Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Feminine Interiority And Social Protest In The Poetry Of Mary Leapor, Joanna C. Yates

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

Mary Leapor (1722-46) is one of the many under-studied women poets of the eighteenth-century. She is often described as a laboring-class poet which, while historically accurate, implies her immediate marginalization as an writer by her class and gender. Her focus of enquiry explores a new female authorial interiority, embracing her own volition, personality, and aesthetic sensibility through the act of writing itself. This nascent individualism, arising from the examination of feeling, lies at the heart of her work and heralds the social protest that will erupt later in the century. This paper hopes to offer a broader perspective on Leapor’s …

Grasses, Groves, And Gardens: Aphra Behn Goes Green, Heidi Laudien

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

Laudien argues in “Grasses, Groves and Gardens: Aphra Behn Goes Green” that Behn moves beyond the stylized and artificial backdrops of most pastoral to explore the unique ways the landscape can be manipulated to investigate gender difference and the dynamics of desire and representation. Laudien suggests that in prioritizing the pastoral as political allegory in Behn, we overlook the descriptions of nature and the importance she places on the natural environments she creates. Through close readings of several of her pastoral poems, Laudien reveals that Behn’s landscapes destabilize existing notions of the pastoral space as an idealized and organized place …

A New Poem By Anna Letitia Barbauld, Scott Krawczyk, William Mccarthy

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

This short discovery article presents information pertaining to a previously unknown poem of four lines by Anna Letitia Barbauld. The poem is housed at Duke University in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

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 …

Editing Aphra Behn In The Digital Age: An Interview With Gillian Wright And Alan Hogarth, Laura Runge, Gillian Wright, Alan Hogarth

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

This interview provides a view of the work in progress for the Cambridge University Press edition of the Complete Works of Aphra Behn. Gillian Wright serves as a general editor (with Elaine Hobby, Claire Bowditch, and Mel Evans) as well as the volume editor for Behn’s poetry. Alan Hogarth is the Postdoctoral Research Associate working with Mel Evans on the computational stylistics and author attribution testing. The discussion focuses on the scope and principles of editing the poetry of Aphra Behn, the role of stylometry in establishing the corpus, the status of work, a few particular poems, and some surprises.

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 …

Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head: Science And The Dual Affliction Of Minute Sympathy, Kelli M. Holt

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

Greatly illustrative of Adam Smith’s statement in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that the sympathizer must “adopt the whole case of his companion with all its minutest incidents; and strive to render as perfect as possible that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded”––while also complementing notions of feeling from the work of Anna Barbauld––Beachy Head and its minutiae “renders” an utterly sympathetic argument, one void of gender conventions, that comments on nature's inhuman and human condition.

Poetry Archives On The Web: Thomas Gray Archive, The Poetry Of The Gentleman’S Magazine, 1731-1800: An Electronic Database Of Titles, Authors, And First Lines, And The Poetess Archive, Kate Parker

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

Recent innovations in digital scholarship have enabled new online archives, editions and bibliographies to flourish. Three such online resources--the Thomas Gray Archive, the Poetess Archive, and The Poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731-1800: An Electronic Database of Titles, Authors, and First Lines--are explored in depth in this review, with an eye to how each archive specifically encourages scholarly collaboration and makes use of crowd-sourcing technologies.

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.

Chasing The Ghost Of Melesina Trench: A Film By Qina Liu In Collaboration With Katharine Kittredge, Katherine Kittredge, Qina Liu

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

Filmmaker Qina Liu has created a short documentary about Katharine Kittredge's decade-long quest to learn about the life and work of Anglo-Irish diarist and poet Melesina Trench. The story tells of remarkable coincidences, documents lost and found, and the emergence of Trench's descendants in the project's final chapter.

Ashes From Falling Stars, John A. Nieves

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a book length collection of poetry—all original and by the author. The book has three chapters, each with a different mode of expressing the work’s overall theme: the remnants of unfulfilled wishes. The first chapter deals with ordinary or mundane manifestations of the theme. The second chapter covers extraordinary, but still feasible, variations on the theme. The final chapter deals with subconscious versions of these unfulfilled wishes. It is far more surreal than the other two chapters and exists in a sort of dream-reality.

The poetry included in this work is all free verse. There are narrative …