Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Scholarship credits Sarah Grand with devising the term “New Woman” in 1894, although occasional differing claims nod to others, Lady Mary Jeune, for instance, in 1889. The label, which characterized and categorized the independent, self-supporting woman, quickly became popular in late Victorian culture and has resurfaced in our fascination with the Neo-Victorian. In their variety and scope, representations of the New Woman were, as New Woman scholars like Lyn Pyckett have established, ambivalent. Continued contributions to New Woman studies broaden the scope, regularly adding names of women newly foregrounded or even discovered. This panel investigates the fluid and the vacillating, the ever-evolving realm of New Woman scholarship with questions not exclusive to the following: Who are the other neglected fin-de-siècle women writers, artists, and journalists we can add to the New Woman canon? How do these additions expand or change our definitions of a female figure who rebelled against the period’s gender norms and social mores? How does opening geographic boundaries associated with the ur-New Woman enrich our understanding of British fin-de-siècle proto-feminism and globalize that reformist and creative energy? How does Neo-Victorian fiction and film complicate, corrupt, simplify or in some other way alter our understanding of the New Woman? The panel aims to investigate these and other questions on the New Woman and New Woman studies.
Please submit 250-300-word abstracts no later than September 30th through the NeMLA portal at
https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/