Workshop at Erfurt University, November 26-27, 2026
Deadline: June 15, 2026
Call for Papers
“Unruly Realism: Conventions and Contestations in 19th-Century American Realist Fiction”
Workshop at the University of Erfurt – November 26 – 27, 2026
Co-organized by Ilka Saal (Erfurt) and Antonia Purk (Mannheim)
This workshop reexamines nineteenth-century American realism through the lens of its internal tensions and aesthetic fault lines. Rather than treating realism as a coherent and self-contained movement, it investigates how realist texts both sustain and strain against their own conventions. We focus on moments when realist narratives—while generally aligned with dominant aesthetic standards—expose the literary mode’s poetic limitations and political blind spots.
A telling example of these tensions can be found in William Dean Howells’s remark that Mary Wilkins Freeman’s realism “cannot always be trusted,” as her work tended toward the “false, sentimental, romantic.”[1] It is precisely this perceived instability—the irruption of the sentimental, uncanny, theatrical, ornamental, or grotesque—that our workshop seeks to explore as a source of aesthetic innovation, cultural insight, and political critique.
We invite papers that examine how such unruly elements render visible experiences of everyday life that might not be legible through a strictly realist lens. We especially encourage papers that focus on women writers and writers of color, whose engagements with realism often entail both participation in and resistance to its cultural logic.
Possible approaches include, but are not limited to:
- How do texts mobilize realist conventions to express the experience of minority groups? Respectively, how do they transform realist modes of writing?
- What are the poetic and political affordances of aesthetic “failure,” according to normative realist conventions?
- How does formal experimentation give rise to alternative epistemologies within realist writing?
- How do realist modes of writing intersect with other genres, such as sentimental fiction, detective fiction, the gothic, melodrama?
- What role do excess, the theatrical, the ornamental, the grotesque, and the ironic play in realist narratives?
We welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages. The workshop aims to foster an engaged and collaborative discussion and to contribute to ongoing conversations about realism’s limits, possibilities, and afterlives.
Submission Guidelines:
Please send an abstract of 250–300 words for a 20-minute paper and a brief biographical note (max. 100 words) to ilka.saal@uni-erfurt.de and antonia.purk@uni-mannheim.de by June 15, 2026.
Workshop Details:
Date: November 26–27, 2026
Location: University of Erfurt
Format: in-person
[1] Qtd. in Donna Campbell. “Howells’ Untrustworthy Realist: Mary Wilkins Freeman.” American Literary Realism, vol. 38, no. 2 (2006): 118.