Education Commons^™

Introduction: Conversations On Abortion Rights And Bodily Autonomy In The Eighteenth Century And Today, Vicki Barnett Woods, Manushag N. Powell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This piece serves as an introduction to the discussions of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights, revised from roundtable presentations held at ASECS 2023. This collection of essays contributes to the resounding responses of frustration and anger toward the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The collection was written and presented by eighteenth-century scholars who have a comprehensive knowledge of the eighteenth-century legal, social, and medical histories that center around reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

Review Of Reckoning With Slavery, By Jennifer L. Morgan, Brigitte Fielder

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Reckoning with Slavery, by Jennifer L. Morgan,

Review Of An Archive Of Taste, By Lauren Klein, Parama Roy

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of An Archive of Taste, by Lauren Klein

Review Of Sister Novelists, By Devoney Looser, Katherine Binhammer Prof.

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser.

Teaching Anne Finch In "Partisanship In Restoration And Eighteenth-Century Britain", Jennifer Wilson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The works of Anne Finch, a writer doubly exiled as a female poet and Jacobite, stand out as eminently teachable examples of a compelling political outsider view that provokes us to consider how we can better attend to perspectives of principled opposition. Her poems in response to what has been called the "first modern revolution," together with her odes upon the deaths of King James II and Queen Mary Beatrice, showcase the subversive power of indirect articulation, expressing values through emotions and affects in veiled forms such as allegory and alternate history.

Fierce Allegories: Teaching Anne Finch’S Fables In A Course On Satire, Sharon Smith

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay outlines an approach to integrating Anne Finch’s work into an advanced undergraduate and/or graduate course on eighteenth-century satire, focusing particularly on her satirical verse fables. This approach encourages students to question common critical assumptions about women and satire, most particularly that women avoided satire due to its association with aggression and politics—assumptions Finch’s fables are well-suited to challenge. The essay focuses particularly on Finch’s verse fables "Upon an Impropable Undertaking," “The Eagle, the Sow, and the Cat,” and “The Owl Describing Her Young Ones.” In these poems, written in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, Finch employs violent …

Using The Anne Finch Digital Archive As A Teaching Text, Martha F. Bowden

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In the course of my teaching career, I have used the Anne Finch Digital Archive in two different classes in the English major at my university: the gateway and capstone courses. In the gateway course, it functions as one of several sites in a module on the Digital Humanities, and as a required text in the capstone course. The essay investigates the Digital Archive’s strengths both as an example of a high-quality digital humanities project and as a rich site for the investigation and analysis of Finch’s poetry. Assignment guidelines for the gateway module and the reading list for …

Teaching Anne Finch’S Satire In The British Literature Survey Classroom, Amanda Hiner

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This article argues for the intentional inclusion of Anne Finch’s diverse and compelling satires in the undergraduate British literature survey course and for the recognition of Finch as an accomplished theorist and practitioner of satire. The article includes practical strategies for pairing Finch’s satires with other well-known and anthologized satires; examines her satires in the context of the Revolution of 1688; and provides an analysis of her innovative rhetorical strategies, including her efforts to dissociate herself from satire while simultaneously producing sharp and defiant satires. The article argues that cultivating a deeper understanding of Finch’s contributions to eighteenth-century satire enriches …

Review Of Figurations Of The Feminine, By Siobhán Mcilvanney, Tonya J. Moutray

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Siobhán McIlvanney's Figurations of the Feminine, by Tonya J. Moutray

Review Of Sapphic Crossings, By Ula Lukszo Klein, Ziona K. Kocher

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Ula Lukszo Klein’s Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Ziona Kocher.

Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince And Saidiya Hartman, Carolina Hinojosa

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This chapter utilizes Hartman’s methodology of retrieval to create a map1 in StoryMap JS2 (“the map” or “this map”) that analyzes multiple geographic spaces in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The map is an archive or a witness to some of the geographical spaces Mary Prince lived (and was sold) as an enslaved woman seeking freedom and the places in which Saidiya Hartman has conducted research or visited in Ghana as a “free” woman. Layering the past over present creates a …

Along And Against The Grain: Close Reading The History Of Mary Prince, Kristina Huang

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Due to the highly mediated conditions of its production, The History of Mary Prince presents a challenge to New Critical methods of reading that are frequently taught in undergraduate literature classrooms. Without questioning the British abolitionists’ textual representation of Prince’s experiences, readers unfamiliar with the historical conditions for slave narratives may attribute the publication’s sentimentalism and representations of violence as direct expressions of Prince. This essay mobilizes close reading towards contrary ends: I throw the editor’s (Thomas Pringle’s) paratextual material, particularly the Preface, under scrutiny by close reading its insistence on transparency and symmetry between the first-person narrative and Prince …

Mary Prince’S Undisciplining Lessons: Counter-Narrative And Testimonio In The History, Kerry Sinanan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay discusses teaching The History of Mary Prince at a Hispanic Serving Institution via Ethnic Studies praxis. It develops Nicole Aljoe’s definition of Prince’s narrative as counter-story and testimonio and explores the undisciplining effects of reading Prince’s history as relevant to the lives of Borderlands students. To understand the multiple meanings of “undisciplining’ this essay draws on the theory of Sylvia Wynter and shows how Prince’s testimonio offers an alternative to Western epistemologies via communal resistance and resurgence. Several pedagogic tools are explored for teaching Prince in this way.

