Every year sees the republication of Stowe’s first and most famous novel.  This edition, however, is unique: in addition to reprinting all of the prefaces that Stowe wrote for authorized European republications of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this Broadview edition gathers a remarkably diverse range of primary materials that shed light on the development and unprecedented reception of Stowe’s controversial text.  The volume’s appendices include the original illustrations that accompanied the first American edition of the novel; abolitionist, colonizationist, and proslavery views on slavery; letters that Stowe wrote before and just after the publication of her novel; the full text of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; American responses to the novel (including those of abolitionist, African American, proslavery, and Southern readers); European reviews (including three previously untranslated foreign language reviews); and a gallery of visual images that recapture how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was reproduced both on stage and in film.  With an introduction that preserves the dramatic suspense of Stowe’s text and over 400 footnotes that clarify biblical and other cultural allusions, this is an edition designed for academic and general readers alike.

Christopher G. Diller is an associate professor in the department of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.

The Collection is now available at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Library (even though the rest of the Stowe Center Library is in off-site storage during the Collections Preservation Project).  The Collection cannot be digitally transferred or emailed, and can only be referenced or published in part.  Material from the Collection may be reproduced with written permission from the appropriate libraries and the Stowe Center.  Schedule an appointment Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.  Call or email Collections Manager Beth Giard (860-522-9258 ext. 313) for more information.

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society is the first group to join with us for the second conference on nineteenth-century American women writers abroad.

We’ve chosen Florence, Italy, for several reasons.  The most important one is that so many of our writers traveled to and spent time in Florence.  Sirpa Salenius, an independent scholar who lives and works in Florence, has volunteered to do the groundwork for the conference; she has already begun to look for meeting rooms and hotel space for lodgings and meals.  Since universities in Italy don’t have dormitories, we would have to stay in one or two hotels that are next to each other.

Further details on the conference in Florence will be discussed at the Saturday lunch at the SSAWW conference on 24 October 2009.  All ideas and offers to help with a second international conference are welcome.  Please contact Beth L. Lueck.

All the sites that played a significant role in Stowe’s life will be part of the celebration, including Hartford, Connecticut; Brunswick, Maine; Cincinnati, Ohio; and New York City.

The Stowe Society also hopes that the bicentennial will stimulate interest in two major scholarly enterprises related to the author:  the launch of a Stowe Society journal as either a print publication or an e-journal, and work towards the long overdue publication of Stowe’s letters, building on the E. Bruce Kirkham Collection of her letters available at the Stowe Center.  Others have expressed interest in a PBS-style film on Stowe, perhaps by an independent production company.

At the SSAWW conference in Philadelphia the Stowe Society, Margaret Fuller Society, and the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society will sponsor a box lunch on Saturday, 24 October, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. in the Bromley/Claypool Room.  The informal agenda will include discussion of collaborative activities among the three societies (and others), past and future.  Stowe’s upcoming bicentennial in 2011, a national conference at Bowdoin College, and a second transatlantic conference will also be on the agenda.

The boxed lunch costs $10.  Those interested should register for the lunch on the registration site for the SSAWW conference. Lunches are free for graduate students, who can register on the same site and simply check the box for graduate students.  The three author societies are subsidizing the cost of the lunches.

One of the first celebrity authors, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) became famous almost overnight when Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication—appeared in 1852. Known by virtually all famous writers in the United States and many in England and regarded by many women writers as a role model because of her influence in the literary marketplace, Stowe herself was the subject of many books, articles, essays, and poems during her lifetime.
This volume brings together for the first time a range of primary materials about Stowe’s private and public life written by family members, friends, and fellow writers who knew or were influenced by her before and after Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted her to fame. Included are periodical articles by Fanny Fern and Charles Dudley Warner; biographical essays by Sarah Josepha Hale and Rose Terry Cooke; letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Jacobs; recollections by Frederick Douglass, Annie Adams Fields, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Charles Beecher; and poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and John Greenleaf Whittier. An introduction at the beginning of each essay connects it to its historical and cultural context, explanatory notes provide information about people and places, and the book includes a detailed introduction, over fifty illustrations, a bibliography, and a chronology of Stowe’s life.
The thirty-eight recollections gathered in Stowe in Her Own Time form a biographical narrative designed to provide several perspectives on the famous author, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in agreement but always perceptive. The figure who emerges from this analytical collection is far more complex than the image she helped construct in her lifetime.

