Authors:Karenza Sutton-Bennett Abstract: The Lady’s Museum (1760–61) was among the most important early periodicals largely written by one of the most important eighteenth-century authors, Charlotte Lennox, whose multigenre, proto-feminist writing is beginning to receive the critical and pedagogical attention it deserves. Yet no modern edition of the text has existed—until now. Launched in 2021, the Lady’s Museum Project is presenting the first critical edition of—and learning community around—Lennox’s Museum in three open-access formats to encourage the widest possible readership: a non-specialist digital, interactive edition of the text and LibriVox audiobook intended for public and undergraduate-student audiences, and a specialist digital edition intended for scholars’ use—and participation (forthcoming). 2023 brought the completion of the teaching edition, which has been used in a variety of institutions across the U.S. and Canada, from 1000-level undergraduate to 5000-level graduate courses, and in undergraduate- and graduate-level internships designed to prepare interns for careers in editing and publishing, with a focus on transcending traditional teaching, editing, publishing, and disciplinary hierarchies and conventions. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:37:38 PDT
Authors:Sarah Buckner Abstract: A review of A History of African American Autobiography edited by Joycelyn K. Moody. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:37:27 PDT
Authors:Michelle Lyons-McFarland Abstract: A review of On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations by Stephen Ramsay. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:37:17 PDT
Authors:Jeanne R. Swack Abstract: A review of Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin, edited by Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:37:07 PDT
Authors:Karen Griscom Abstract: A review of The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 5: 1645–1714: The Later Seventeenth Century by Margaret J. M. Ezell. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:36:57 PDT
Authors:Melissa Schoenberger Abstract: A review of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, edited by Jennifer Keith et. al. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:36:47 PDT
Authors:Diana Solomon Abstract: The publication of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea makes it possible to teach not only a much wider assorted of her edited poetry, but also Finch’s two dramas: the tragicomedy The Triumphs of Love and Innocence, and the tragedy Aristomenes. This essay proposes integrating Finch’s plays into a course on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama by proposing a class, “Genre Trouble,” which sets them in dialogue with frequently-taught plays of the era. Included herein are a syllabus of primary and secondary sources, suggestions for discussing Finch’s plays and dramatic paratexts in comparison to works by Behn, Centlivre, Dryden, Otway, Rowe, and Wycherley, and a lesson plan that enables students to investigate differences between “closet” and professionally staged drama and understand how a playwright’s gender figures into this divide. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:36:34 PDT
Authors:Jennifer Keith Abstract: This essay discusses two approaches I use to teach Anne Finch's—and others'—poetry. Drawing on certain habits of early modern manuscript culture, I make visible to my students ways that reading and writing are socially embedded practices, which may variously involve exchange, reciprocity, or censorship. By adapting the "quaint" habits of manuscript culture practiced by Finch and many others to specific assignments, I encourage students to experience poetry as living, sociable occasions of reading and writing. To augment my students' engagement with early modern poetry I connect it to frameworks from their twenty-first-century reading and writing worlds. These exercises in "early modern social media" provide students with an intimate structure for studying a poem that resonates with many of their interests in creative writing and with their participation, mutatis mutandis, in one or more kinds of twenty-first-century social media. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:36:21 PDT
Authors:Melissa Schoenberger Abstract: This article recounts an instructional event for English majors held in the central campus library. Students engaged with various materials related to the career and editorial history of Anne Finch. The event offered students an introduction to questions of information literacy, textual history, and literary studies. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:36:10 PDT
Authors:Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook Abstract: Teaching the birdsong poems and compositions for musical settings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, through media theory allows students to connect their own social-media-based expressive arts practices with the multimedia practices of early modern women writers. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:35:59 PDT
Authors:Jennifer Keith et al. Abstract: This essay introduces Part Two of the two-part “Concise Collection on Teaching the Works of Anne Finch," guest edited by Jennifer Keith (Aphra Behn Online, vol. 14, no. 1, 2024). The first part of this collection appeared in Fall 2023. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:35:48 PDT
Authors:Martine Van Elk Abstract: This essay explores how Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World works differently when taught and read on its own and in combination with Cavendish’s other works. Focusing specifically on the graduate classroom, I examine and present strategies for teaching the book alongside works by other early modern women and for teaching it in a single-author course. While in isolation, The Blazing World allows for discussions that focus primarily on questions of gender, genre, class, and politics, read in tandem with Cavendish’s other works, in particular her philosophical writings, The Blazing World becomes a source for reflections on questions of creaturely identity, nature, and interdisciplinarity. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:35:36 PDT
Authors:Peter West Abstract: In my contribution to this Concise Collection on Margaret Cavendish, I focus on teaching Cavendish’s work in the context of philosophy (and, more specifically, Early Modern Philosophy). I have three aims. First, to explain why teaching women from philosophy’s history is crucially important to the discipline. Second, to outline my own reflections on teaching Cavendish’s philosophy. Third, to defend a specific claim about the benefits of teaching Cavendish to philosophy students; namely, that introducing biographical detail alongside philosophical ideas enriches the learning experience. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:35:25 PDT
