Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Discomforting Narratives: Teaching Eighteenth-Century Women’S Travelogues, Elizabeth Zold

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

In this essay, I describe an undergraduate course I designed and taught on eighteenth-century women’s travelogues and advocate for more courses that explicitly focus on noncanonical genres and authors. Using student papers, I explore how students worked through their discomfort with new genre conventions and improved their overall reading and analytical skills. I hope that my outline of the course will be useful to those who teach or will be teaching women's travel literature or who wish to focus courses on noncanonical authors and genres.

In Their Hands: Students Editing Eighteenth- And Nineteenth-Century Letters, Thomas Mclean

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

This article describes an honours-year class conducted in 2013 at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Students transcribed, annotated and wrote essays about a little-known New Zealand collection of unpublished letters written by leading British women writers of the Romantic era. Their research was then collected and published as a book entitled "In Her Hand: Letters of Romantic-Era British Women Writers in New Zealand Collections." The success of this course suggests the benefits of allowing students the opportunity to undertake original archival research and serves as a reminder that rich archival collections are found all over the world.

The Best Laid Plans Of Librarians And Faculty: Information Literacy Instruction In A General Education Literature Course, Difficulties And Successes, Kelly Diamond, Lisa Weihman

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Members of this panel (a librarian and faculty member) began collaborating to create information literacy sessions for English 272: Modernist Literature. Assuming that students enrolled would be English majors or similar, we created sessions and assignments focused on higher-order research skills, such as working with and analyzing primary sources.

However, this section of English 272 fulfilled a General Education Curriculum (GEC) requirement. At our institution, students take 43 credit hours to fulfill GEC requirements, courses from a broad range of disciplines. Unfortunately, many students enroll in GEC courses for which they are under-prepared, have no personal interest, and are not …

Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Cult Of The Cross, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Although most Anglo-Saxonists deal with Old English texts and contexts as a matter of course in our research agendas, many of us teach relatively few specialized courses focused on our areas of expertise to highly-trained students; thus, many Old English texts and objects which are commonplace in our research lives can seem arcane and esoteric to a great many of our students. This article proposes to confront this gap, to suggest some ways of teaching a few potentially obscure texts and artifacts to undergrads, to offer some guidance about uses of technology in this endeavor, and to help fellow teachers …

"A Simple Tale Told Simply": The Cultural Importance Of R. D. Blackmore's Neglected Novel "Lorna Doone", John Stanifer

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Morehead State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English by John Stanifer on September 18, 2014.

Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In’T: Using Graphic Shakespeare Texts To Create Meaningful Engagement In The High School Classroom, Eric Kallenborn

All Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis covers the attempt to successfully motivate and connect with high school students by giving them the option of reading a graphic form of Hamlet instead of the original text. This research was conducted to not only dispel the myth that comics and graphic novels are juvenile and adolescent but to also explain the benefits of such texts to educators and administrators.

For this research, 10^th graders were assigned Hamlet and were allowed to select the graphic text over the traditional text, allowing for student buy-in from the selection. Students also took part in a project that …

Review Of Bonnie Latimer, Making Gender, Culture, And The Self In The Fiction Of Samuel Richardson: The Novel Individual, Karen Lipsedge

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

Latimer’s Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson answers a need in eighteenth-century Richardsonian studies. It is also a thoughtful and long overdue study, which deserves praise and attention. Latimer provides the reader with a greater understanding of the notion of female individuality in Richardson’s novels, and also of eighteenth-century culture and contemporary literature. Her research is gratifying in its level of detail, and she is deft in showing correspondences between eighteenth-century culture, fiction and Richardson’s novels. Although Sir Charles Grandison lies at the heart of this study, Latimer is equally skilful in devoting attention …

Review Of Enit Karafili Steiner, Jane Austen's Civilized Women: Morality, Gender, And The Civilizing Process, Sarah Raff

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Paula Backscheider, Elizabeth Singer Rowe And The Development Of The English Novel, Sarah H. Prescott

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Carol Stewart (Ed.), The Rash Resolve And Life's Progress, Sarah R. Creel

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

This review gives an overview of Carol Stewart's edition of Eliza Haywood's The Rash Resolve and Life's Progress. Providing a modern edition of these texts in print for the first time, Stewart's edition brings the two novels to life with careful attention to historical and contextual details.

