Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Transmisogyny In Popular Culture, Feminisms, And Shakespeare Studies, Lisa S. Starks

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

In this article, I deal with the disparagement of femininity and trans persons in multiple levels of our culture, including in some feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism. I point out that contemporary culture, patriarchal institutions, and some feminist positions share misogynistic stances towards expressions and embodiments of femininity; and these perspectives carry over into some criticism, as well as our academic institutions and classrooms. I examine the double-standard that is often applied to feminine-gendered behavior and bodies in contemporary culture and the profession. In so doing, I address the points of tension and common ground between feminist, queer, and transgender …

Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in …

Elizabeth Robins Portrays Working Women In Suffragette Literature: A Reflection Through The Lens Of The 2015 Film, Suffragette, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

I place the 2015-released film Suffragette within a context of the efforts Elizabeth Robins made to document and, by witnessing, to advocate, the early phases of the British Women’s Suffrage Movement in England. Robins wrote and participated across margins. An expatriate American living in England, she had no personal advantage to gain with a franchise. In her late forties and in ill health, she took perhaps only "safe" opportunities to thrust herself into the fray. But as Jane Marcus points out, with her research on the play that became Votes for Women, she took efforts to experience how working-class …

Review Of Placing Charlotte Smith, Eds Elizabeth A. Dolan And Jacqueline M. Labbe, Heather Heckman-Mckenna

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

A review of Placing Charlotte Smith edited by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Jacqueline M. Labbe, written by Heather Heckman-McKenna

Review Of The Novel Stage: Narrative Form From The Restoration To Jane Austen, By Marcie Frank, Kathleen E. Urda

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

A review of Marcie Frank's The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen by Kathleen E. Urda

Negotiating Gender, Representing Landscape: Teaching Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard’S Letters, Journals And Watercolours From The Cape Colony (1797–1801), Lenka Filipova

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

The article focuses on Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard’s letters, journals and watercolours that she produced during her stay at the Cape Colony (1797–1801). Combining a series of tasks focused on close reading of Barnard’s work and a critical discussion of the historical context, the article provides a teaching strategy to examine her work with respect to the gendered discourse of the eighteenth century, and her approach to the Cape landscape and its inhabitants which both employs and, significantly, subverts contemporaneous conventions. More specifically, the tasks draw attention to Barnard’s use of ‘the modesty topos’ and the way she uses rhetorical …

Concise Collections: Teaching British Women Travelers, Tiffany Potter

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

No abstract provided.

Cooking Up Knowledge: Materiality, Recipes, And Jane Barker’S A Patch-Work Screen For The Ladies, Carolin Boettcher

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

The recipes included in Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) appear to be some of the most jarring and out-of-context inclusions in the narrative. This article explores the relationship between Barker’s novel and the form of the recipe collection in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on both a material and an epistemological level. The entanglements between recipes and the patchwork screen not only point to the processes of constructing and conveying knowledge, but also to the materiality of these processes as Galesia and the Lady build the patchwork screen. Her focus on the materiality of …

Postures After The Antique In Eighteenth-Century Portraits Of Women, Lauren K. Disalvo

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

This paper re-examines the relationship between eighteenth-century portraiture and the antique where women adopt the postures of floating female figures from Pompeiian wall paintings in eighteenth-century portraiture. I argue that eighteenth-century floating portraits afforded their female sitters an opportunity to assert classical knowledge while adhering to typical conventions of femininity.

Susannah And Cold Mountain: Examining The Portrayal Of Appalachian Culture In Opera, Savannah Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies qualitative literary analysis and ethnographic methods to examine the portrayal of Appalachia in the operas Susannah and Cold Mountain. The operas were premiered almost 60 years apart, yet they share many themes that epitomize roles, patterns, and stereotypes within the Appalachian region. One theme observed is the role and expectations of Appalachian women and how they have developed over time, as the plots are placed roughly a century apart. The depictions of Appalachian religious traditions and representations of violence are also explored as these themes play a considerable role in Susannah and Cold Mountain. By analyzing …