The Black Wanderer: Reading The Black Diaspora, Resistance, And Becoming In The History Of Mary Prince In The Classroom, Nicole Carr

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This paper examines The History of Mary Prince as a pedagogical tool for exploring complexities within the Black Diaspora. As Paul Gilroy’s articulations of the Black Atlantic inform my approach, Prince’s circuitous journey through the West Indies and England situates her process of becoming as one mired in longing and loss. Encouraging students to consider Prince as a wandering soul in search of not only freedom, but also solid familiar connections lays the foundation for merging her narrative with other enslaved Black people traversing countries and regions on ships against their will. Ample research material available on the survivors of …

Introduction: Teaching The History Of Mary Prince (1831), Guest Edited By Kerry Sinanan, Kerry Sinanan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Black Lives, White Witnesses: An Argument For A Presentist Approach To Teaching Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Sharon Smith

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay outlines a presentist approach to teaching Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), in which a white woman witnesses a Black man’s brutal execution at the hands of enslavers. This approach explores the capacity of Behn’s novel—a colonialist narrative scholars frequently identify as troubling or frustrating—to generate discussions about “white witnessing,” particularly white people’s consumption of images of Black people in peril. This includes recent videos of Black people killed by police or white citizen vigilantes. Many Black individuals identify these videos as traumatizing, frequently noting how they have failed to spur structural reform. Of central concern in the classroom discussion …

Chawton House And Its Library: Legacies And Futures, Kim Simpson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In a review of Women’s Writing, 1660-1830: Feminisms and Futures, Paula Backscheider draws attention to “the miracle that is Chawton House, whose conferences nurtured these essays” in the collection. This essay will examine the legacy of this unique institution and explore the futures for the organization both as heritage site and as home to a substantial collection of women’s writing of the long eighteenth century. The community encouraged and nurtured by Chawton House since it opened to the public in 2003, as is so often the case with all things related to Jane Austen, complicates divisions between the academic …

Why Austen, Not Burney? Tracing The Mechanisms Of Reputation And Legacy, Marilyn Francus

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

During the 200^th anniversary of Austen’s death in 2017, the narrative of Austen’s rise to fame and her ongoing celebrity circulated throughout modern culture. But how did this happen? When Austen died in 1817, it was not obvious that Austen would become the archetypal British woman writer. Frances Burney was far more famous in her lifetime than Austen was in hers, and Burney’s novels (particularly Evelina and Cecilia) achieved as much, if not more, critical acclaim than Austen’s works. By comparing the afterlives of Jane Austen and Frances Burney, the factors that shape legacy come into focus—and scholars …

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 …

Introduction: Shaping The Legacy Of 18th-Century Women, Marilyn Francus

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Placing Charlotte Smith, Eds Elizabeth A. Dolan And Jacqueline M. Labbe, Heather Heckman-Mckenna

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Placing Charlotte Smith edited by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Jacqueline M. Labbe, written by Heather Heckman-McKenna

Review Of Female Husbands: A Trans History, By Jen Manion, Jeremy Chow

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This review evaluates Jen Manion's Female Husbands: A Trans History.

Review Of The Novel Stage: Narrative Form From The Restoration To Jane Austen, By Marcie Frank, Kathleen E. Urda

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Marcie Frank's The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen by Kathleen E. Urda

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 …

Teaching Mary Wollstonecraft's Travelogue Of Historical Trauma, Annette Hulbert

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Abstract: I teach Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in an undergraduate English literature course on “Survival Narratives of the Eighteenth Century” at the University of California, Davis. The aim of this course is to show how significant perilous voyages were to the ways in which writers in eighteenth-century Britain imagined and interpreted their world. The course draws from the burst of new scholarship on rethinking the traditional “rise of the novel” narrative in imperial, oceanic, and global contexts and develops interpretive frameworks for the eighteenth century’s changing relationship to commerce and …

Ripped From The Headlines: Teaching Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Letters In The Context Of 21st-Century Controversies, Susan Spencer

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In the long shadow of 9/11 and the ongoing COVID pandemic, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters connect with the lived experience of today’s students, especially the cluster of eight letters dated 1 April 1717. By emphasizing parallels between Montagu’s observations and the students’ own lives, The Turkish Embassy Letters can add a modern dimension to the eighteenth century in general, challenges of gender, and texts written in and about the Muslim world.

Teaching Eliza Fay's Original Letters From India (1817) Through Classroom Editing, Lacy Marschalk

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Travel writing is an ever-growing area of interest in eighteenth-century studies, but it can be difficult to teach. Students often find the writing dry and unrelatable, and faculty who have had little experience with travel writing in their own educations may not know which texts would prove useful to their courses. In this article, I discuss the travel narrative with which I've found the most pedagogical success, Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India (1817). Fay's initial journey to India includes a range of captivating adventures, including encounters with Marie Antoinette in Paris, bandits in Egypt, and Hyder Ali in Calicut, …

Concise Collections: Teaching British Women Travelers, Tiffany Potter

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Cooking Up Knowledge: Materiality, Recipes, And Jane Barker’S A Patch-Work Screen For The Ladies, Carolin Boettcher

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The recipes included in Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) appear to be some of the most jarring and out-of-context inclusions in the narrative. This article explores the relationship between Barker’s novel and the form of the recipe collection in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on both a material and an epistemological level. The entanglements between recipes and the patchwork screen not only point to the processes of constructing and conveying knowledge, but also to the materiality of these processes as Galesia and the Lady build the patchwork screen. Her focus on the materiality of …

Postures After The Antique In Eighteenth-Century Portraits Of Women, Lauren K. Disalvo

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This paper re-examines the relationship between eighteenth-century portraiture and the antique where women adopt the postures of floating female figures from Pompeiian wall paintings in eighteenth-century portraiture. I argue that eighteenth-century floating portraits afforded their female sitters an opportunity to assert classical knowledge while adhering to typical conventions of femininity.