The Henry James Review
Conferences and Calls for Papers

Leon Edel Prize

The Leon Edel Prize will be awarded for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar. The prize carries with it an award of $150, and the prize-winning essay will be published in HJR. The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply. Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published. Please follow regular HJR guidelines as to format, and identify essays as submissions for the Leon Edel Prize. A brief curriculum vitae should be included. Deadline: November 1, 2009.

The Women

Thirty years ago, the new fields of Women’s Studies and Feminist Criticism looked with interest at the fiction of Henry James. For many, his work offered an exception to the general misogyny of American male writing; for others, the Master’s oeuvre was irredeemably patriarchal. Those early studies re-oriented our critical understandings of Henry James. Recent archival, biographical, critical, and creative work have again shifted how we understand James’s life and writing and re-opened this topic. The Fall 2010 special issue of the Henry James Review seeks to explore, broadly, how we read James with women in the twenty-first century.

Some possible topics include:

• Women’s Studies’ Henry James vs. Gender Studies’ Henry James
• Letters to, from, and about women
• Women’s love, loving women
• Female bodies: beauty, sex, motherhood, health, disability
• James and female writers: predecessors, contemporaries, and followers; borrowings, criticism, influence, depictions
• Women artists’ James/James’s women artists: depiction, criticism, translation
• Fashion, clothing, interior decoration, objects
• Gendered politics: suffrage, nationalism, feminism, the law
• Women and money: work, consumption, inheritance, gifts, ownership, commodification
• Actresses: depictions, correspondence, casting, performances
• Hospitality: hostesses, salons, visits, parties
• Female family: mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces

Contributions should be submitted in duplicate and produced according to MLA style. Please enclose a cover letter identifying your manuscript as a Forum submission. Also include return postage. One-page proposals or short (10-12 pages) essays should be sent by March 1, 2010, to:

Susan M. Griffin, Editor
Henry James Review
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292
USA

Teaching James

In Fall 1996, HJR published a special forum issue on "Teaching James" in order to open the journal to conversation on the ways in which we teach James. Readers' responses to that issue indicate that the many HJR readers who are teachers of James would like to continue discussing pedagogies. To that end, HJR will now accept submissions of short essays on teaching James. Such essays will undergo HJR's normal, refereed submission process and, if accepted, be published in regular issues of the journal. HJR's primary function will continue to be, of course, the publication of scholarly and critical work on Henry James. Essays on pedagogy will simply become an added, occasional feature of the journal that allows us to explore the ways in which teaching and scholarship nourish one another. I will be happy to consult with authors about potential submissions.