2023 K-SAA Essay Prize Winners
In order to recognize outstanding scholarship devoted to the writers of our period and the culture in which they lived, the Keats-Shelley Association of America has since 1986 conferred an annual Essay Award. The awards are adjudicated by a three-member committee specially designated by the Board of Directors and are conferred at K-SAA’s annual dinner at the Modern Language Association’s conference Encomia for Award-winning essays are published in the Keats-Shelley Journal.
This year’s essay prize winner is Lily Gurton-Wachter for "Reading by Firefly,” Studies in Romanticism, Vol 62, number 1, Spring 2023: 77-102.
“This essay argues that the figure of the firefly sheds light on an environmental poetics that expands our understanding of how literature represented slavery in the Romantic period. Focusing on Edward Rushton's West-Indian Eclogues (1787) and Charlotte Smith's "To the Fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a Collection" (1804), I trace how the firefly exposes the intersection of slavery and natural history, and thwarts the familiar abolitionist impulses to metaphorize, sympathize, and sentimentalize. Flickering on and off, the firefly ultimately registers the failure of a figure to capture and a poetics of intermittence and parataxis that resurfaces in contemporary Black ecopoetry.”
Dr. Gurton-Wachter is Associate Professor of English Language & Literature at Smith College
Honorable Mention was given to Eric Tyler Powell for “Form, History and the Politics of Lyric in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind,’” ELH, Vol 90, Issue 3, (2023) 723-765.
“The concept of lyric reading, I argue, is a powerful tool to reconsider Shelley's famous ode [To the West Wind]. The protocol of lyric reading is well-known: there is a speaker of the poem, who should not be confused with the poet; the dramatic situation of the speech act must be gleaned as context for interpretation and analysis; the poem itself should be the focus of interpretation, without considering the biography or intentions of the poet; historical context is only relevant insofar as it is "in" the poem itself. This conception of the lyric as a single genre, with a defined set of rules for reading, hand in hand with expressivist theories of Romanticism, have led to a neglect of Shelley's own historical poetics as developed in his late works—in poetry and critical prose—and of the formal complexity of the "Ode to the West Wind" in particular.5 Foregrounding Shelley's historical poetics—the view that poetic forms have historical specificity and varying social functions as part of diverse cultures of circulation—is part of the burden of this.”
These awards were conferred at the 2024 MLA annual conference in Philadelphia. Read more about K-SAA at MLA ‘24 here.
