112th Annual Conference - Riverside Convention Center, California
Friday, October 31 - Sunday, November 2, 2014

This page is about the 2014 conference. For 2015 conference info, go to PAMLA 2015.

American Literature after 1865 I

Session Chair: 
Sean Epstein-Corbin, University of California, Riverside
Time: 
Session 1: Friday 9:00-10:30am
Location: 
RCC Meeting Room 2
Topic Area: 
American Literature after 1865

Presenters/Papers:

  1. Policing Necrocurrencies: Spiritualists, Counterfeiters, and the Classing of Unproductive Exchange after the American Civil War

    Daniel Graham, University of Connecticut
    This essay pivots on Marxian considerations of spiritual and economic markets whereupon investors of the tangible and intangible dealt in what I term “necrocurrencies.” I examine Spiritualism as a cultural force in order to historicize and theorize its connection to state-sanctioned relations of capitalist exchange, particularly after the Civil War.

  2. The Virtual Orphan and the Racial Other: "Sivilizing" Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    Soh Yeun (Elloise) Kim, University of Washington
    This paper will examine, through the study of orphan/adoptee Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), how the emergence of the modern adoptee is predicated on the construction of them as potential and virtual racial others within a family.  

  3. Fictions of Mugwumpery: The Problem of Representation in the Gilded Age

    Mary Hale, University of Illinois, Chicago
    This paper examines the way in which popular Gilded Age political process novels think formally and thematically about the separation of political passion from ideological difference in post-war politics. Taking as an exemplar Harold Frederic’s early novel Seth’s Brother’s Wife, the paper has implications for our understanding of realism as an aesthetic and political project and the status of affective politics and literary theory in general. 
Session Cancelled: 
No