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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“A World Of Her Own Invention”: Teaching Margaret Cavendish’S Blazing World In The Early British Literature Survey And Beyond, Vanessa L. Rapatz
“A World Of Her Own Invention”: Teaching Margaret Cavendish’S Blazing World In The Early British Literature Survey And Beyond, Vanessa L. Rapatz
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Margaret Cavendish has only recently been included in the canonical literature anthologies and even then, the samplings of her prolific writings are severely truncated. However, even this small taste of Cavendish’s poems and excerpts of A Description of a New World called The Blazing World leave early British literature survey students hungry for more. Frequently, students in the survey choose to focus on Cavendish’s writing for their research projects in which they practice feminist and queer readings and engage with Cavendish as a key player in utopian and science fiction genres. Beyond the survey course, Blazing World works wonderfully in …
Relocating Early Modern Women: Teaching Margaret Cavendish To A Broader Audience, Jennifer Topale
Relocating Early Modern Women: Teaching Margaret Cavendish To A Broader Audience, Jennifer Topale
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, can be called many things: writer, poet, philosopher, woman, Royalist, eccentric rule-breaker, scientific collaborator, utopian thinker, and the list goes on. Unfortunately, access to her writings, typically her The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, are often limited in academic settings to courses centered on the seventeenth century, early modern utopian literature, Restoration literature, and possibly an early modern women writers class. Though these are all wonderful course topics, they are often upper-division courses specifically designed for English majors of the early modern period. Limiting Cavendish to only these courses means that …
Review Of Botanical Entanglements, By Anna K. Sagal, Millie Schurch
Review Of Botanical Entanglements, By Anna K. Sagal, Millie Schurch
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Review of Botanical Entanglements, by Anna K. Sagal
Elizabeth Boyd's Disappearing Act: Performing Literary Legacy On The Georgian Stage, Kristina Straub
Elizabeth Boyd's Disappearing Act: Performing Literary Legacy On The Georgian Stage, Kristina Straub
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
How do we trace the historical processes that grant some writers visibility and, hence, legacy, while shoving others into the historical closet? This essay offers the case study of Elizabeth Boyd (1727-1745), a novelist, poet, and playwright who has received some attention from scholars interested in women’s contributions to the legacy of William Shakespeare in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In particular, her unperformed play, Don Sancho: Or, the Students Whim, a Ballad Opera of Two Acts, with Minerva’s Triumph, a Masque (1739) dramatizes a woman writer’s reflections on the politics of legacy at this formative moment in …
Negotiating Gender, Representing Landscape: Teaching Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard’S Letters, Journals And Watercolours From The Cape Colony (1797–1801), Lenka Filipova
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
The article focuses on Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard’s letters, journals and watercolours that she produced during her stay at the Cape Colony (1797–1801). Combining a series of tasks focused on close reading of Barnard’s work and a critical discussion of the historical context, the article provides a teaching strategy to examine her work with respect to the gendered discourse of the eighteenth century, and her approach to the Cape landscape and its inhabitants which both employs and, significantly, subverts contemporaneous conventions. More specifically, the tasks draw attention to Barnard’s use of ‘the modesty topos’ and the way she uses rhetorical …
Review Of The Man Who Thought Himself A Woman, Ed Christopher Looby, Carrie D. Shanafelt
Review Of The Man Who Thought Himself A Woman, Ed Christopher Looby, Carrie D. Shanafelt
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Christopher Looby's anthology of queer nineteenth-century American short stories is a fascinating collection of both obscure and familiar texts that together constitute a powerful argument for the queerness of the short story and for the centrality of queerness to American literary aesthetics.
Unmasking Polly: Race And Disguise In Eighteenth-Century Plantation Space, Kristen Hanley Cardozo
Unmasking Polly: Race And Disguise In Eighteenth-Century Plantation Space, Kristen Hanley Cardozo
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera has influenced popular culture since its debut. Its 1729 sequel, Polly, has been understudied by literary critics, perhaps because of its suppression in Gay’s lifetime. However, Polly offers scholars new views on British imperialism before an active abolition movement in Britain. Gay confronts the evils of colonialism through his theatrical use of disguise. While other Caribbean plays of the period allow white characters to reinvent themselves abroad, in Polly disguise only intensifies the self, while the higher stakes of plantation space are where the characters meet the fates originally designated for them in The …
Visions: The Dance Most Of All: Envisioning An Embodied Eighteenth-Century Studies, Susannah Sanford, Sofia Prado Huggins
Visions: The Dance Most Of All: Envisioning An Embodied Eighteenth-Century Studies, Susannah Sanford, Sofia Prado Huggins
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
The editors introduce this special issue of ABO, highlighting the work of the authors included in the issue. The introduction draws on recent scholarship re-visioning the work of the long, “undisciplined” eighteenth century, arguing for an eighteenth-century studies that embodies our intersectional identities and honors the experiences of bodyminds surrounding texts and authors, as well as the bodyminds that interact with those texts in the present. Throughout the years, scholars have demonstrated that there is no single vision of what eighteenth-century scholarship is or should be, but rather multiple visions. This introduction urges scholars to consider how an eighteenth-century studies …
Summary Remarks On Conversations About “Researching, Reading And Writing During The Pandemic”, Kate Ozment, Mona Narain
Summary Remarks On Conversations About “Researching, Reading And Writing During The Pandemic”, Kate Ozment, Mona Narain
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Summary remarks on the Spring 2021 issue that includes Conversation essays by participants in the ABO summer 2020 writing camp #WriteWithAphra. The participants describe their experience of reading, researching, and writing during the pandemic.
