Modern Women's Writing Research Articles

Einleitung: Gewohnheit, Erfahrung und die ‚schreibende Frau‘

Abstract This introduction summarizes some of the main hypotheses that underly the contributions of this thematic issue of ARTES which is dedicated to the role of habit/custom and experience in the writing of some Early Modern women authors. One hypothesis is that references to habit and experience may have supported Early Modern women writers in their efforts to legitimize their arguments, knowledge and writing, the reason for this being that – due to various social restrictions and expectations – women were often denied access to other fields of knowledge, especially that of so-called book knowledge. Hence, the question arises to what extent the references to habit/custom and experience are connected to the question of female education and female strategies of (self-)empowerment. I will illustrate this using the prominent example of the medieval writer Christine de Pizan. Since the specific nature of female claims can only be assessed against the background of male writing practices, I will also make some introductory remarks on habit/custom and experience with reference to Early Modern male authors.

Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, eds. Feminist Formalisms and Early Modern Women's Writing: Readings, Conversations, Pedagogies. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. 304. $60.00 (cloth).

Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, eds. Feminist Formalisms and Early Modern Women's Writing: Readings, Conversations, Pedagogies. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. 304. $60.00 (cloth).

“I Am a Wanderer”: Paek Sinae (1908–1939) and Writing Travel

Abstract Paek Sinae (1908–39) was a modern woman writer whose career was cut short by an early death. She lived in the era of New Women, but unlike most of her peer woman writers, Paek had little formal education or connections to the literary establishment (mundan). This background, combined with her modest output of fictional works, resulted in Paek Sinae being seen by critics during her lifetime and scholars long after her death as a provincial writer, thus affording her only limited recognition. This article challenges such dismissals and seeks an approach that would allow a more comprehensive appreciation of Paek Sinae and woman writers more broadly. First, the article looks closely at Paek's life based in her hometown away from the social center of Kyŏngsŏng (present-day Seoul) and considers how geographical and linguistic aspects of Paek's locale were misunderstood by critics. Next, with a focus on Paek's travels and her travelogues, cosmofeminism and global-local connections are examined as a key to understanding the complexities of being a modern woman writer in Paek's day. At the same time, by putting a spotlight on the “lesser” literary genre of the travelogue, this article also gestures toward a more inclusive approach to research on woman writers whose aesthetic or literary qualities were often judged only by their works of fiction (sosŏl) or poetry, while other important works like autobiographical or sociopolitical essays tended to be overlooked. Paek Sinae's life and work add breadth to the already complex definition of New Women and early feminism, and through her example, this article urges a more comprehensive consideration of works by Korean women writers in the early twentieth century.

Unfathered Connections: Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes

This essay explores Beckett’s engagement with Djuna Barnes, starting with their epistolary exchanges in the 1970s and working back to his reading of her work in the 1930s in order to position Barnes as yet another modernist woman writer who, along with Gertrude Stein, facilitated Beckett’s transition away from Joyce in the 1930s. It explores their shared connection with James Joyce before developing on two key comparative critical readings of their aesthetics by Tyrus Miller and Daniela Caselli in order to situate Barnes as a valid aesthetic counterpoint to Joyce, a development on the ‘Nominalism’ versus ‘Realism’ dyad Beckett establishes between Gertrude Stein and Joyce in the 1937 Kaun letter. Borrowing from Barnes’s own late reflection on Nightwood, this article builds on extant criticism of Beckett and Barnes to situate Barnes’s ‘histrionic’ and ‘verballistic’ writings within the constellation of women authors whose work facilitated the development of Beckett’s ‘literature of the non-word’, and an important progression on from the (Steinian) ‘nominalistic irony’ Beckett identifies in the 1937 Kaun letter as a ‘necessary’ step towards his desired aesthetics. The essay argues that Barnes’s work represents a significant point of contact within this transitional period in Beckett’s aesthetic development, and that his identification of Barnes’s work as ‘verballistic’ in 1938, specifically the ‘shattered’ surfaces visible therein, provided Beckett with a glimpse of ‘that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing’ so central to his post-1937 aesthetics.

