Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Boy In The Text: Mary Barber, Her Son, And Children's Poetry In Poems On Several Occasions, Chantel M. Lavoie

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

The Boy in the Text: Mary Barber, Her Son, and Children’s Poetry in Poems on Several Occasions

This paper reconsiders the work of Dublin poet Mary Barber, whose collection of poems appeared in 1733/34. There she acknowledges the assistance of Jonathan Swift, and frames her poetry as a pedagogical aid to her children’s education—particularly that of her eldest son, Constantine. Barber’s relationship with Swift has received much critical attention, as has her focus on her own motherhood—sometimes in critiques that suggest both of these hampered the quality and scope of her work. This paper asks readers to look at her …

Entering The Lady’S Dressing Room: Using Feminist Game Design To Look At And Beyond The Male Gaze In Swift’S The Lady’S Dressing Room., Melanie D. Holm

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

In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire, and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation, the multiple narrative-making experience of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and …

Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens

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

This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers …

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.

Lady Mary's Imperfect Employment, Danielle Bobker

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

No abstract provided.