Call for Papers-Essay Collection-Women & the Everyday Realities of War

Call for contributions for the Essay Collection -Women and the Everyday Realities of War.

Abstract deadline 1st November 2006. Final essays will be requested by or before
1st April 2007.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Whether living through the British Civil War in the seventeenth century or the American
Civil War in the nineteenth century or today's conflicts in the Middle East,
women writers have historically chronicled their responses to war in ways that merge
politics and domesticity. Despite vast differences in time and place, works like
Jane Cavendish's manuscript writing (ca. 1640) shares with Hanan al-Shaykh's
more recent evocation of war-torn Beirut a sense that women's acts of everyday
resistance--making bread even when food supplies have been raided, for example--impact
the way war works, on metaphoric, physical, political, and ideological levels.

For this proposed collection, I am soliciting essays that address the ways in which
women confront the everyday realities of war in various mediums and from a range
of historical and cultural perspectives. Studies that take into account graphic
arts like Persepolis and other visual media as well as extra-literary text forms
like receipt books, account books, women's magazines, and performing arts are
welcome, as are studies that look at more traditional or canonical literary modes.

Essays should contextualize the works examined in order to provide a clear sense
of what material and cultural details informed the output of the women analyzed.
A primary goal of the collection is to suggest how women negotiate national and
political debates (obliquely and directly) through representations of household
order and disorder. Essays might approach this question by exploring female education,
cross-cultural exchange, publication/other forms of entry into the marketplace,
and generic experimentation, although other avenues of critical inquiry are encouraged
as well.

Please submit abstract to:
Dr. Emily Smith
Research Associate in Gender Studies, Lawrence University
c17women@earthlink.net