Wildness and Wilderness in American Travel Writing

The Society for the Study of American Travel Writing (SSATW) seeks proposals for a panel on "Wildness and Wilderness in American Travel Writing" at the American Literature Association's Fall Symposium (October 26-28, 2023, in Santa Fe, New Mexico). Scholarship on any region or era of American Travel Writing is welcome.

The unfamiliar, unexplored, and unsettled places have long captivated the American literary imagination and travel writing. Whether we think of wilderness as sacred, shrinking, imagined, or simulated, how has the spectacle of wildness, in unsettled or settled spaces, impinged upon representations of the American scene by travelers? Proposals might consider how travel writers have metaphorically linked subject matter and creative practice in renditions of confronting geograpies of wilderness and wildness. They might also think about the impact that the wild or the wildernss has had on individual writers, ideas of nation, or constructions of genre.

Please submit abstracts of apporximately 300 words no later than August 10, 2023, to Susan Roberson (susan.roberson@retiree.tamuk.edu). Early submissions are welcome.