English Language and Literature Commons^™

Frankenstein’S Creature: Monstrous Chicken Or Grotesque Egg?, Alexandria B. Acero

Gettysburg College Headquarters

Some scholars believe that due to the negligence of Victor in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the creature became an attention-craving murderous monster. Other scholars believe that the unaffectionate and unnatural way Victor birthed the creature caused his monstrous form. The argument over “Nature versus Nurture” in relation to the creations is irrelevant, however. The creature is only pushed away by Victor due to his hideousness which stems from the environment in which the creature was born. Victor’s societal view on nature and its connection to womanly attributes creates a paradox of a loveless creation and an affection-craving creature within the novel.

Review Of The The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture Of Intimacy, By Danielle Bobker, Mary Peace

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Relative Races: Genealogies Of Interracial Kinship In Nineteenth-Century America, By Brigitte Fielder, Shelby Johnson

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

No abstract provided.

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.

“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, David Mazella, Claude Willan, David Bishop, Elizabeth Stravoski, Walter Barta, Max James

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

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of women’s participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory became the …

The Lady’S Museum Project: A Digital Critical Edition In Phase 1 Of Its Development, Now Available For Teachers And Students To Learn Collaboratively Through Charlotte Lennox’S Lady’S Museum (1761-62), Kelly Plante

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

This announcement informs readers on how they can use, and participate in, the Lady's Museum Project (ladysmuseum.com). It discusses the work completed and the forthcoming updates planned for teachers', scholars', and students' use of this first critical edition of Charlotte Lennox's the Lady's Museum, as of spring 2022.

Arabella In The Salon: Teaching Charlotte Lennox’S Female Quixote With Madeleine De Scudéry’S “Carte De Tendre,” Clélie, And Conversations, Nicole Horejsi

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

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Lady’S Museum And Sophia: Imperialism, Early Feminism, And Beyond, Karenza Sutton-Bennett, Susan Carlile

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

This essay argues for the value of teaching Charlotte Lennox’s periodical The Lady’s Museum (1760-61) in undergraduate literature, history, media studies, postcolonial, and gender studies classrooms. Lennox’s magazine, which includes one of the first serialized novels “Harriot and Sophia” (later published as the stand-alone novel Sophia (1762)) encouraged debate of the proto-discipline topics of history, geography, literary criticism, astronomy, botany, and zoology. This essay offers a flexible teaching module, which can be taught in one to five days, that focuses on the themes of early female education and imperialism using full or excerpted portions of essays from the eidolon, “Of …

Mapping The Geographic Imagination In Harriot Stuart And Euphemia At An Hbcu, Leah M. Thomas

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

Teaching Charlotte Lennox’s Harriot Stuart (London, 1750) and Euphemia (London, 1790) offers a transatlantic perspective of the New York region and its diverse population of African Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans as understood from a British woman novelist who lived in New York in the 1740s during the time in which both novels are set. In addition to this diversity, her novels demonstrate the conflicts and networks within this part of America, all of which can be explored through historical and geographical contexts of contemporaneous maps. These maps not only engage the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) focus …

Teaching Charlotte Lennox’S Harriot Stuart: Romance, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, And Transatlantic Fictions, Marta Kvande

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

Harriot Stuart is well worth teaching because it offers rich possibilities both for discussing literary forms such as heroic romance, epistolary form, and women’s narrative voices, and for investigating topics such the transatlantic experience, colonialism, and representations of Native Americans. Whether in a course focused specifically on Charlotte Lennox’s works or in a more broadly focused course in eighteenth-century fiction, Harriot Stuart can help students learn about the possibilities for women’s empowerment and about transatlantic and racial ideas during the period.

Concise Collections: Teaching Charlotte Lennox, Tiffany Potter

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

The Spring 2022 issue of ABO inaugurates our new Pedagogies feature: the Concise Collections on Teaching Eighteenth-Century Women series. Each issue of ABO will include a Concise Collection on a different female writer or artist, with three to five articles offering critically-informed and practice-based strategies for teaching in survey or theme-based courses for different student audiences. This series seeks to facilitate the innovative and effective teaching of female creatives whose excellence and insight demand inclusion in our classrooms, but who have not yet received the attention they deserve in pedagogy publications, or who might not yet have been encountered by …

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 …

Seeking Margaret Baker: Identifying The Author Of Three Manuscript Receipt Books, Kimberley G. Connor