Susan Belasco is professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She has authored, coauthored, edited, and coedited numerous books and articles on American literature, including Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays, The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, and Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Thematic and formal connections, or “threads”, run through American literature. Some have been acknowledged by the writers themselves, others have been identified by academia. The aim of this conference is to show that the link between a nineteenth-century novelist, Harriet Beecher-Stowe (1811-1896), and a twentieth-century, poet John Beecher (1904-1980), is not merely genealogical. The theme “forms and reform” is an invitation to trace new continuities or overlaps beyond generic and chronological boundaries, and to examine these authors’ problematic inclusion in–or exclusion from–the canon in a new light.

In spite of the publication in 1980 of John Beecher’s Collected Poems, his work was neglected for many years. But One More River To Cross, a new “Selected Poems” edited by Steven Ford Brown and brought out by NewSouth Books in 2003, has made available again for reappraisal the work of one in turn dismissed as no poet at all or celebrated as “an American hero.” As for Harriet Beecher Stowe, the need to reread Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems particularly acute in the wake of three recent publications (Gregg Crane’s The Cambridge Introduction to The Nineteenth-Century Novel [2007], Sarah Robbins’s The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe [2007] and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins [2007].) Both authors therefore bear some relevance to the present.

Among the features common to both writers:

- their obvious concern for slaves in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe and for workingmen, particularly African-Americans, in the case of John Beecher. Such priorities account for an inclination to preach, common to both authors. To various degrees, their works qualify as protest literature but are also informed by religion. Another tension worthy of exploration is that between sentiment and politics. Are these balancing acts successful? What is the political and religious relevance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to today’s America? How religious do John Beecher’s politics sound to those who call themselves the Progressives of the 21st century? Should ‘the Beechers’ be considered as ultimately engineering social stability rather than radical reform? Surely they were not Anti-moderns in Antoine Compagnon’s understanding of the term—or were they?

- an apparent disinterest in formal innovation or just a taste for well-tried literary forms. But was it really the case, or did they simply choose to take their pick among available middle-of-the-road contemporary forms as their priorities lay elsewhere? Besides, is preaching out of bounds in literature? Where exactly does the border run between rhetoric and literature? Can the preaching, progressive thread(s) in John Beecher’s and Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s writings be tied to other significant works of American literature?

- their being a part of the Southern heritage for different reasons, although their roots lay in the North. How does John Beecher’s poetry tie into the some-say-non-existent Southern poetry tradition? What do Southern Studies have to say about the evolution of the assessment of Beecher-Stowe’s work? How do both writers’ attempts at writing the Southern idiom look and sound today?
The purpose of this conference is to provide the opportunity for a (re-)assessment of one of these two writers or of their possible connection. Priority will be given to papers showing an interest in bringing out continuities in American literature.

This project, initially conceived as a call for papers, has become a call for contributions for two reasons. Due to budget cuts, the recent academic context has been rather unfavourable. However, we are very happy to announce that we have found a possible publisher (a scholarly publisher, based in the UK) who has offered to examine our book proposal.

-articles should be approximately between 7,000 and 15,000 words in length (style sheet: MLA)

-In order to make sure that the collection of articles will be a coherent and self-sufficient volume, as the published has required, contributors are encouraged to address some of the key issues mentioned above, specifically: the canon, political commitment, genre, rhetorical and stylistic strategies, interdisciplinary issues, the literary tradition, etc.

Proposals of about 300 words to be sent to Guillaume Tanguy and Vincent Dussol by January 30th 2009, along with a short biographical note.

Conference Planning for the Author Society: A Roundtable Discussion
(Friday, 23 Oct., 4:00-5:15 p.m.)

1. Beth L. Lueck, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, chair, “Planning an International Conference on a Shoestring Budget”

2. Brigitte Bailey, University of New Hampshire, “Framing Conference Questions,
Developing Programs, and Collaborating with Other Organizations”

3. Lucinda Damon-Bach, Salem State College, “From the Ground, Up: Five Conferences in Ten Years for Sedgwick and Her Contemporaries”

This roundtable will offer officers of other author societies, as well as any conference participant, information about how to plan a small to mid-sized conference. The three participants listed above all have experience in conference organization, from small conferences (several dozen participants) to mid-sized (75 to 80), from regional to international conferences. During the planning of the international conference Transatlantic Women: 19th-C. American Women Writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe, the organizers remarked numerous times that the planning would have been easier if we had had the benefit of other author societies’ experience. While everyone we asked for advice gladly gave it, we still sometimes felt as if we were “reinventing the wheel.” For this roundtable, Brigitte Bailey, President of the Margaret Fuller Society, brings her experience working on conferences with the Fuller Society and writing the CFP and organizing the program for Transatlantic Women; she will also discuss collaborating with other organizations. Lucinda Damon-Bach, President of the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, offers her experience planning smaller conferences that offer opportunities to present on a range of authors and topics. Beth Lueck directed Transatlantic Women and will offer tips on planning an international conference and dealing with contracts, both domestic and international.