Pride And Prejudice: A Modern, Queer Retelling For The Stage, Kate Isabel Foley

Theater Summer Fellows

In the course of studying LGBTQ topics in a queer drama class, I noticed that there was a glaring omission in our readings: the “B.” However, this lack of bisexual representation wasn’t due to a poor syllabus, but to a dismaying lack of bisexual representation in theatre as a whole. This observation, as well as my own experience as a bisexual woman, motivated me to use my love of writing and theatre to fill the void. After performing in Pride and Prejudice at Ursinus, I knew that Jane Austen’s story was the key to me bringing visibility to an underserved, …

Cross-Cultural Performativity Of Gender Communication In Heather Raffo’S Nine Parts Of Desire, Shaimaa M. Saeed

English Language and Literature

Since the mid-twentieth century, the study of gender has constituted a fundamental part of many interdisciplinary research works due to its multi-perspective nature which made it a fertile ground for analysis in diversified fields of science. Discussions over sex/gender distinction and the representation as well as perception of gender ceaselessly exist within controversially enriching, discursive frameworks. In 1990, Judith Butler (1956- ), one of the prominent feminist theorists in the field of gender studies, first coined the concept of “gender performativity,” where she challenged the conventional notions of ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists who restricted the perception and communication of gender to …

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

She Speaks Her Truth: Black Female Self-Empowerment In African-American Centric Texts, Britt N. Seese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

A Master's Portfolio that looks into African-American Women in African-American literature and theatrical works.

“All The Daughters Of My Father's House, And All The Brothers Too”: Shakespeare’S Portrayal Of Gender Fluidity, Sebastian Lopez

Symposium of Student Scholars

This paper analyzes how Shakespeare's personal life influenced the relationship between Viola and Cesario in Twelfth Night through a feminist lens and an analysis of gender fluidity in the Elizabethan Era. It is a common misconception that conversations revolving around gender are a modern discussion. Shakespeare popularized the idea of gender fluidity in English literature in his play, Twelfth Night.

At the height of Shakespeare’s career, he wrote many comedies, yet few tragedies, however, a tonal shift occurred after the death of his son, Hamnet. Shakespeare was father to a pair of fraternal twins, Judith and Hamnet. However, the …

Spring Awakening: A Midwest Children's Tragedy, Lena Nighswander

Honors Projects

Spring Awakening: A Midwest Children's Tragedy is a new play that takes up the issues of adaptation, translation, and temporality in regards to Frank Wedekind's Frühlingserwachen, a play infamous in its revelry in controversy and unflinching nature in the face of social issues many would prefer to ignore. Several modern adaptations of the original text exist, but none have utilized the 2020s as a setting nor have they used the fertile landscape of the American midwest as a background.

This play, set in Toledo, OH, leans into the Wedekindian tradition of cutting social criticism and controversy in its exploration of …

Sweet Fooling: Ethical Humor In King Lear And Levinas, Kent R. Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"In recent years, scholars have increasingly put the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1623) in dialogue with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995)... The majority of these Shakespearean references are to Hamlet and Macbeth, but contemporary critics working in the vein of Levinas have tended to favor King Lear. No Shakespearean play has been subjected to Levinasian analysis more fully or more frequently.⁵ This critical proclivity is not unwarranted, for Shakespeare's tragic play and Levinas's ethical writings tell the same basic story: that of the egoist who heedlessly pursues his own interests until he is until he …

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 …

Fun With Palamon And Arcite: Rationale And Strategies For Teaching The Two Noble Kinsmen As The Culmination Of The Shakespearean Canon, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Hardly noticed in the reception of Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human several years ago was his hint that not The Tempest but The Two Noble Kinsmen makes an appropriate final accomplishment. On one level, the play is merely a stage adaptation of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, with a rather crude couple of subplots thrown in, perhaps to please the commoners. In an undergraduate forum, I am less inclined to evaluate Fletcher's contribution as distinct from Shakespeare, but I do think the play important for how it is representative of many of the co-authored English Renaissance plays …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

“What We Ought To Say”: Debating The Morality Of Dishonesty And Equivocation In King Lear, Markelle Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

King Lear does not reveal the nature of honesty but provides a stage on which the morality of honesty can be debated. The play questions whether honesty is inherently moral at all, or if there are ways in which honesty can be considered harmful and even immoral. Other scholars have noted this as well in characters such as Edgar and Kent, but missing from the critical conversation are the ways in which Cordelia is the pillar of moral goodness in the play, and how her own paradoxical honesty and dishonesty were what enabled Lear to “see better” and ultimately, to …