Dreaming of Christmas: Rediscovering the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Christmas Story
Proposal Deadline: May 1, 2024
Final Essay Deadline: October 15, 2024
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Christmas story was a key driver of the publishing industry on both sides of the Atlantic. Christmas editions of magazines and newspapers, saturated with seasonal stories, sold more copies than at any other time of the year. Editors competed for the best Christmas copy from the most prominent contemporary authors, with commensurate price tags. Christmas and its emerging tropes were also deeply implicated in the shifting contours of the literary landscape across the nineteenth century: Christmas played a key role in the establishment of sentimental literary culture, just as it provoked literary realists; it stimulated the development of diverse genres, from children’s literature to stories of the supernatural. For all that, however, the vital place of Christmas in the Transatlantic literary life of the nineteenth century remains profoundly neglected. While seasonally inflected cultural touchstones like A Christmas Carol and Little Women still claim significant attention, thousands of stories, published each December in journals across Britain and America, linger unread and unexamined; countless novels and poems with Christmas themes share the same fate. As such, our sense of the nineteenth-century literary world remains distorted, warped around a Christmas-shaped void. This edited collection therefore seeks to rediscover, reexamine, and reframe the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Christmas Story. We are interested in essays which examine any aspect of the literary use of Christmas across the nineteenth century. Essays may address, but aren’t limited to:
- Christmas gift books
- Christmas and the publishing industry
- Christmas and sentimental culture
- Christmas and literary realism
- The Christmas story as a genre
- Christmas and the supernatural
- Christmas and children’s literature
- Christmas and gender
- Christmas and race
- Christmas and Empire
- Christmas and cultures of protest
- Christmas and the Transatlantic
- adaptations of nineteenth-century Christmas stories
- Christmas and abolition
- Christmas and the South
- Christmas food
- Christmas and religion
Please send proposals of roughly 300-500 words, a short bio, and any other inquiries to editors Monika Elbert (elbertm@mail.montclair.edu) and Thomas Ruys Smith (thomas.smith@uea.ac.uk) by May 1st, 2024. Final essays (roughly 7000 words) will be due by October 15th, 2024.