Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

“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 …

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

Merge

No abstract provided.

Haunted Heroines: An Examination Of The Complication Of The Gothic Heroine, Molly S. Callison

Honors Projects

This undergraduate research thesis is an examination of two of the most significant evolutions of the literary figure of the Gothic heroine, focusing on innovations made by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1817) and Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847). It discusses the origins of the Gothic heroine, set up by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764), and examines the ways that Austen and Brontë make their heroines more internally complex, bringing not only realism to the Gothic heroine but a psychological depth to the feminine Gothic.

Mutually Exclusive: Being Gay And Being A Man In E.M. Forster’S Maurice, Kimber Foreman

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This paper outlines the impacts of English heteronormativity on E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice by exploring applicable cultural context and its reflection within the text. Maurice was published after Forster’s death, and as his only novel with explicit queer characters, is the best suited for parsing Forster’s own understanding of the society he lived in. With a primary focus on the characters of Maurice and Clive, the paper examines the dichotomy that Forster posits heteronormative English society creates between traditional English masculinity and the identities of gay men. This examination ultimately leads to the conclusion that Forster writes the Greenwood-bound fate …

Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The heroine of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has been of considerable interest to medieval feminist scholars as a woman who is depicted as both virtuous and an adulteress. Yet critical discussions do not often view Criseyde’s virtue in light of her role as daughter. This article explores that role, focusing on how her father Calkas is described by the characters as having authority over his daughter’s body in the marriage market. This will later enable them to use him as an excuse for Criseyde’s failure to return to Troy and thus preserve her status as virtuous. However, the characters …

Affect And The Tomb In Robert Henryson's Testament Of Cresseid, Elizabeth Elliott

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The penultimate verse of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid suggests the possibility that Troilus raised a monument in memory of his former love, Cresseid: “Sum said he maid ane tomb of merbell gray” (l. 603). Examining the political implications of this uncertain act of memorialisation, this article considers how Henryson's poem mobilises the reader's emotional response to constitute Cresseid as a mourned subject, whose subjectivity is recognised only insofar as it is limited to suffering and death. In doing so, the Testament also establishes a subjectivity for women that offers conditional tolerance predicated on respectable behaviour, contributing to the historical production …

“Hysteria Abated”: Forster’S Treatment Of Women’S Mental Health In Howards End, Rosemary Pauley

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In Howards End, Forster’s female characters are written off multiple times as having ‘hysteria’ or simply being foolish, sensitive women, which was a common attitude towards mental illness in Edwardian society. This essay investigates the concept of hysteria and Forster’s use of mental health with his female characters, using these factors to enhance the understanding of the characters, particularly the struggles or judgments that the three leading ladies, Helen, Margaret, and Ruth, face. The initial inspiration was drawn from Margaret’s jumping out of the carriage, as well as the neglect of Ruth’s dying wish; both women are deemed hysterical. While …

The Glass Coffin: Gothic Adaptations And The Formation Of Sexual Subjectivity., Colton T. Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is now an almost foregone conclusion that classic depictions of vampirism resonate with contemporary queer audiences. A sympathetic response to the monster’s persecution is often the key factor in these arguments, yet little attention is paid to the textual details that prompt such a process of identification. This study posits that the iconography used to establish a connection between monstrosity and non-normative sexuality has its origins in Victorian Gothic fiction, whose descriptions of vampirism were assimilated into the discourse of the fin-de-siècle medical field known as sexology. Theories that defined homosexuality as an illness with physical and psychological symptoms …

Love And Romance In Early Modern British Literature, Sophia Szeneitas

Senior Honors Projects

This paper seeks to describe and analyze the way in which themes of love and romance were presented in literature in early modern Britain, and how those may differ from or be similar to romantic themes in the media of today. The works being analyzed include plays by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, as well as some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A few different lenses will be explored, including the interaction that love could have with the societal power structure and hierarchy present within the literature (such as the ways in which someone being the lover of a powerful person might …

Performance, Theatricality, And Identity In Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Nina Masin-Moyer

College Honors Program

William Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew is a curious and often controversial play due to its depiction of spousal abuse and female subordination. But despite that charged reputation, it continues to be produced on stages around the world, with creative choices that suggest an attempt to change a supposedly un-feminist play into a feminist one. My thesis argues that this play already features notable feminist elements at the level of the text itself, stemming in particular from its thematic and structural investment in performance and theatricality and in the roles that these elements play in constructing gender and …

First Person Narration In Postwar British Women’S Fiction, Julia Mccoy

English Student Scholarship

Julia McCoy ’22
Majors: English and Political Science
Faculty Mentor: Dr. William Hogan, English

A study of postwar English novelists Margaret Drabble and Jeannette Winterson, looking particularly at the way these writers use first person narration in their works. Both writers explore how women’s identity can be ‘written into being’ against external pressures and authorities that seek to define women’s ‘proper’ role.

