Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

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 …

“Before I Am Quite Forgot": Women’S Critical Literary Biography And The Future, Susan Carlile

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

“‘Before I am Quite Forgot’: Women’s Critical Literary Biography and the Future” extends the conversation about literary “worth” in the twenty-first century as it still judges and ignores women authors of the past. Specifically, this essay explores the role of women’s literary historical biography as a primary marker of worth and as a means of shaping legacy. I also discuss my (perhaps more non-traditional) experience—both my personal circumstances and particular material conditions—writing the critical biography Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind. Without a substantial biography that shows the scope of Lennox’s mind, her significant corpus, and her interventions in literary history …

Forgotten Encounters: The Legacy Of Sculptresses And Female Muses, Laura Engel

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

Sculpture as a medium is inherently connected to legacy making. In producing three- dimensional monuments designed to withstand the test of time, women artists provided evidence of the lasting quality and permanence of their creative acts. This article examines the actress, sculptress and novelist Anne Damer’s sculpture of the famous actress turned Countess Eliza Farren (c. 1788), paying particular attention to the relationship between sculpture as a static art form that captures tactile embodied presence and the ephemerality of performance. Farren’s involvement in Damer’s staging of the private theatricals at Richmond House (Farren directed and Damer starred) suggests that their …

Women, Slavery, And The Archive: Innovations In Slavery Studies And Contemporary Connections, Srividhya Swaminathan

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

“Women, Slavery, and the Archive: Innovations in Slavery Studies and Contemporary Connections”

Early scholarship on slavery, abolition, and the British empire largely ignored the contribution of women of any race to the African Institution. British women who participated in boycotts, produced literary texts against African enslavement, and did the legwork of circulating petitions were relegated to footnotes until well into the twentieth century when women scholars began to create space in the canon for the unrecognized or under-recognized women writers. These new avenues of research evolved through decades to become more inclusive, more critical, and more ground-breaking in bringing the …

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.

“We Could Do With A Bit More Queerness In These Parts”: An Analysis Of The Queer Against The Peculiar, The Odd, And The Strange In The Lord Of The Rings, Yvette Kisor

Journal of Tolkien Research

As developed in The Lord of the Rings, “queer” is a special term, one uniquely associated with the Hobbits, and Tolkien crafts a very specific set of resonances that embed it in provincial mistrust, a sense of real outside threat, and places within the ancient natural world that appear foundationally opposed to the ordinary realm of civilization. While Tolkien cannot be said to use the word “queer” in its more modern sense of “homosexual” or nonnormative sexual and/or gender identity, he included an owning and even embracing of the term that follows a similar pattern.

A Case For Tolkien As Master Of The Sublime, Graham A.C. Scheper

Journal of Tolkien Research

The present article aims to reconcile Tolkien with the Literary Critics through an exploration of Tolkien's use of the sublime. First, an explanation of the sublime is given, with a summary of its evolution over the past two millennia. Subsequently, three key thrusts of the sublime's manifestation in Tolkien's work are identified: his use of depth and incompleteness, his use of vastness and grandeur, and his usage of shadows and death. Investigating Tolkien's usage of these devices in turn illuminates his skill as an artist and as an author.

Acts Of Disruption In The Eighteenth-Century Archives: Cooperative Critical Bibliography And The Ballitore Project, Danielle Spratt, Deena Al-Halabieh, Stephen Martinez, Quill Sang, Joseph Sweetnam, Stephanie Guerrero, Rachael Scarborough King

Criticism

This essay outlines a method of intersectional feminist book history that we call “cooperative critical bibliography,” a practice of engaging faculty and students at different ranks and at different institutions in the act of collaboratively transcribing and digitizing historical archives of understudied communities, often those that comprise the quotidian and domestic daily lives of everyday people. Cooperative critical bibliography’s non-hierarchical method centers the shared expertise and scholarship of students as they participate in broadening the accessibility of historical knowledge and revising standards of the historical literary canon through transcription, digitization, and shared reflection. By creating a pedagogical space that resituates …

