newspaper Poetry," Eric Gardner, Saginaw Valley State University

• "Staying Local: William Carlos Williams and Newspaper Poetry," Christopher MacGowan, William and Mary

• Respondent: Robert Scholnick, William and Mary

Panel 2: Reading and Studying Periodicals in Digital Form: A Round Table Discussion

Chair: Kathleen Diffley, University of Iowa

• "American Periodicals Series Online: Demonstration and Discussion," Elizabeth Lorang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• "American Periodicals Series Online: A View from the Publisher," Jo-Anne Hogan, ProQuest

• "If A is like B: The Theoretical Implications of Reading Digital Periodicals," Ingrid Satelmajer, University of Maryland, College Park

Society for the Study of American Women Writers, Philadelphia, PA, October 2009

Panel 1: Women Periodical Essayists

This panel examines the influence of women periodical essayists from Judith Sargent Murray's "Gleaner" in the late 18th century through Fanny Fern and beyond. Even as the novel increasingly offered more visible and profitable avenues for authorial careers, many women writers continued to focus on the essay form and work primarily in periodicals. The papers in this panel examines how and why women writers utilized, revised and interrogated traditional conventions of the essay and its related forms.

• Elizabeth Hewitt, "Judith Sargent Murray: Gendering Economics in the Massachusetts Magazine"

• Carolyn Karcher, "Fanny Fern in the Context of the New York Ledger"

• Sara Lindey, "Between Books & Periodicals: Fanny Fern's Female Reader"

• Edward Whitley, "The Queen of Bohemia and The Saturday Press: Ada Clare's Periodical Essays and the Making of Bohemian New York"

• Chair, Jared Gardner

Panel 2: Advice Columns

Women have long been associated with the magazine advice column, a widely disparaged form. But advice columns have allowed women writers a sustained voice in magazines, allowed women readers to hear one another's voices through their letters, while they have shaped emotional norms. As repositories of hopes and dreams, advice writers have become celebrities and public figures. This panel looks at the history and practice of advice columns and columnists from the 19th century to the present, and includes a historian as a practicing advice columnist.

• Laura Hutelmyer, "Using the Words of Others in an African American Advice Column: Exchange Papers in 'Our Women's Department' "

• Jean Lutes, "Women Writers and Mass-Produced Emotional Expression: How the Grandmother of Advice Columns Got Us Started"

• Julia Golia, " 'Our Column Mother': The Newspaper Advice Columnist as Journalist and Icon, 1895-1955"

• Emily Toth, "What Ms. Mentor Knows, or How Advice Writing Changes Women"

• Chair: Ellen Gruber Garvey

Panel 3: Periodical Chat Rooms: Writers Talk Amongst Themselves in Public, From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries

Periodicals often contain letters columns and other arenas for conversing with the editors and with other readers. These rarely studied features build the sense of community that the periodical convenes. This panel looks at how women have contributed to that as writers or editors of such features. These arenas, with their low thresholds for entry, offer special opportunities for using the periodical for conversation. Our papers address the sometimes strategic use of periodicals for conversation among women writing—in student magazines, for example, where they were used to secure women's place in institutions of higher education. Periodicals addressing the specific constituency of missionary papers solidified their sense of community via exchanges of letters and advice. The tradition of women's conversation within and between periodicals has continued in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century in grrrlzines, with young women writing to comment and influence one another on issues of race.

• Jared Gardner, "'A Thousand-Audience Power': Fandom, Advice, and Ownership in the Letters Pages of the New-York Ledger"

• L. Jill Lemberton, "Letter Columns in Late Nineteenth-Century Student Magazines: Women's Transatlantic Strategies for Securing Access to Elite Higher Education"

• Sarah Robbins, "Building Christian Commitment through Magazines' Advice to Readers...