With Monika Elbert and Julie E. Hall, I am seeking potential
contributors for a proposed collection on the work of Elizabeth Peabody,
Mary Peabody Mann, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, tentatively titled
Reinventing the Peabody Sisters. Our collection would be an outgrowth of our
successful MLA 2000 session of the same title. In that panel, we sought to
redefine the Peabody sisters' relationship to the literary and political
movements of the mid-nineteenth century. Among the titles of the papers
were, "Desire, Transgression, and Sophia Hawthorne's 'Notes in England and
Italy'," "Subtle, Shifting, and Subverted Power: Mary Peabody Mann's
Innovative Model for the True Woman," and "Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's
Problematic Feminism and the Feminization of Transcendentalism." Our book
will expand the discussion that we started at the MLA Convention, as
described below:
While each a creative force in her own right, Elizabeth Peabody, Mary
Mann, and Sophia Hawthorne typically are read in light of others, most
sympathetically as helpmate, muse, protegee, or colleague to
nineteenth-century American luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace
Mann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Bronson Alcott. Even an undeniably public
performer like Elizabeth Peabody figures most vividly to some readers as the
prototype for Henry James's Miss Birdseye or as a "minor Margaret Fuller."
In spite of the tendency to romanticize, to vilify, or to erase their
influence and literary production, contemporary scholarship has identified
these women not only as vital participants in negotiating their century's
struggle with ideological dictates of public and private spheres, but in
determining nineteenth-century American culture. Accordingly, our
collection intends not only to recover significant writers, but to
reconsider the limited, loathed, or idealized roles into which each has been
cast. A reconfiguration of the sisters in regard to one another, as
dynamic, conversant forces in a venture to revolutionize society, will also
be explored.
If you are interested in submitting an essay, please send me a short
abstract of two pages by 1 August 2001. E-mail submissions are
particularly welcome, as is work on Mary Peabody Mann, the least-studied of
these writers, or essays on these women as a collective of nonetheless
individualized voices.
Thanks,
Katharine Rodier
Associate Professor of English
Marshall University
400 Hal Greer Blvd.
Huntington WV 25755-2646
<rodier@marshall.edu>
fax: (304) 696-2448
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