Craftivism And Cottonian Bindings: “The Handiwork Of Greta Hall”, Helen Williams

Criticism

Edith Southey, Edith May Southey, and Sara Coleridge Jr. covered Robert Southey’s books in vibrantly printed dress fabrics, creating a collection that came to be called “the Cottonian Library.” This article is a manifesto for Cottonian bookbinding to be studied as feminist literary activism. It argues for the importance of looking beyond the book trades to the domestic and unremunerated ways in which women contributed to Romantic period book design, suggesting that the new feminist Craftivism can prompt us to historicize and to acknowledge the significance of Cottonian bookbinding as a practice that cannot be omitted from any history of …

Surface Reading Paper As Feminist Bibliography, Georgina Wilson

Criticism

This article models a mode of feminist bibliography by “surface reading” paper. Taking Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1605) as a case study, this article reads watermarks as reminders of paper’s three-dimensional materiality, whose surfaces and depths model the more and less legible forms of labor which contribute to paper’s making. Watermarks here become a creative and critical prompt to recover the interventions of John Spilman (the papermaker whose output was used for Sejanus), Spilman’s workers, and especially his female ragpickers. This article fuses close reading of literary texts and archival sources with bibliography and theory to demonstrate fresh …

"A Shadow Of A Magnitude": The Parthenon Marbles Through The Eyes Of Keats And Byron, Annie Griffin

Honors Projects

In 1817, The British Museum put on display a collection of sculptures taken by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Greece, and the controversy of the so-called “Elgin Marbles” began. The event of the marbles’ removal from Greece and display in Britain inspired poets such as John Keats and Lord Byron, who wrote of the beauty of the sculptures and the loss for Greece. The subject of the Marbles and the poets have been critically discussed at length—one need only type “Elgin Marbles” into a search bar to be met with countless recent articles about them. On the other hand, …

Novela Negra Y Rol: Adaptación Del Género Hacia Nuevas Narrativas, Daniel Romero Benguigui

Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM

En sus orígenes, la novela negra llegó a presentarse como una experiencia lúdica, donde se invitó a los participantes a resolver el caso antes de finalizar la velada. De igual manera, los juegos de rol también proponen un desafío para los jugadores, también mediante un conjunto de reglas que aseguran el juego limpio.

Además, estos han demostrado su vinculación a lo literario al adaptar diferentes géneros a los sistemas empleados para el juego, ya fuera la fantasía épica (Dungeons and Dragons, Anima: Beyond Fantasy), el terror cósmico (Llamada de Cthulhu, Rastro de Cthulhu) o …

The Queer Ecology Of Clouds In Nineteenth-Century British Poetics, Lucien Darjeun Meadows

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the nineteenth century, British writers were interested in the emergent science of meteorology, and their lyrical writing (their “poetics”), from poetry to creative and scientific prose, often turns to clouds as both meteorological formations and as material metaphors for human-environment interactions. These writers frequently invoke clouds to disrupt or “queer” depictions of human-environment relationships built on human domination of environmental beings. Clouds, in poetic writing, help writers (and readers) instead experience subject-subject relationships of reciprocity—a collaborative, non-hierarchical way of existing with and learning from our ecological relatives.

Dwelling in the confluence of literary studies, queer studies, and ecology, The …

Envisioning A World Without Rape In Late Fifteenth-Century Dream Narratives, Boyda J. Johnstone

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Recent scholarship has been preoccupied with questions of rape and consent in late medieval literature, partly influenced by the Me Too movement while we continue to grapple with Geoffrey Chaucer’s allegation of raptus. In such a climate, medieval texts that likewise challenge the normalization of rape in literature and society require renewed attention and critical interest. The three fifteenth-century poems I examine in this article, The Assembly of Ladies, The Floure and the Leafe, and The Isle of Ladies, push Chaucer’s dream vision tradition in a new direction, presenting us with female-centered models of cooperation, care, and governance. …

Holy Matter Making Holy Meaning: Fashioning Memory, Community And Dissimilar Similitude In Middle Dutch Sister-Books And The Book Of Margery Kempe, Godelinde G. Perk

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Middle Dutch sister-books and The Book of Margery Kempe are fifteenth-century vernacular texts by women chronicling their female subjects’ conversion and arduous attempts at a holy life. They share an (auto)hagiographic enterprise and formal and thematic features, including a display of rags and riches by the vitae’s subjects and a desire for mnemonic engagement on the part of the readers with the text. This article is the first to present the Diepenveen and Deventer sister-books and the Book as conversation partners. I draw on two main conceptual tools: 1) medieval memoria and 2) the notion of “dissimilar similitude” …