Authors:Tonya J. Moutray Abstract: A review of Siobhán McIlvanney's Figurations of the Feminine, by Tonya J. Moutray PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:01:24 PDT
Authors:Ziona K. Kocher Abstract: A review of Ula Lukszo Klein’s Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Ziona Kocher. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:01:14 PDT
Authors:Jennifer Buckley Abstract: A review of Chelsea Phillips’s Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800, by Jennifer Buckley PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:01:05 PDT
Authors:Shelby Johnson Abstract: In this essay, I consider how The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) extends vital affordances for assembling a literary history of ecological rupture, settler colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. These insights arise from my experiences teaching Prince in “Plotting the Plantationocene in Early Atlantic Literature” (Fall 2021), a course which took up what it means to orient to historical formations of climate change as co-emergent with plantation systems. I argue that my students explored how figures like Prince open politically vibrant pathways for being in the world otherwise to plantation modernity. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:00:54 PDT
Authors:Carolina Hinojosa Abstract: This chapter utilizes Hartman’s methodology of retrieval to create a map1 in StoryMap JS2 (“the map” or “this map”) that analyzes multiple geographic spaces in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The map is an archive or a witness to some of the geographical spaces Mary Prince lived (and was sold) as an enslaved woman seeking freedom and the places in which Saidiya Hartman has conducted research or visited in Ghana as a “free” woman. Layering the past over present creates a subversive cartography, one that subverts and unsettles the monolithic geographical narrative of the transatlantic slave trade. Twenty-two locations are mapped that merge past, present, and future as one narrative and not a compartmentalized narrative contained by borders or timelines because “At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as a total climate” (Sharpe 21). This map will elicit questions of responsibility on how to unsettle colonial narratives about Black and African American women. This map interrogates geographical spaces of the formerly enslaved as already and always in existence beyond hegemonic structures that contribute to a capitalist economy. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:00:44 PDT
Authors:Kristina Huang Abstract: Due to the highly mediated conditions of its production, The History of Mary Prince presents a challenge to New Critical methods of reading that are frequently taught in undergraduate literature classrooms. Without questioning the British abolitionists’ textual representation of Prince’s experiences, readers unfamiliar with the historical conditions for slave narratives may attribute the publication’s sentimentalism and representations of violence as direct expressions of Prince. This essay mobilizes close reading towards contrary ends: I throw the editor’s (Thomas Pringle’s) paratextual material, particularly the Preface, under scrutiny by close reading its insistence on transparency and symmetry between the first-person narrative and Prince as the narrative's univocal source. Using the Preface as an apparatus for close reading The History, I emphasize the dissonance between, on the one hand, the British abolitionists’ textual representation of freedom and, on the other, Prince’s speech as a practice of freedom. Drawing on the methods developed by Marisa Fuentes and Ann Laura Stoler, I offer historical and geographical contexts that can be layered onto close readings exercises for The History – particularly around repeated tropes of salt and allusions to sugar – that destabilize Thomas Pringle’s, and by extension the London Antislavery Society’s, representation of Prince’s public image. I argue how the paratextual materials of The History can help instructors foreground the contradictions and asymmetries of power embedded in subaltern representations. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:00:33 PDT
Authors:Kerry Sinanan Abstract: This essay discusses teaching The History of Mary Prince at a Hispanic Serving Institution via Ethnic Studies praxis. It develops Nicole Aljoe’s definition of Prince’s narrative as counter-story and testimonio and explores the undisciplining effects of reading Prince’s history as relevant to the lives of Borderlands students. To understand the multiple meanings of “undisciplining’ this essay draws on the theory of Sylvia Wynter and shows how Prince’s testimonio offers an alternative to Western epistemologies via communal resistance and resurgence. Several pedagogic tools are explored for teaching Prince in this way. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:00:22 PDT
Authors:Nicole Carr Abstract: This paper examines The History of Mary Prince as a pedagogical tool for exploring complexities within the Black Diaspora. As Paul Gilroy’s articulations of the Black Atlantic inform my approach, Prince’s circuitous journey through the West Indies and England situates her process of becoming as one mired in longing and loss. Encouraging students to consider Prince as a wandering soul in search of not only freedom, but also solid familiar connections lays the foundation for merging her narrative with other enslaved Black people traversing countries and regions on ships against their will. Ample research material available on the survivors of the 1858 illegal ship enslaving Africans “Wanderer'' offer an opportunity to consider the constructions of Black Atlantic identities in which formerly enslaved Black people forge connections with each other while longing for a return to Africa. Additionally, Tessa Mars’ and Yinka Shonibare’s art forms a bridge for conceptualizing Black diasporic identities. Because the Caribbean is often perceived as a perpetual space of fantasy and play, The History of Mary Prince also challenges misconceptions of slavery as an institution peculiar to the United States. Of her brutal slaveholder sending her to another island, Prince expresses competing emotions, “At length he put me on board the sloop, and to my great joy he sent me