Collection: Crossing Borders: Women and Communities of Letters, 1500-1700

We have extended the deadline for papers for the volume Crossing Borders: Women and Communities of Letters, 1500-1700 to April 15, 2007. We would like to receive proposals by December 31, 2006.

We welcome submissions for a volume of essays that addresses issues discussed in the two-part panel sessions called Crossing Borders: Learned Women and Communities of Letters presented at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in 2005.

The goals of this volume are to examine ways in which women participated in communities of letters, to explore how cultural, national, political, and/or religious “borders” were crossed in such communities, and to consider ways in which gender influenced the kinds of participation that occurred in such communities.

We are especially interested in essays that consider one or more of these general goals as they address such topics as the following:
--cross-cultural/transnational membership in communities of writers and readers
--perceptions of communities of writers and readers
--circles of women
--imagined or real literary circles, academies, coteries, and salons --crossing gender borders in literary circles --cross cultural/transnational influences regarding material trends and literary practices
--cross-cultural/transnational influences regarding genre and/or subject
matter
--conflations of political and religious agendas, national and international
implications
--relationships between women’s book production and reception --readerships of specific books or other texts
--editors with agendas
--manuscript circulation and/or editing and group authorship
--miscellanies and their relationships to specific groups
--intertextuality between works by women writers
--influence between women writers or between men and women writers

Essays should be double-spaced and should not exceed 35 pages or 8750 words, including notes. Please use Chicago Manual of Style footnotes, following the fifteenth edition. Three hard copies plus one electronic copy should be sent to Julie Campbell
Associate Professor
Department of English
Eastern Illinois University
600 Lincoln Avenue
Charleston, IL 61920-3099

Please address queries to Julie Campbell, jdcampbell@eiu.edu, Gabriella Eschrich, geschric@umd.umich.edu, or Anne Larsen, alarsen@hope.edu.