CFP: Edited Volume “Formats and Institutions of American Literary Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century”

Editors: Philipp Löffler (Heidelberg) and Alexander Starre (Berlin)

Deadline for Abstracts: October 31, 2025

This edited collection addresses alternative modes of writing nineteenth-century literary history, spanning the evolution of the literary field from a narrow patronage system in the 1810s and 1820s to a broad and expanding commercial literary market around 1900. The framing of the volume cuts across traditional period distinctions, from the early Republic to turn-of-thetwentieth-century naturalism, as well as canonized literary movements. The project will highlight a startling variety of oftentimes simultaneous formats of writing and of literary publishing, as well as private and public modes of circulating literary texts, at a time when book trading networks were only starting to emerge.

The period model of literary history has evolved from a longstanding academic commitment to linear, progressive story-telling and corresponding assumptions about the stylistic, thematic, or conceptual coherence among bodies of literary texts. Notwithstanding the pedagogical and fieldshaping merits of the period model, this edited volume is designed to complement more conventional accounts of nineteenth-century literary culture. Its goal is to highlight the extent to which literary culture—across its various formal-stylistic manifestations—evades literaryhistorical grand narratives and instead urges us to acknowledge the radical particularity of individual readers, writers, and the socio-institutional contexts they share.

Rather than subjecting this inchoate field of literary practice to the typologies of modern academic historiography, we wish to approach the long nineteenth century by embedding individual texts, authors, and readers within concrete fields of literary activity, including (1) literary institutions (e.g., publishers, editors, magazines…), (2) facilities of private and public learning (e.g. schools, colleges, lyceums, private reading clubs, …), and (3) paratextual formats of literary communication (forewords, advertisements, newspaper columns, bibliographies).

• We seek essays that address questions including, but are not limited to the following: How do recently (re-)discovered or newly accessible collections of nineteenth-century sources allow for reframings of literary history?
• How did hierarchies of taste emerge and evolve across the nineteenth century?
• How did institutional framings of literary culture connect with American ideas of race and gender?
• How did publishers, libraries, schools, colleges, and professional societies enable and/or constrain certain types of literary activity?
• Which formats of literary communication outside the standard lines of novels, short stories, and poems were instrumental to C19 literary culture?
• Which functions do tangible archives or the idea of a symbolic “archive” perform in today’s C19 scholarship?

We invite short proposals (250 words) for chapters in this volume to be submitted by October 31, 2025. We explicitly encourage early career researchers working in C19 studies to contribute. The tentative deadline for finished chapter drafts is April 30, 2026.

The volume is projected to appear in 2027 in the ANGLIA book series published by De Gruyter (Berlin).

Please send your abstracts and a short biographical statement to al**************@*******in.de and ph**************@***************rg.de.