away to Turk’s Island. I was not permitted to see my mother or father, or poor sisters and brothers, to say goodbye, though going away to a strange land, and might never see them again.” Encouraging students to consider Prince as a wandering soul in search of not only freedom but also solid familiar connections lays the groundwork for merging Prince’s narrative with other enslaved Black people traversing countries and regions on ships against their will. Ample research material available on the survivors of the 1858 illegal ship enslaving Africans “Wanderer” serves as my teaching tool for considering the constructions of Black Atlantic identities in which formerly enslaved Black people forge connections with each other while longing for a return to Africa. One of these survivors, Cilucängy, expressed in a letter his desire to return to his homeland: “I am bound for my old home if God be with me.” My essay also draws on student reactions to Yinka Shonibare’s art piece entitled “Wanderer.” Shonibare’s artwork forms the bridge for conceptualizing the more complex definitions of the Black Atlantic, Black Diaspora, and transnational identities. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:00:12 PDT
Authors:Sharon Smith Abstract: This essay outlines a presentist approach to teaching Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), in which a white woman witnesses a Black man’s brutal execution at the hands of enslavers. This approach explores the capacity of Behn’s novel—a colonialist narrative scholars frequently identify as troubling or frustrating—to generate discussions about “white witnessing,” particularly white people’s consumption of images of Black people in peril. This includes recent videos of Black people killed by police or white citizen vigilantes. Many Black individuals identify these videos as traumatizing, frequently noting how they have failed to spur structural reform. Of central concern in the classroom discussion described in the essay is the sympathy white witnesses experience in response to images of racist violence, a feeling that can bring reassurance—even pleasure—to the white witness but that in and of itself does little, if anything, to address the systemic causes of such violence and may actually serve to sustain them. In addition to considering how instructors can draw upon this novel from the past to generate discussions about critical issues of the present, the essay describes how they might place Oroonoko in conversation with texts from diverse periods, places, and genres in order to expose the limitations of and fill the gaps in Behn’s narrative. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:59:51 PDT
Authors:Kim Simpson Abstract: In a review of Women’s Writing, 1660-1830: Feminisms and Futures, Paula Backscheider draws attention to “the miracle that is Chawton House, whose conferences nurtured these essays” in the collection. This essay will examine the legacy of this unique institution and explore the futures for the organization both as heritage site and as home to a substantial collection of women’s writing of the long eighteenth century. The community encouraged and nurtured by Chawton House since it opened to the public in 2003, as is so often the case with all things related to Jane Austen, complicates divisions between the academic and the popular, bringing together people of different backgrounds from all over the world. For diverse audiences, Chawton House—the Visiting Fellowship program, the reading group, the reading rooms, the collections, and, increasingly, the gardens and parkland—have provided the time, space, and material to explore, share, and delight in women’s contributions. This essay will celebrate work already done to maintain and shape the legacy of Jane Austen, her contemporaries, and her predecessors—the legacy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary world. It considers some of the challenges faced by heritage organizations like Chawton House in recovering and representing the work of early British women writers and shaping their legacy, exploring the ways in which issues of canonicity, value and reputation play out in both academic research and public engagement. It outlines some of the strategies used by Chawton House over the last two decades to meet these challenges, including public programming that introduces women writers little-known outside academic circles, but that also asks audiences to consider the conditions that rendered them obscure in the first place. It goes on to consider the ways in which the current moment – both the culture wars and the pandemic—has revitalized these questions of legacy by demanding new perspectives and providing new audiences for heritage organizations. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:59:40 PDT
Authors:Marilyn Francus Abstract: During the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death in 2017, the narrative of Austen’s rise to fame and her ongoing celebrity circulated throughout modern culture. But how did this happen' When Austen died in 1817, it was not obvious that Austen would become the archetypal British woman writer. Frances Burney was far more famous in her lifetime than Austen was in hers, and Burney’s novels (particularly Evelina and Cecilia) achieved as much, if not more, critical acclaim than Austen’s works. By comparing the afterlives of Jane Austen and Frances Burney, the factors that shape legacy come into focus—and scholars can use some of these factors to shape the legacy of British women writers today. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:59:29 PDT
Authors:Susan Carlile Abstract: “‘Before I am Quite Forgot’: Women’s Critical Literary Biography and the Future” extends the conversation about literary “worth” in the twenty-first century as it still judges and ignores women authors of the past. Specifically, this essay explores the role of women’s literary historical biography as a primary marker of worth and as a means of shaping legacy. I also discuss my (perhaps more non-traditional) experience—both my personal circumstances and particular material conditions—writing the critical biography Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind. Without a substantial biography that shows the scope of Lennox’s mind, her significant corpus, and her interventions in literary history and current events through publishing, this talented and popular author would not have had the opportunity to be fully taken seriously. This essay is designed to encourage potential biographers who study remarkable women authors of past centuries around the world. It also asserts the value of the #MeToo movement and social media for more robust legacy making. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:59:19 PDT
