Sedgwick Society Newsletter - Research in Progress and Notes and Queries

Research in Progress and Notes and Queries

Kudos and thank-yous to Patricia Kalayjian for launching the first "Sedgwick Society" affiliated panel at the American Literature Association conference May 27-30, 1999, featuring panelists who all met at the Sedgwick Symposium in Stockbridge. Patricia will be presenting an essay entitled "A New England Tale: Sedgwick's Distopic Village." Ivy Schweitzer will read "Imaginative Conjunctions on the Imperial Frontier: Catharine Sedgwick reads Mungo Park." Rebecca Faery will present "Colonizing Captivity: Hope Leslie and the Tradition of the Indian Captivity Tale." And Melissa Homestead will contribute her essay, "'Without haranguing like a magnificent Corinne': Catharine Sedgwick's Clarence and Female Authorship in Ante-Bellum America." Victoria Clements and Lucinda Damon-Bach will chair the session. Again, thanks to Patricia Kalayjian, we will also be having our first formal Sedgwick Society organizational meeting at the ALA (and I have a deadline for finishing this newsletter!).

Paul Lewis, Chair of the English Department at Boston College, recently completed the essay "'Lectures or a Little Charity': Poor Visits in Antebellum Literature and Culture." The first part of Lewis's title refers to Whitman's Song of Myself, which hints at the sweep of this essay. In addition to Whitman, Lewis considers works by Alcott, Rowson, Sedgwick, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Child, Emerson, and Melville, as well as various tracts, letters, and 19th-century works of social reform. In particular, the essay examines Sedgwick's A Poor Rich Man and a Rich Poor Man and Melville's satire of the above, "Poor Man's Pudding, Rich Man's Crumbs." Watch for it.

Jenifer Banks, from Michigan State University, is eager to return to her book project on Sedgwick's letters. If anyone is having difficulty deciphering Sedgwick's handwriting, Jen is a good person to ask! Also keep in mind Lois Dellert Raskin, SUNY/Albany, whose dissertation includes study of Sedgwick's letters; she, too, is helpful with the Sedgwickian scrawl.

Symposium presenter Karen M. Woods has just received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship to work with an unfinished antislavery novel found among the Catharine Sedgwick Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. She will spend a month at the MHS in order to learn more about this abandoned project-when it was written, under what circumstances, and why it was discontinued. She'll be moving to Boston in the fall, and is eager for any leads or suggestions Sedgwick Society members may have for her. She's convinced that her research will alter our image of the "reluctant abolitionist."

Lucinda Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements are continuing their collaboration on a collection of recent Sedgwick criticism culled from the first Symposium.

Lucinda Damon-Bach also dreams of editing a reprint of her favorite novel, Redwood.

QUERIES
At the Symposium, several participants indicated that they were at work (or would like to be) on a variety of projects. How are you doing? I know first hand the multiple challenges of job searching while commuting to several jobs at once, so please think of these queries as gentle, supportive nudges. Melissa Homestead, any progress on the "informal, annotated Sedgwick bibliography"? Patricia Kalayjian, can we congratulate you on your book? John Austin, have you defended your dissertation? Still interested/working on reprinting Sedgwick's short stories?

Call for contributions to the Sedgwick Society Newsletter
If you have or would like to propose an article for the newsletter, please feel invited to contribute. The article should be 8 pages or less, that is, under 2000 words (counting notes and works cited).

Please e-mail me with your ideas and queries: lucinda.damonbach@salemstate.edu
Thank you in advance!

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