Authors:Valerie Billing Abstract: This article summarizes my approach to teaching Cavendish’s play The Convent of Pleasure in my course “LGBTQ+ Literature and Culture,” which I teach at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I demonstrate how I teach the play with excerpts from literary scholarship in queer theory in order to help students sharpen their close reading skills, teach scholarly engagement, and deepen students’ understanding of early modern and Restoration comedy and the history of sexuality. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:35:12 PDT
Authors:Vanessa L. Rapatz Abstract: Margaret Cavendish has only recently been included in the canonical literature anthologies and even then, the samplings of her prolific writings are severely truncated. However, even this small taste of Cavendish’s poems and excerpts of A Description of a New World called The Blazing World leave early British literature survey students hungry for more. Frequently, students in the survey choose to focus on Cavendish’s writing for their research projects in which they practice feminist and queer readings and engage with Cavendish as a key player in utopian and science fiction genres. Beyond the survey course, Blazing World works wonderfully in courses focused on Renaissance Utopias as well as transhistorical utopian and dystopian fiction and serves as the perfect frame text for literature and gender courses that focus on female world making. In the gender and literature course, Blazing World pairs excellently with more contemporary and intersectional feminist world makers including Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Alison Bechdel. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:35:00 PDT
Authors:Jennifer Topale Abstract: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, can be called many things: writer, poet, philosopher, woman, Royalist, eccentric rule-breaker, scientific collaborator, utopian thinker, and the list goes on. Unfortunately, access to her writings, typically her The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, are often limited in academic settings to courses centered on the seventeenth century, early modern utopian literature, Restoration literature, and possibly an early modern women writers class. Though these are all wonderful course topics, they are often upper-division courses specifically designed for English majors of the early modern period. Limiting Cavendish to only these courses means that most university students will not come across her texts, even if their institution requires at least one English elective course. Furthermore, Cavendish tends to be excluded from entry-level English courses because these courses are often designed around contemporary themes and texts that target students from diverse academic disciplines and non-English fields of study. Additionally, Cavendish is often seen as inaccessible to a wide audience because her writing style and philosophical experimentations can be difficult to process. In typical English classes, student understanding of literature is often assessed by requiring them to write academic essays that adhere to a very traditional structure, which can be intimidating to non-English majors. In order to introduce Cavendish to a broader student body, this essay will examine teaching her texts through multi-modal, student-centered, creative pedagogy using digital, visual, written, and verbal expressions that go beyond the traditional academic essay. A more diverse pedagogical approach to teaching Cavendish ensures that she can be read alongside, and in conversation with, more contemporary writers and texts. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:34:49 PDT
Authors:E Mariah Spencer Abstract: This is the introduction of Part I of the "Concise Collection on Teaching the Works of Margaret Cavendish." PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:34:38 PDT
Authors:Leah Benedict Abstract: Despite decades of feminist scholarship, Lydia Bennet has consistently been taken at Jane Austen’s word: she is viewed as capricious, difficult, and silly, and in most cases found to be deserving of her fate. But with the adaptation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Lydia became the character most likely to inspire a heightened emotional bond with viewers. Because of the show’s format, Lydia’s voice and experiences became more central, and were conveyed with greater sympathy than prior adaptations. Against all anticipation, many viewers immediately identified not with Lizzie, but with Lydia. My paper explores the cultural contexts surrounding the web adaptation and examines the heated discourses on Lydia’s character circulating in fan blogs, YouTube comments, and discussion boards (preserved in their original form), and ultimately considers how this change in feeling might cast new reflections upon the original Lydia of Pride and Prejudice. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:34:25 PDT
Authors:Mary Ann O'Donnell Abstract: Aphra Behn’s poems usually celebrate some form of pastoral life or love, so much so that her “Epitaph on the Tombstone of a Child” seems anomalous in her 1685 Miscellany. The same poem (with two lines crossed out) appears in Cambridge University Library MS Add. 8460, Elizabeth Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, where it is titled simply “Epitaph on William Fairfax.” The twelve lines also appear on one other material witness: the tomb marker for young William Fairfax, who was Elizabeth Lyttelton’s nephew and Sir Thomas Browne’s grandson. This article examines the poem itself, discusses the deleted lines, considers connections that might have led Behn to compose such a piece, and suggests what this might reveal about Behn, the family of young William Fairfax, and the transmission of Behn’s poems. PubDate: Fri, 17 May 2024 09:34:12 PDT
Authors:Lisa Vandenbossche Abstract: This piece focuses on insurance and parental leave. While it feels like we know in the abstract that insurance and leave policies are important concerns for faculty members, and employees across all industries, conversations about them by and large taken place in informal settings – through mentorship or personal conversations between friends. In reconstructing these informal information networks, this article seeks to make visible ways that leave policies impact career decisions by women academics. We need to start seeing employee benefits as a reflection of institutional values, to ask about them when considering employment, and to have these conversations with graduate students – both male and female. Focusing solely on tenure as the epitome of academic career stability, makes it easier to overlook (and forgive) gendered precarity within these hierarchies, allowing institutions to resist implementing systemic policies that are vital to faculty equity. PubDate: Tue, 12 Dec 2023 15:53:14 PST
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