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

Review of Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britain 1769 - 1840 by Lucy Peltz

Madeleine L. Pelling — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 17:49:22 PST

Review of 'Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britian 1769 - 1840,' Lucy Peltz by Madeleine Pelling

Review of Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind by Susan Carlile

Alexis McQuigge — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 17:49:13 PST

This article reviews Susan Carlile's recent biography of Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind. Because much of Lennox's life story, and many of her works, remain mysterious to contemporary readers, Carlile's work highlights some unique and important aspects of the life of a - at least in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, a celebrated literary minds. Carlile's work is an important and necessary addition to the study of women's writing in the period, and contributes a great deal to those studying the works of Charlotte Lennox.

Review of Royal Shakespeare Company Production of Mary Pix’s The Beau Defeated, retitled The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich

Aparna Gollapudi — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 17:49:04 PST

Jo Davies’s reprise of Mary Pix’s comedy The Beau Defeated, Or The Lucky Younger Brother,performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon under the title The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich refocuses the comedy from its original engagement with primogeniture and middling class masculinity towards the female characters. It also diffuses Pix’s Whiggish moralism in Mrs. Rich's portrayal, highlighting instead her energy and verve. Overall, a very successful production, the performance is more Restoration comedy than the transitional work that Pix's play was when it opened in 1700.

Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age: An Interview with Gillian Wright and Alan Hogarth

Laura Runge et al. — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 17:48:52 PST

This interview provides a view of the work in progress for the Cambridge University Press edition of the Complete Works of Aphra Behn. Gillian Wright serves as a general editor (with Elaine Hobby, Claire Bowditch, and Mel Evans) as well as the volume editor for Behn’s poetry. Alan Hogarth is the Postdoctoral Research Associate working with Mel Evans on the computational stylistics and author attribution testing. The discussion focuses on the scope and principles of editing the poetry of Aphra Behn, the role of stylometry in establishing the corpus, the status of work, a few particular poems, and some surprises.

Reading Her Queenly Coiffure: A Collaborative Approach to the Study of Marie-Antoinette's Hairstyles

Hélène Bilis et al. — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 17:48:39 PST

Four colleagues--a faculty member, a digital services librarian, a research librarian, and a curator of Special Collections--take turns describing their role in creating an undergraduate student project around an eighteenth-century almanac that belonged to Marie-Antoinette. In recounting the steps taken, the collaborative process, the student research, and the analysis of the contents of the Trésor des Grâces almanac, we share the lessons learned for completing a digital exhibit over the course of one semester.

New Lines: Mary Ann Yates, The Orphan of China, and the New She-tragedy

Elaine McGirr — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 17:48:28 PST

This essay demonstrates a significant break in eighteenth-century tragedy from tales of fallen women begging (the audience) for forgiveness and redemption to a different kind of she-tragedy, in which the heroine is neither fallen nor sexually desired, but rather transcends nation and politics with the “natural” moral force of maternal love. I argue that this shift was made possible/legible by Susannah Cibber’s ill-health, which forced Arthur Murphy to reconceive The Orphan of China’s heroine and allowed a rival actress, Mary Ann Yates, to step into this new role and to establish a tragic ‘line’ defined in opposition to that of her predecessor. The essay demonstrates this shift by tracing The Orphan of China’s convoluted path to the stage and by reading Murphy’s tragedy in dialogue with earlier translations of The Orphan of China and Douglas, the play Covent Garden mounted in opposition to The Orphan of China.

Review of The Making of Jane Austen

Mary Beth Tegan — Mon, 07 May 2018 21:12:10 PDT

Review of Minds in Motion

Anna K. Sagal — Mon, 07 May 2018 21:11:48 PDT

A review of Anne Thell's Minds in Motion.

Review of The Shelley-Godwin Archive

Stacey L. Kikendall — Mon, 07 May 2018 21:11:30 PDT

Review of The Shelley-Godwin Archive

Review of The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism

Dawn M. Goode — Mon, 07 May 2018 21:11:11 PDT

Review of The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism. Bucknell UP, 2017. xxxvi + 331pp. Index. ISBN: 978-1-6114-8761-9.

Review of Edinburgh Lyceum Theatre Production of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem

Tanya M. Caldwell — Mon, 07 May 2018 21:10:44 PDT

This article reviews the production of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem directed by Tony Cownie and produced for the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in February and March 2018. In setting the play in Edinburgh and placing emphasis on its women characters, Cownie underscores the universal and timeless relevance of Cowley's play as well as its performance versatility.

Anna Larpent and Shakespeare

Fiona Ritchie — Mon, 07 May 2018 21:10:13 PDT

Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by amateurs; she reads his works and hears them read aloud by her husband and sons; she studies criticism of Shakespeare and records her reflections on it; she notes in her reading of contemporary writers when she feels they have been influenced by Shakespeare; she compares Shakespeare’s plays with those of the pre-eminent French dramatist Voltaire; she reflects on various elements of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, such as his use of the supernatural; and she invokes Shakespeare in her ideas about education. This article has two aims. Firstly, an analysis of Larpent’s engagement with Shakespeare demonstrates just how much the dramatist’s works permeated the life of bourgeois woman of the period. Secondly, I explore how this deep interest in Shakespeare, which was not in itself altogether unusual, enabled Larpent to take on a less conventional role, that of censor. As the wife of the Examiner of Plays, Larpent influenced the licensing of drama for the London stage.

Wishing for the Watch Face in Jonathan Swift’s “The Progress of Beauty”

Jantina Ellens — Mon, 07 May 2018 21:09:32 PDT

This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers commiserate with the speaker’s final desire for “new Nymphs with each new Moon,” Swift catches them in an affective trap that ridicules their ill-fated attempts to escape their own mortality.

Review of Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr, eds., Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830

Kristina Straub — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:05:44 PDT

Stage Mothers is a collection of essays that complicate the binary between female professional and domestic mother, contributing to theater history and the history of female professionalization and maternity.

Review of Kathryn E. Davis, Liberty in Jane Austen's Persuasion

Stephanie Russo — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:05:37 PDT

Review of Locating London's Past and London Lives 1690 to 1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis

Shawn W. Moore — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:05:31 PDT

Review of Locating London's Past and London Lives 1690 to 1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis

Review of Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Kevin Bourque — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:05:26 PDT

WWABD? Intersectional Futures in Digital History

Tonya L. Howe — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:05:21 PDT

WWABD: What would Aphra Behn—world traveler and spy, playwright and poet of scandal, innovator of novelistic forms—do, were she to imagine a future for digital humanities in period-specific scholarship? This essay outlines a vision for the DH section of Aphra Behn Online: An Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. In particular, I see three important and interrelated places for development: theorizing the feminized labor of digital recovery, editing, and textual preparation; offering thoughtful and feminist approaches to digital pedagogy that are specific to the work we do in the period; and critically assessing the absences in existing digital projects. Our digital future needs to foster flexibility, experimentation, and intersectional thinking.

Highest Form of Public Scholarship

Cynthia Richards — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:05:17 PDT

Women, Gender and the Arts: Intersections, Differences and Connections

Mona Narain — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 11:05:11 PDT