Fraught intimacies: toward the impossibility of women’s kinship

ABSTRACT This essay argues that recognizing and examining the fraught intimacies among modernist women writers and among the female characters they create is necessary for feminist modernist scholars. The two modernist authors at the center of this essay, Nella Larsen and Jean Rhys, write relationships among women that illustrate the way white heteronormative patriarchy constrains and ultimately denies the cultivation of a mutually sustaining intimacy between women. Delsandro and Mitchell conclude their reading by acknowledging that feminist modernist studies has focused more on recuperation and revision rather than the difficult conversations attendant upon the acknowledgement that not all of the women writers feminist scholars have recovered have succeeded in their feminism.

Feminist publishing against the pandemic

ABSTRACT The special issue “Feminist Publishing Against the Pandemic” features essays from thirteen contributors whose work would have been presented at “FiMA2: Feminist Revolutions,” the second conference of the Feminist inter/Modernist Association (FiMA), originally scheduled for Spring 2020, rescheduled, and eventually canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. By soliciting snapshot essays of no more than 2000 words, the editors of the issue are able to showcase a wide range of feminist modernist scholarship in danger of being lost due to the constraints of the pandemic and a profession in crisis. Authors included in the special issue engage with modern women writers, artists, and culture-makers who navigated their own constraints such as fighting for suffrage, managing domestic and professional commitments, responding to two world wars, and continuing feminist work in the post-war years. This collection of essays highlights vibrancy and complexity in the field of feminist modernist scholarship.

АВТОБІОГРАФІЧНА УТОПІЯ НАТАЛІ РОМАНОВИЧ-ТКАЧЕНКО

The article is devoted to researching the work of N. Romanovych-Tkachenko, a representative of the generation of female writers of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, from the perspective of gender discourse. Women's literature of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s-1930s is an understudied and not updated phenomenon of the Ukrainian literary process of that time. Most of the texts of women writers were unnoticed by literary critics, and the problems that were raised in their texts turned out to be "uninteresting" for the then, generally male, literary critics. Instead, we note the emergence of a new generation of women writers in Ukrainian literature, formed not only by the national tradition, but also by the first wave of European feminism. They radicalize the women's issue and put forward other, unlike their predecessors, aesthetic demands on artistic texts. At the same time, it was women writers who continued the traditions of modern Ukrainian literature, in particular bright individual writing. Most of them told the reader about their biographies for the first time in the form of memories, diaries, memoirs. The peculiarity of these biographies is that they reveal a striking discrepancy between the expectations of women from the gender policy of the Bolsheviks and the revolutionary, post-revolutionary reality. We can see two biographies of the writer by comparing the artistic texts and autobiographical memories of N. Romanovych-Tkachenko. One of them is imaginary, constructed by the author on the basis of her own life project, and the second is real, as the writer lived. These two biographies in different genre forms are presented in the writer's work. Imaginary biography is described in the experience of the characters of fictional texts, while real biography is represented by the memoir genre, in particular, the diaries and memoirs of the author. The difference between these two life scenarios shaped the feminist outlook of N. Romnovich-Tkachenko and many other modern women writers.

:Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800

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The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller

Reviewed by: The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller Jaime Goodrich (bio) The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn Gary Waller Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105, cloth. Over the past fifty years, scholarship on early modern women writers has grown exponentially as critics have discovered, edited, and analyzed a significant corpus of previously unknown works. Gary Waller was an early pioneer in this field, and he continues to break new ground with a new book that applies Julia Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque to key texts by early modern female authors. In the first two chapters, Waller lays the groundwork for the rest of his study by conceptualizing the Baroque. Admitting that it is difficult to define this term, Waller focuses on five key "Baroque tendencies" (20, his emphasis), as follows: 1.) "fictionalizing" (29), or narrative multiplicity; 2.) "le pli" (31), or acts of folding that move into infinity; 3.) paradoxical juxtapositions of hyperbole and melancholy; 4.) kitsch, with its emphasis on duplication; 5.) "plateauing" (31), or the indefinite postponement of climax. The second chapter then turns to Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque, itself based on Teresa of Avila, in order to redress the lack of scholarly attention to the role of gender in the Baroque. Surveying different early modern exemplars of femininity (the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, the Petrarchan mistress), Waller poses a key question: "Given the dominance of these largely oppressive models for women,…how were Baroque women writers and artists able to explore their own lived experiences as providing an 'owned' source of meaning" (66)? He finds an answer in Kristeva's theory of the semiotic mode, in which a feminine subconscious erupts through patriarchal language. The remainder of the monograph analyzes the ways that various Englishwomen rebelled against patriarchal domination through writings that display Baroque characteristics. Chapter three covers the Catholic female Baroque, by way of Gertrude More and Mary Ward. In the next chapter, [End Page 218] Waller turns to the Protestant Baroque with a discussion of Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, the women of Little Gidding, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Hutchinson. Chapter five considers works by women associated with the court, with special attention to the role of masques and country house drama: Mary Wroth, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Hester Pulter. The next chapter is the strongest in the book, providing a compelling and fascinating analysis of labyrinths, narrative multiplicity, plateaus, and folds in Wroth's Urania. Finally, chapter seven considers how Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn moved beyond the Baroque toward the Enlightenment. The project of situating English literature—and especially works by women writers—in relation to the Baroque is an intriguing and timely one, particularly since scholars such as James E. Kelly have recently begun to consider the role of Englishwomen on the continent (English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Yet the very indeterminacy of the Baroque becomes problematic, as this key term is frequently paired with qualifiers that are never defined. Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalms are "emergent or incipient Baroque" (121), Anne Bradstreet's poetry is "'accidentally' Baroque" (150), Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's dramas are "at least 'pale' Baroque" (186), and Aphra Behn's Love Letters is "clearly if superficially Baroque" (268). As variants of the Baroque proliferate, the concept itself takes on a multiplicity that is aptly ironic and may leave readers wondering what, if anything, truly constitutes the Baroque. Furthermore, the inclusion of authors whose works are "accidentally," "pale," "incipient," or "superficially" Baroque serves as a distraction from the more successful analysis of writers such as Wroth and the women of Little Gidding. Indeed, what unites all of the writers covered in this book is not their connection to stylistic traits of the Baroque but rather to the Kristevan female Baroque described in chapter two. As Waller observes in the postscript, "in the Baroque…women were able, to greater or lesser extents, to give voice to counter-dominant surges and explorations of 'intimate revolt,' discovering many means by which paternal realms might...

Visions: Re-historicizing Genre: Teaching Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai in a Fantasy-Themed Survey Course

Eliza Haywood is an increasingly popular author to assign in eighteenth-century literature courses. But Haywood is also a prime figure to represent the eighteenth century in courses with a broader scope. This essay proposes teaching The Adventures of Eovaaiin a fantasy-focused, introductory-level survey of British Literature. Identifying Eovaaias part of the fantasy tradition leverages students’ prior knowledge and facilitates teaching this complex novel to first-year students. Eovaaiprovides a wealth of topics for class discussions and activities, including the development of the novel as a genre, identity and othering in fantasy literature, and the use of fantasy conventions like world-building and speculative technology. Moreover, considering Haywood as both representative of the eighteenth century and a pioneer of fantasy literature encourages students to broaden their conceptualizations of the early modern period, women writers, and generic conventions.

Jody Cardinal, Deirdre E. Egan-Ryan, and Julia Lisella (eds.), Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement

The “new modernist studies”, coined by Mao and Walkowitz in their titular article in the May 2008 issue of PMLA, has been a boon for scholars who study women writers. As modernism has “softened its definitional gaze and relinquished its gatekeeping function” (451), as stated by Paul Saint-Amour in 2018, its scholarship has blossomed in variation and kind. An interest in gender, i.e. women writers, a long-policed, tacit demarcation in literary modernism, has increased and continues to prosper ...

Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith

Reviewed by: Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith Diana Barnes Ross, Sarah C. E., Rosalind Smith, eds Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ( Early Modern Literature in History), London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; hardback; pp. 370; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €99.00; ISBN 9783030429454. Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics is an exciting new collection of fifteen essays on early modern women's complaint which represents a welcome extension of current scholarship on early modern women's engagement with complaint, one of the most pervasive literary modes in English writing in print and manuscript over the years 1550–1700. Much scholarship to date has identified Ovid's Heroides as the locus classicus for early modern complaint, but Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith, the editors of this collection, argue that the mode is far more capacious. The volume traces the genealogy of female complaint through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious, political, legal, and philosophical discourses, and its critical reception and recent representation in digital scholarly resources. For early modern writers, Ovid's verse epistles voiced by heroines addressing the heroes who raped, entrapped, and abandoned them, paired with some replies, thematized the potentials of women's writing to overturn the priorities of hegemonic discourses. Although a number of early [End Page 253] modern women writers, including Isabella Whitney, cite this tradition, Ovid's Heroides was a troublesome legacy owing to its licentious subject matter and its male-authored ventriloquy of women's complaint. As Early Modern Women's Complaint shows, the Heroides was just one element in early modern women's complaint. The essays are organized in four chronologically ordered sections, followed by an afterword. Part I, 'Sixteenth Century', comprises four chapters. Susan M. Felch contends that Anne Lock deployed prophetic and penitential complaint to instruct her readers and thus advance Calvinist Reform over the 1540s to 1590s. Micheline White outlines Katherine Parr's evolving use of religious complaint to lament on behalf of her husband, Henry VIII, in Psalms and Prayers (1544), and later, writing as the dowager queen, to urge for Protestant reform in Lamentation or Complaint of a Sinner (1547). Tricia A. McElroy analyses the prevalence of female-voiced complaint in Scottish political propaganda of the 1560s and 1570s, when the ideal of wifely virtue was fraught following the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567. Lindsay Ann Reid examines Isabella Whitney's adaptation of autobiographical affect derived from Ovid's Tristia rather than his Heroides to articulate careerist poetic ambitions in The Copy of a Letter (1566–67) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573). Part II, 'Seventeenth Century', includes four chapters. In the first, Emily Shortslef investigates Mary Cary's use of complaint to embrace anti-Stoic inconstancy in her closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Paul Salzman examines how Mary Wroth employs the 'dirty pain' (p. 142) generated by complaint to 'bridge between the personal and political' (p. 138) in her manuscript play Love's Victory and in the second part of her romance Urania. Danielle Clarke tracks the 'interpellation of complaint (p. 158) indebted to Du Bartas through the writing of Aemilia Lanyer, Anne, Lady Southwell, and Lucy Hutchinson. Sarah C. E. Ross challenges the association between Ovidian complaint and 'isolation, distortion, and deception' (p. 186), demonstrating how Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and John Milton use the Ovidian figure of Echo to construct female community within pastoral complaint. Part III, 'Restoration', contains three chapters. Gillian Wright considers Aphra Behn's complaint 'Oenone to Paris', in John Dryden's collection Ovid's Epistles, Translated by Several Hands (1680), to redirect critical attention from Dryden's theorization of translation towards the ideological and political implications of Restoration complaint. Whereas Dryden expressed 'clear signs of unease with royal sexual self-indulgence' (p. 210), Behn 'dramatiz[ed] conflicts between power and sexuality' (p. 219). Susan Wiseman extends the discussion of complaint to North America with a fascinating account of how Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) is 'deeply mulched with the matter of complaint' (p. 233), adapting 'experiential testimony and...

Digital Editions of Early Modern Women's Writing

Abstract: Martine van Elk on Mary Wroth's Poetry: An Electronic Edition, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, and Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition

Hidden in Plain Sight: Editing and (Not) Canonizing Early Modern Women's Writing

Abstract: This essay explores some of the recent history of how early modern women's writing was edited. The process of recovering and analyzing that writing, in all its heterogeneity, has gone hand in hand with innovative approaches to editing. I explore a series of recent editorial developments that address three fundamental aspects of the positioning of early modern women's writing in relation to current debates about the nature of texts and textuality: the return of the authoritative complete edition, a revitalization of teaching editions, and new approaches to digital editing. What is at stake when we attempt to understand early modern women's writing, and how does editing contribute to that understanding? To illustrate this I look very briefly at the example of Katherine Austen's reflections on the Plague in her Book M .