You’Re An Austen Heroine! Engaging Students With Past And Present, Caroline Breashears

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

In my senior seminar on Jane Austen, I seek to engage students in multiple ways. On one hand, I want them to connect with Austen’s world and to reflect on what it means to them; on the other hand, I want them to understand the very real differences of that world and how they inform her novels. One strategy for engaging students in these ways is through interactive games. Studies have shown that many modern games have features similar to those stressed by engaged learning, so game design can be adapted for pedagogical purposes. I discuss the purposes, design, and …

Teaching Willmore, James Evans

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

Teaching Aphra Behn’s The Rover for nearly four decades, I have witnessed a considerable shift in students’ attitudes toward the play, especially toward Willmore. More positive about his character in the 1970s and 1980s, they have had a much more negative assessment since then. The only available video version, the Women’s Theatre Trust production, compounds my pedagogical problem through filming techniques and choice of actor; emphasizing male violence against women, its interpretation parallels feminist criticism of the 1990s. Asking students to examine theater history may lead them to see that Behn does not completely match this ideological paradigm. The original …

The Secret Life Of Archives: Sally Siddons, Sir Thomas Lawrence, And The Material Of Memory, Laura Engel

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

This essay is in two parts, in the first I attempt to map out strategies for considering archival materials through the lens of performance, and in the second I enact or perform some of those strategies through a close reading of a letter from Sally Siddons, daughter of the famous actress Sarah Siddons, to the renown portrait painter and rakish bad boy, Sir Thomas Lawrence. I present a methodology that considers archival researchers as tourists who approach archival objects and images as material for curating a virtual exhibition. I argue that this strategy allows us to recognize and attempt to …

Adrianne Wadewitz, 1977-2014, Laura Runge

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

No abstract provided.

A Professorial Nation: The Pedagogical Gardens Of William Crimsworth, Jane Eyre, And Lucy Snowe, Elise Green

Masters Theses

Charlotte Brontë was not an intentional pedagogue, but nevertheless, her works reflect the dynamics of an educational ideology that depends on the natural environment. In Brontë's works, including The Professor, Jane Eyre, and Villette, safe learning environments are most commonly found in gardens, providing spaces--literally and metaphorically--dedicated to individual growth. These spaces are not isolated, however, as they are located in bustling towns such as Villette and schoolyards like those of Jane Eyre. Likewise, the individual does not grow in isolation; rather, development is a process that is fostered by an individual's interaction with his or her environment. In essence, …

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.

What Jane Saw, Kate Singer

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

Review of Professor Janine Barchas' "What Jane Saw?" a website that reconstructs Joshua Reynolds's 1813 retrospective art exhibit, which Jane Austen attended, with particular attention to the Regency social and cultural history depicted in Austen's novels.

Frances Burney’S Cecilia: A Publishing History, By Catherine M. Parisian, Lee Kahan

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

No abstract provided.

Matters Of Fact In Jane Austen: History, Location, And Celebrity, By Janine Barchas, Laura E. Thomason

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

No abstract provided.

Crossing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Course In The "Enlightenment", Carol White, Kathryn P. Russell

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

In this essay, we present a twofold version of the first team-taught course on the eighteenth century designed by faculty at Clayton State University who plan to develop and teach this course again in the near future. We hope that our explanation of the original course and our projected future version of the course will be useful to scholars who teach in the eighteenth century, as well as to specialists in other historical periods who wish to plan revisions of courses to make them more reflective of current scholarship in gender studies. Authors taught in this course include Benjamin Franklin, …

Bosom Friends And The Sapphic Breasts Of Belinda, Ula E. Klein

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

This article examines Maria Edgeworth’s 1801 novel Belinda in order to argue that the breast at the center of Lady Delacour’s narrative signifies not maternal failure but Sapphic feelings and connections. While previous studies of the novel have discussed the wounded breast of Lady Delacour as a punishment for her transgressions or as an emblem of her patriarchal oppression, this article claims that the wounded breast is both a sign of and a means to female same-sex desire and relationships. This article contrasts the wounded, festering breast with the tableau that ends the novel. The tableau, a constructed vision of …

Revolutionary Imaginings In The 1790s: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald By Amy Garnai, Jennifer Golightly

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

No abstract provided.

Collecting Women: Poetry And Lives, 1700-1780 By Chantel M. Lavoie, Holly Faith Nelson

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

No abstract provided.

'Lactilla Tends Her Fav'rite Cow': Ecocritical Readings Of Animals And Women In Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Women's Poetry By Anne Milne, Dometa Wiegand

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

No abstract provided.

Numbering The Streaks On A Digital Tulip: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets On The World Wide Web, Emily Bowles

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

No abstract provided.

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.

"Calmly To Heav'n Submit Your Cause": Jane Cave Winscom And The Bristol Bridge Riots Of 1793, Catherine Ingrassia

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

No abstract provided.

Missing Immortality: The Case Of Melesina Trench (A Neglected, Celebrated, Dismissed And Rediscovered Woman Poet Of The Long Eighteenth Century), Katharine Kittredge

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.

Anna Seward And The Sonnet: Milton's Champion, Claudia Thomas Kairoff

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

No abstract provided.