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

This paper uses recipe contributors named in three early modern manuscript receipt books (Sloane MS 2485, Sloane MS 2486 and Folger V.a 619) to identify the author as Margaret Baker, daughter of Richard Baker the Chronicler (c.1568-1645) and Margaret Mainwaring (died c.1652). A familial connection is also made to Wellcome MS 212. The Margaret Baker example is used to argue for the necessity of identifying a broader range of receipt, or recipe, book writers in order to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of recipe book production, and their social context. In the case of Margaret Baker, additional information about …

Succubus Matters, Jeremy Chow

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

This essay argues that the Gothic succubus pioneers new frameworks for examining female sexuality, sexual violation, and consent in the eighteenth century. M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) reveals the Bleeding Nun as a demonic female ghost that is both sadistic and hypersexualized, especially in her tryst with Don Raymond. The spectrality of the succubus reimagines the displacement of the female body as something both material and ethereal, and in so doing, renders consequent displacements of consent, agency, and sexuality, which may characterize queer Gothic tropes. I interweave discussions of consent alongside representations and theories of ghosts throughout the eighteenth …

Dominance And Radical Submission In Seventeenth-Century Drama: Chastity, Fairness, And Silence In Portrayals Of Mar(R)Iam(Ne), Sophonisba, And Cleopatra, Laura S. Deluca

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This thesis conducts an extensive reading of early modern English playwrights’ interpretation of ancient royalty. I survey a series of seventeenth-century plays concerning Mariamne I, the Carthaginian noblewoman Sophonisba, and Cleopatra VII. I argue that the English stage produced two models of ancient royalty. Mar(r)iam(ne) and Sophonisba personify one model, functioning as white, seemingly obedient figureheads. I document playwrights portraying their men as reducing them to their chastity and fairness, or lack thereof. Despite the inactivity of these objectified women, the qualities that these men obsess over catalyze masculine irrationality. The other model, which Cleopatra embodies, encompasses blackness and defiance. …

The Wailing Of The Streets: Novelistic Form And The Everyday In Voyage In The Dark And Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit, Tutkunur Vatansever

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

In 1911, before the increased attention to everyday life in critical theory, György Lukács contemplated the concept of trivial life and its relation to literary form. The recent theories of everyday life like that of Blanchot – emphasizing its formlessness and defiance of subjectivity – invite us to address the variance in the modernist novelistic form in the framework that Lukács outlined. In Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys and Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, both published in the 1930s, the pain and suffering of everyday life on the streets diffuse into the form of …

Literary Decadence And Critical Decay, Kevin David Beverage

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which literary decadence works against the tendency of literary history, scholarship, and literary institutions to make permanent—to monumentalize—certain styles, names, or movements. It does this through an examination of the role of criticism in decadent texts, and that criticism’s resistance to the “technologies of maintenance” working to guarantee permanence. After examining Oscar Wilde’s notion of criticism as conversational and that which comes before the work of art, thus breaking the permanency of the work of art, I shift to an analysis of two novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. Fitzgerald’s This Side …

Not Like Other Girls: Feminist Modernisms, Domestic Labor, And The Trouble With Conventional Women, Ana Elizabeth Quiring

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates the centrality of conventional womanhood to feminist literary history. As women gained access to voting rights, universities, and professions in the early years of the twentieth century, some writers sought to distinguish themselves from old-fashioned, domestic women in order to fashion themselves as uniquely modern. Not like Other Girls argues that this gesture of contradistinction has formed a core component of the feminist modernist ethos, both for early century writers and their scholarly reception. In response to this rift between the modern and the conventional, the dissertation gives an account of conventionality’s presence in modern feminist life. …

The Catholic Paradox Of Villette, Kevin R. Bie

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Villette, published in 1853, was Charlotte Brontë’s last novel. Brontë explores both narrative and religious complexities through her narrator, Lucy Snowe. Orphaned Lucy Snowe embarks on a new life in a predominantly Catholic country where her Protestant identity is challenged. Catholicism is presented as a temptation for Lucy. Brontë reveals Lucy’s story through her notable fictional autobiography structure, but Lucy Snowe complicates the relationship between narrator and reader. Lucy explicitly capitalizes on the structure of fictional autobiography, critiquing her narration and fostering a personal relationship with the reader.

This thesis analyzes the Catholic paradox in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette by …

Rosalind's Masculine Self: As You Like It And Criticism Of Male Communities, Faith Langford

Merge

No abstract provided.