Edited Volumes |
Co-edited with Julie A. Eckerle, Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England was published by Ashgate Press in 2007. taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected in this volume interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.
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Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology (ACMRS, 2012), co-edited with Thomas Festa was published in 2012 by Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (MRTS) as part of their "Texts for Teaching" Series. Winner of the 2013 Award for Best Teaching Edition from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW), this anthology presents the works of eighteen early modern Englishwomen addressing the biblical story of the Fall from the Book of Genesis. The texts, many of which are available in a modern edition for the first time, are fully annotated and introduced for use by students and researchers alike. In addition, the anthology includes supplementary materials that these writers would have known intimately, such as the marriage ceremony from The Book of Common Prayerand the account of the Fall in both the Geneva and Authorized (King James) versions, as well as a selected bibliography of scholarly works.
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In 2015, I co-edited Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater with Ronda Arab and Adam Zucker. This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of our graduate mentor Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.
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Most recently, in 2022, I co-edited with Lara Dodds Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing. This volume reexamines the relationship between gender and form in early modern women’s writing in essays that elaborate the specific literary strategies of women writers, that examine women’s debts to and appropriations of different literary genres, and that offer practical suggestions for the teaching of women’s texts in several different contexts. Contributors explore the possibility of feminist formalism, a methodology that both attends to the structural, rhetorical, and other formal techniques of a given text and takes gender as a central category of analysis. This collection contends that feminist formalism is a useful tool for scholars of the early modern period and for literary studies more broadly because it marries the traditional questions of formalism—including questions of style, genre, and literary history—with the political and cultural concerns of feminist inquiry.
Contributors reposition works by important women writers—such as Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter, Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips—as central to the development of English literary tradition. By examining a variety of texts written by women, including recipes, emblems, exchanges, and poetry, Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing contributes to existing scholarship on early modern women’s writing while extending it in new and important directions. |
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