Small Forms in Nineteenth-Century America
This edited collection expands critical approaches to scale in nineteenth-century America by shifting focus from immensity (Baker 2006; Roberts 2014) to “small forms,” or forms disposed toward brevity or reduction. Building on scholarship that examines the operation of individual forms such as epigraphs (Stokes 2021), extracts (Wisecup 2021), footnotes (Cohen 2022), recipes (Tompkins 2013), and the serial sketch (Spires 2021), this collection aims to synthesize analysis of diverse small forms evident in nineteenth-century American literature and culture.
In her introduction to Forms (2015), Caroline Levine claims that all forms share one central affordance: portability. “They can be picked up and moved to new contexts,” she writes, adding that forms “afford movement across varied materials” (7). Throughout the long nineteenth century, textual forms made especially portable by their brevity or reduced scale wandered across varied contexts of time, space, genre, media, and readership in the United States. From short texts that “went viral” in newspapers (Cordell and Smith 2024) to the aphorisms that punctuate Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance, forms shaped by reduction undergirded practices and epistemologies that showcase the surprising power of the small within a vast and growing nation.
We are especially interested in papers that consider small forms in their endlessness, ongoingness, and nonlinearity. Like Emily Dickinson’s image of a brain “wider than the sky,” small forms invite attention to the dynamics of scale over the fixity of size. Small forms popular in nineteenth-century America demonstrate a paradoxical tendency toward growth: short stories expand into cycles, footnotes threaten to swallow up pages, and pseudonyms proliferate newspaper texts into a connected universe. Even as small forms afford portability, their ability to accumulate, to wander, and to disrupt larger structures resists containment and completeness.
Works Cited
Baker, Anne. Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Cohen, Lara Langer. Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Duke University Press, 2022.
Cordell, Ryan, and David Smith. Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines (2024), http://viraltexts.org.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Roberts, Jennifer L. Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014.
Spires, Derrick R. “Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the Fifteenth Amendment.” In African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880: Black Reconstructions: Volume 5: 1865–1880, edited by Eric Gardner, 17–48. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Stokes, Claudia. Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Tompkins, Kyla. “Consider the Recipe.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (2013): 439–45.
Wisecup, Kelly. Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
Type: edited collection
Submission guidelines: We welcome submissions exploring a wide range of small forms alongside related practices, genres, and media in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. We invite contributors to consider forms that might include: abridgements, advertisements, aphorisms, autographs, citations, excerpts and extracts, footnotes, proverbs, riddles, scraps, sketches, songs, statistics, and tracts.
Suggested areas of focus include but are not limited to:
- How embedded small forms disrupt or shore up larger forms and associated structures.
- Mobility and interactivity: The ways in which small forms tend to wander across media formats, genres, and time periods, including beyond the nineteenth century.
- Closure and storage: How small forms frame problems and questions of excess, accumulation, and collection.
- How small forms reflect nineteenth-century attitudes toward brevity and scale.
A scholarly press has shown interest in this project. Editors Thomas W. Howard (Bilkent University) and Madeline Zehnder (Humboldt University of Berlin) invite potential contributors to submit proposals of 500 words maximum along with a CV. In the spirit of encouraging experimentation—and in keeping with the collection’s focus on small forms—we seek shorter essays of 3,000-5,000 words.
Proposals from graduate students and contingent faculty are encouraged. Please submit proposals to th***********@bi*****.tr and ma**************@hu*******.de by August 15th, 2025. We also welcome advance queries about potential topics. Contributors will be notified that their work has been accepted in October, and first drafts will be expected by March 27th, 2026.
Submission deadline: August 15th, 2025
Editors:
Thomas W. Howard is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bilkent University and associate editor for The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies. His work on the aphorism and ecology in nineteenth-century American literature has appeared in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and forms the basis of his current book project, Aphoristic Science: Ecology, Psychology, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature.
Madeline Zehnder is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Humboldt University of Berlin and a reviews editor for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). Her work on small textual and material forms ranging from the tract to the miniature portrait has appeared in journals including American Literature, Book History, and New Literary History, as well as online. Her first book, on pocket-sized print, scale, and imaginaries of the book in nineteenth-century America, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Link: for more information about the CFPs, contact th***********@bi*****.tr and ma**************@hu*******.de