Jane Austen Camp, Devoney Looser
Jane Austen Camp, Devoney Looser
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Austen camp has become prevalent, even omnipresent, today, in visions and versions of her and her fiction, using them as a canvas for zombies, porn, or roller derby. Some of it may be kitsch, but it’s arguably camp. Investigating Austen as camp is a valuable way to understand her humor and her social criticism, as we now understand camp as a positive literary and social practice. But rather than asking if and when camp is “there,” for Austen or for her past readers, we might instead investigate what aspects or elements of her reputation or her writing we notice differently …
Review Of Facing The Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, And Society In Britain 1769 - 1840 By Lucy Peltz, Madeleine L. Pelling
Review Of Facing The Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, And Society In Britain 1769 - 1840 By Lucy Peltz, Madeleine L. Pelling
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Review of 'Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britian 1769 - 1840,' Lucy Peltz by Madeleine Pelling
Embodying Character, Adapting Communication; Or, The Senses And Sensibilities Of Epistolarity And New Media In The Classroom, Jodi L. Wyett
Embodying Character, Adapting Communication; Or, The Senses And Sensibilities Of Epistolarity And New Media In The Classroom, Jodi L. Wyett
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This essay describes a classroom role-playing activity that incorporates both modern social media and the tools of eighteenth-century composition. Students communicate with each other as characters in the assigned novel, by either texting, tweeting, or writing longhand with quill pens. The exercise aims to help students grasp the sometimes-elusive historical contexts of eighteenth-century writing as well as the ways in which we interpret and adapt those contexts and their attendant modes of communication when we read for meaning in our own moment. My experiences suggest that the activity is particularly effective at helping students to reflect upon their own interpretive …
Arabella’S Valentines And Literary Connections [Dot] Com: Playing With Eighteenth-Century Gender Online, Melanie D. Holm
Arabella’S Valentines And Literary Connections [Dot] Com: Playing With Eighteenth-Century Gender Online, Melanie D. Holm
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This article describes two digital assignments that ask students to imaginatively embody characters from eighteenth-century texts written by women in order to cultivate a greater awareness of the critical role of gender and gender critique in these works. The first of these assignments, “Arabella’s Valentines,” asks students to translate dialogue from Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote as humorous Internet memes. The second assignment, “Literary Connections [dot] com,” asks students to imagine how characters from the course archive might represent themselves on an internet dating site. Through creative role-play facilitated by these digital genres, students engage with the texts in stimulating …
Review Of Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, And Belief In Early Modern England, Amy Mallory-Kani
Review Of Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, And Belief In Early Modern England, Amy Mallory-Kani
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
No abstract provided.
Females And Footnotes: Excavating The Genre Of Eighteenth-Century Women’S Scholarly Verse, Ruth Knezevich
Females And Footnotes: Excavating The Genre Of Eighteenth-Century Women’S Scholarly Verse, Ruth Knezevich
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Throughout the eighteenth century, the genre of women’s poetry heavily annotated with editorializing commentary (a genre I term “scholarly verse”) became increasingly prevalent. Such poetry presents an ironic reversal of conventions of gender and authority by incorporating the literal margins of the page: the female voice commands the majority of the page, while the masculine voice of empiricism, authority, and scholarly reason is pushed to the margins. This essay offers a distant reading of the range of annotations women poets provided, in order to begin new conversations about the ways women’s poetry served as a site of and structure for …
Review Of Helen E.M. Brooks, Actresses, Gender, And The Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women, Leslie Ritchie
Review Of Helen E.M. Brooks, Actresses, Gender, And The Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women, Leslie Ritchie
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
No abstract provided.
Review Of Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, And Friendship In Early Modern Britain, Angela Rehbein
Review Of Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, And Friendship In Early Modern Britain, Angela Rehbein
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Review of Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014. xi, 256 pages: illustrations; 24 cm. ISBN 978-0-300-17740-4.
Collecting Women: Poetry And Lives, 1700-1780 By Chantel M. Lavoie, Holly Faith Nelson
Collecting Women: Poetry And Lives, 1700-1780 By Chantel M. Lavoie, Holly Faith Nelson
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
No abstract provided.
Hearing Eighteenth-Century Occasional Poetry By And About Women: Swift And Barbauld, Elizabeth Kraft
Hearing Eighteenth-Century Occasional Poetry By And About Women: Swift And Barbauld, Elizabeth Kraft
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
No abstract provided.
Women’S Literacy In Early Modern Spain And The New World, Ed. By Anne J. Cruz And Rosilie Hernández, Kirsten Schultz
Women’S Literacy In Early Modern Spain And The New World, Ed. By Anne J. Cruz And Rosilie Hernández, Kirsten Schultz
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
No abstract provided.
Inviting Twenty-First Century Students To The Eighteenth-Century Party, Kathryn Strong Hansen
Inviting Twenty-First Century Students To The Eighteenth-Century Party, Kathryn Strong Hansen
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This article describes a classroom activity that increases students’ connection to literary characters, and by extension, texts. The activity, constructed as a party attended by literary characters, tasks students with taking on the point of view of one character in an assigned novel. This can encourage a student to see the viewpoint of a character that differs from him or her in gender, social status, or any other category of difference. In heightening students’ relationship to eighteenth-century characters, I argue, instructors can bring the eighteenth century closer to contemporary students as well as increase students’ sensitivity to viewpoints that differ …
Populism, Gender, And Sympathy In The Romantic Novel, By James P. Carson, Elizabeth J. Mathews
Populism, Gender, And Sympathy In The Romantic Novel, By James P. Carson, Elizabeth J. Mathews
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
No abstract provided.
Intersectionality Of Race, Gender, And Class In The ‘Hard Times: Women Scholars And The Dynamics Of Economic Recession', Christine Clark-Evans
Intersectionality Of Race, Gender, And Class In The ‘Hard Times: Women Scholars And The Dynamics Of Economic Recession', Christine Clark-Evans
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
No abstract provided.