Women And Supposition: The Chronicles Of Narnia And Biblical Womanhood, Carolyn Dailey

Honors Projects

Supplemented by C.S. Lewis' works in theology, predominately Mere Christianity, and 'Priestesses in the Church?" as well as sources from other theologians, and historians, this paper explores the relationship between Christian tradition and Biblical womanhood that is expressed in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. This paper finds that C.S. Lewis drew more from the core tenets of love and equality that exist at the heart of Christianity rather than from traditional Christian beliefs, including some he held himself. In doing this, he crafted an imaginative fiction that affirms Biblical womanhood.

To Put Her In Her Place: An Interrogation Of Death And Gender In Shakespearean Tragedy, Isabella A. Zentner

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This analysis investigates the gendered implications of Shakespearean heroines' deaths. Using Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus as case studies, evidence is drawn from the text. This evidence is then supported by extensive historical research and reference to external critical studies of these tragedies. By identifying the gendered aspects of these heroines’ deaths, one can gain a greater understanding of Shakespeare’s view of female autonomy and power. The deaths Shakespeare inflicts often act as a punishment for the heroines' betrayal of traditional gender roles and forcibly return the heroines to the feminine sphere.

British Literature I, Justin Shaw

Syllabus Share

What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to have an identity? This course serves as an entry point to the study of early British literature and its historical contexts. We examine texts written from the 7th to the 17th Centuries that comprise a portion of what we call British literature. This survey engages poetry, prose, and drama that reimagine the complexities of intersectional identity, render the nation as part of a global stage, and challenge conventions of sexuality and gender. It traces early texts written by and about people on the margins of “Britishness” and "Englishness" such …

Gawain, Women, And The Hunts: How The Body Influences Human-Animal Relationships In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Meghan Gavis

The Criterion

In the narrative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, women and animals appear, on the surface, to function in a quintessential medieval sense — as physical objects to bolster Sir Gawain’s chivalric image. However, the dynamics between women, animals, and Gawain in this text challenge the human hierarchy presented by other medieval standards. By reading the ritualized hunts as devolving in honorable attention to the animal body and mapping their language onto the Lady’s temptations in Gawain’s bedroom, a feminine reclamation of the body appears. Though Gawain undercuts the Lady and Morgan by reducing them to physical presences, …

Women, Writing, And Storytelling In Medieval England And The Canterbury Tales, Sadie O'Conor

The Criterion

For a woman to succeed in an academic sphere, it is never enough for her to be clever-- she must be brilliant. “The Second Nun’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales explores the metaphorical brilliance (in sexual purity, intelligence, and faith) of St. Cecilia. The tale is also a mechanism for the Second Nun to advocate for her own vocation of “holy work,” for the sake of the learned religious women who preserved such writings. The themes of her tale are quite different from those espoused by the Wife of Bath, but the Wife also argues to have her voice …

Femininity As Disability In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar., Shae Kirkus, Monika Shehi Herr

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

Disability studies is often associated with the treatment of people with physical disabilities, which are defined as features of non-normative human bodies. However, analyzed through the lens of the classical idea of the ideal body, which was first and foremost male, femininity itself is also atypical and therefore confines women to the realm of being disabled.

Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar shows how the feminine is a disability in and of itself. As Plath’s main character and narrator, Esther Greenwood, spirals into her own madness, her condition is only worsened by societal reactions to her declining mental health. …

Realism As Weaponry: Challenging Victorian Ideals Of Femininity In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret And Wilkie Collins' Armadale, Taylor Aalgaard

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

"Wearing A Mask To Each Other": Masculinity & The Public Eye In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Shannon Branfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sensation fiction, as a genre, offers a field to explore the ways in which ideologies of masculinity are negotiated, contested, and enforced. The Victorian man has no respite from social surveillance; the public is always watching, always evaluating the performance. As these sensation fiction novels build on each other, a portrait of male claustrophobia in response to unceasing surveillance is revealed. The pressure this constant scrutiny puts on Victorian men is immense and sensation novels derive many thrilling plot twists from the dramatic lengths men to which men must go to protect themselves from this gaze. These habits persist even …

Wwa Reflection: Losing Sight, Making Scholarship, Sabrina M. Durso

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

No abstract provided.

Wwa Reflection: “So Near Approach / The Sports Of Children And The Toils Of Men”: Pandemic Labour, Pandemic Imagination, Kathleen E. Lawton-Trask

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

This reflection calls attention to the idea that the merging of the domestic and the intellectual, while especially intense during the pandemic year of 2020-21, is a familiar conundrum for women especially. It suggests that creativity can emerge from the intensity of domestic labour, noting the domestic mock-heroic poetry that was written by women in 18^th century Britain as a counterpoint to the rise of domesticity, and suggests that (for female academics who are also primary caregivers) scholarly responses and reflections may be easier to bring out of this pandemic moment than scholarly research.