Updated Call for Papers: Great Excursions: Travel and the Antebellum Literary Imagination
A symposium sponsored by the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society
Deadline for Proposals Extended to Feb. 21
Hilton St. Louis Downtown, St. Louis, MO
June 5-8, 2014
In honor of Sedgwick’s 225th birthday and her 1854 Midwestern trip (the farthest west she ever traveled), the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society will convene its 7th symposium in St. Louis, featuring plenary speakers Melissa Homestead, Professor of English at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Kate Culkin, Associate Professor of History at Bronx Community College.
The Society invites proposals that consider the work of Sedgwick or her close contemporaries through the lens of the “excursion” broadly construed—literal or imaginary or stylistic “travel” away from, toward, or through any of topics addressed in her “Great Excursion to the Falls of St. Anthony” sketch or other works.
Much of Catharine Sedgwick’s writing features an excursion of some kind, but none as fantastic in both scale and scope as her “Great Excursion to the Falls of St. Anthony” in June 1854. In the span of 20 days, Sedgwick and approximately 1,000 other excursionists traveled 3,600 miles by rail and steamboat as guests of the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad, the first railroad to reach the Mississippi River from the east coast. Participants traveled individually by train to convene in Chicago, continued west together by rail to Rock Island, Illinois, then north by steamboat toward the headwaters of the Mississippi—beyond St. Paul/Minneapolis to the “Falls of St. Anthony”—then headed downriver to St. Louis before returning to their (mostly) New England homes. The celebrity tour—comprised almost exclusively of northern men (with some women but very few southerners)—included notable politicians, historians, clergymen, scientists, doctors, bankers, publishers, and authors, including Caroline Kirkland and Elizabeth Oakes Smith.
In her letter-cum-sketch “The Great Excursion to the Falls of St. Anthony,” Sedgwick claimed that this 1854 adventure was “an illustration and proof of the advancement of true civilization.” “Proof” to whom? What kind(s) of “advancement”? And what does she mean by “true civilization?” These questions prompt others: What about a journey is “worth” paying attention to and/or commemorating? How does travel change the traveler? What are the purposes of writing about one’s travels? How does an excursion “transport” or “transform” a writer/her characters/her readers?
Please e-mail proposals of no more than 250 words by Friday, Feb. 21, 2014, to Jenifer Elmore, CMSS Second Vice-President for Programs: Jenifer_Elmore@pba.edu
To read Sedgwick’s “Great Excursion” sketch, read our list of suggested topics, and find more information about the conference itself, visit the CMSS website at http://cmsedgwicksociety.org
SSAWW 