“Thomas Wolfe and History”
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
May 24-25, 2019
Announcing Eugene Gant’s arrival on earth in the first year of a century that would be the millennium’s last, Thomas Wolfe heralded his protagonist as “borne in . . . upon the very spear-head of history.” And throughout accounts of the doings of Eugene Gant and George Webber (and others), Wolfe interweaves threads from ancestral and national stories and traces influences exerted on individual destinies by the tides of great events.
As the 2019 Memorial Day weekend begins, we will gather near the New World home of Wolfe’s paternal ancestors and at the site of a fearful and decisive battle in this nation’s history. Gettysburg is an ideal place to consider Wolfe’s evoked intersections of public and private, of collective and individual, of past, present, and future.
Organizers of this forty-first annual meeting look forward to productive discussion of history–recorded, remembered, or in the making–as subject, backdrop, or concern in Wolfe’s writing. Those who wish to present papers are invited to submit proposals on any aspect of Wolfe’s writing on the past and its influence, or on the struggles of individuals to contend with events and forces that shape their times and lives.
Wolfe’s consciousness was formed by Western philosophical and religious thought and by the English language and the literature it spawned. He was aware of the overshadowing of the present by the past and of the need to understand the history of one’s forebears–and of those of others.
Wolfe’s world-view was additionally affected by impressions of the conquest of this continent, by the founding of a new kind of nation and its tearing apart in civil strife, by waves of immigration and the rise of large cities, by the evolution of capitalism and resulting social disparities, by the sufferings of the Great Depression, by hatred and prejudice in its several forms, by the abomination of slavery. The clash between attachment to Germany as ancestral land and impressions of World War I, the rise of Nazism, and the lead-up to World War II affected Wolfe’s understanding of his world and his delineation of the nature and destiny of the characters he created.
Please send 250-word (email attachment) proposals to Anne Zahlan at arzahlan@eiu.edu by 7 January 2019.
Conference registration and sessions will be located in the Wyndham Gettysburg, 95 Presidential Circle, Gettysburg, PA 17325. The special conference room rate is $149 per night if reservations are made by April 23, 2019. To reserve a room, contact the Wyndham at (717) 339-0020 and identify yourself as a Wolfe Society member. Alternatively, you can click here to reserve your room on-line. For more information, see www.thomaswolfereview.org/2019-conference, or contact Rebecca Godwin at rlgodwin@barton.edu or Anne Zahlan at arzahlan@eiu.edu.