Authors:Laura Engel Abstract: Sculpture as a medium is inherently connected to legacy making. In producing three- dimensional monuments designed to withstand the test of time, women artists provided evidence of the lasting quality and permanence of their creative acts. This article examines the actress, sculptress and novelist Anne Damer’s sculpture of the famous actress turned Countess Eliza Farren (c. 1788), paying particular attention to the relationship between sculpture as a static art form that captures tactile embodied presence and the ephemerality of performance. Farren’s involvement in Damer’s staging of the private theatricals at Richmond House (Farren directed and Damer starred) suggests that their collaborative relationship engendered aesthetic acts across media – performances that are now lost but remain in traces across a variety of material.Similarly, in the mid nineteenth century the American artist Harriet Hosmer’s spectacular sculptures of female figures were inspired in part by her intimate relationship with the famous actress Charlotte Cushman. Cushman’s dynamic performances of Lady Macbeth parallel Hosmer’s powerful controversial sculpture of Zenobia as a warrior Queen (1859). Looking ahead to the early twentieth century, I propose that Malvina Hoffman’s uncanny portrait busts of the ballet dancer Anna Pavlova (particularly her “Head of Pavlova” made of wax, 1924), similarly recreate a unique dynamic between the female artist and the intangible performances of her female muse. Drawing connections between Damer, Hosmer, and Hoffman, across time and media, allows us to re-imagine the relationship between artistic forms, materials, and aesthetic practices. Women’s artistic and theatrical legacies, I suggest, are not found only in tangible sources, but also by recuperating networks, connections, and collaborations through interdisciplinary practices. In doing so we create new legacies that chart the extraordinary accomplishments of women of the past. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:59:09 PDT
Authors:Srividhya Swaminathan Abstract: “Women, Slavery, and the Archive: Innovations in Slavery Studies and Contemporary Connections”Early scholarship on slavery, abolition, and the British empire largely ignored the contribution of women of any race to the African Institution. British women who participated in boycotts, produced literary texts against African enslavement, and did the legwork of circulating petitions were relegated to footnotes until well into the twentieth century when women scholars began to create space in the canon for the unrecognized or under-recognized women writers. These new avenues of research evolved through decades to become more inclusive, more critical, and more ground-breaking in bringing the past into the present. I identify four important shifts in our understanding of British enslavement and abolition over the long eighteenth century: 1. recognition of (white) women’s work in the abolitionist campaigns; 2. recognition of the labor of enslaved women and their contributions to resistance; 3. recognition of women’s involvement in supporting as well as resisting slavery; 4. recognition of the erasure of people, and the violence of the archive that only validates recorded experiences. Recovering these various kinds of erasures has opened possibilities for new methods of analysis. The legacy of this work not only opened slavery studies to new methodologies of gender and intersectional analyses, but it also opened the archive to productive critique. The new avenues for slavery studies recovers the voices of silenced women and empowers scholar who wish to challenge established narratives. By reviewing the scholarly legacy of transatlantic slavery studies, we can also better appreciate the influence on the immediate present. Contemporary work on Black Lives Matter (abolition), 1619 Project, and the attempts to ban critical race theory address the importance of the transitions in scholarship and how their legacies can reshape the future. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:58:58 PDT
Authors:Kristina Straub Abstract: How do we trace the historical processes that grant some writers visibility and, hence, legacy, while shoving others into the historical closet' This essay offers the case study of Elizabeth Boyd (1727-1745), a novelist, poet, and playwright who has received some attention from scholars interested in women’s contributions to the legacy of William Shakespeare in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In particular, her unperformed play, Don Sancho: Or, the Students Whim, a Ballad Opera of Two Acts, with Minerva’s Triumph, a Masque (1739) dramatizes a woman writer’s reflections on the politics of legacy at this formative moment in the history of authorship and the British theater. While the play was not performed, key scenes were later plagiarized in popular afterpieces by theater managers and playwrights Henry Giffard and David Garrick. Boyd, along with her inclusive vision of theatrical legacy as the domain of men and women of different classes, disappears in the male playwrights’ fantasies of exclusively masculine, British literary greatness. The story of Boyd’s erasure speaks to the gendered and classed exclusions and elisions in the social and economic processes by which legacy is formed, in this case, in the gendered power relations of eighteenth-century theater and its management. PubDate: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:58:48 PDT
Authors:Gabrielle Stecher Abstract: A review of Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 by Gabrielle Stecher PubDate: Mon, 19 Dec 2022 12:10:43 PST
Authors:Heather Heckman-McKenna Abstract: A review of Placing Charlotte Smith edited by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Jacqueline M. Labbe, written by Heather Heckman-McKenna PubDate: Mon, 19 Dec 2022 12:10:30 PST
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