Loss and Longevity: Rhetorics and Tactics of Early Modern Women's Writing

Abstract: This article assesses the place of scholarship on early modern women's writing, interrogating the conditions for sustaining, as well as recovering, women writers. The paradigm of loss has been both enabling and limiting for research in this area, capturing the excitement of discovery and innovation but with rhetorical pitfalls that impact upon longevity in the literary canon. The article evaluates various strategies for dissemination of research, also advocating for a set of practices around public engagement beyond the academy. The situatedness and fluidity of the literary canon are considered in the context of women's writing but also debates around decolonizing the curriculum. Perspective, location, and time are determinants of literary and intellectual value. The discussion concludes by proposing an "action plan," a set of tactics available to those in the field that might support the longevity and sustained presence of early modern women in the canon of literature as well as the wider community.

"Undisciplined": Early Modern Women's Writing and the Urgency of Scholarly Activism

Abstract: This essay argues that in the negotiation of their own power and privilege, early modern English women were crucial to the development of the English strategies of racialization that licensed chattel slavery and English empire. This is to challenge how we frequently understand racial constructions—not, as is so often thought, as instruments for the powerful to maintain their prominence but more often as tools for the powerless to gain distinction. This reorientation of our perspective on the early modern period already has a long and visible history in England and the Anglo-Americas. In considering the construction of race and racism in early modern England, this essay also tries to make sense of the critical strategies that ignore the complicity of early modern Englishwomen in this construction and that instead render this history invisible once more.

Reading Marguerite de Navarre: An Aged Professor's Meditation

Abstract: Marguerite de Navarre's political importance as François I's sister and Henri IV's grandmother, together with her accomplishments as poet and writer of stories, drew attention in her own day and still does today. Much remains to discuss, not least her treatments of gender and the environment. Offering a close reading of the pigs in Story 34 of the Heptaméron, this essay considers how current ecological knowledge might give us a new perspective on this important early modern woman writer.

Beyond Canonicity: The Future(s) of Early Modern Women Writers

Abstract: This introduction to a special issue on "The Future(s) of Early Modern Women Writers" provides a thumbnail sketch of this subfield's history in order to pinpoint its successes and failures. While scholars have located, edited, and analyzed a robust corpus of works by early modern women writers, these texts have yet to be fully integrated into the canon of early modern literature. A genre of "marginalization lit" has consequently arisen in which feminist critics seek to identify and remedy the factors behind this exclusion. Arguing that pervasive structural issues are actually to blame, this essay notes that the anti-hierarchical, idiosyncratic canon of early modern women writers offers a glimpse of a more egalitarian model for literary study. From that vantagepoint, the future of early modern women writers is the future of early modern literature itself.

Is There Room for Judith Shakespeare and Her Brother, Too?

Abstract: This essay considers the future of scholarship on early modern women writers in light of structural issues in the twenty-first-century academy. By drawing upon a dataset comprising 21,053 scholarly works (books, book chapters, articles, doctoral dissertations, editions, and translations), it quantifies the relationship between scholarship on early modern women and the field at large. It pays particular attention to Shakespeare and his outsize influence. The essay advances two major claims: first, that even scholars without a particular interest in women or gender must become informed about women's diverse contributions to literate culture and, second, that early modernists must decide what we would like our contracting field to be and what values we will collectively embrace.

Modernist Women Writers and Whimsy: Marianne Moore and Dorothy Parker

This article assesses the work of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) in relation to the aesthetic category of whimsy. It considers how whimsy has been used as a term of dismissal for American women poets, outlines ways both writers’ receptions have been informed by this context, and explores questions of cost, worth, and value raised by their work. It situates whimsy in relation to Sianne Ngai’s account of diminutive modes in Our Aesthetic Categories (2015) and suggests why American women’s modernist poetry can be a useful context for exploring the aesthetic and cultural associations of whimsy.