Abstracts

MICHELLE HARTMAN

An Arab Woman Poet as a Crossover Artist? Reconsidering the Ambivalent Legacy of Al-Khansaʾ

This article looks at how al-Khansaʾ, a seventh-century woman poet of the Arabian Peninsula, can be seen as a crossover artist between the Arabicand English-speaking poetic worlds. Al-Khansaʾ is a striking poetic figure partly because she is revered within the Arab world as the first Arab woman poet and writer but also because she holds a similarly prominent role in the translated English-reception environment as an exemplary Arab woman writer. This article explores how in this latter case, al-Khansaʾ is significantly altered in specific ways that are tied to her gender. It shows how the intersections between being an Arab, a Muslim, and a woman all inform her transformation, producing a problematic and ambivalent legacy for Arab women writers in the English-language context. The article suggests ways in which increased contextualization and historicization of Arab women writers and poets, particularly from early periods, can help to work towards more complex readings of their works.

DIANA SOLOMON

Anne Finch, Restoration Playwright

The poet Anne Finch wrote and translated plays, play prologues, epilogues, and songs, and should thus be considered a Restoration playwright. That she has not been so regarded is due to her own gendered and classed self-effacement, critical bias against closet dramas, and modern-day scholars’ prioritization of her manuscript housed at Wellesley College, which is nontheatrical, over her manuscript at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which contains multiple plays, dramatic prologues and epilogues, and songs. An analysis of these texts demonstrates that Finch shares thematic and structural sensibilities with her Restoration colleagues, while a material examination of the Folger manuscript indicates that Finch envisioned her dramatic work in performance and publication.

NICOLLE JORDAN

A Creole Contagion: Narratives of Slavery and Tainted Wealth in Millenium Hall

This article begins by suggesting that Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), a utopian vision of women’s independence, invites not only feminist but also postcolonial interpretations. The presence of colonial wealth, though seemingly incidental in a work that focuses on charitable women, betrays an underlying anxiety about slave labor. Significantly, both the narrator and the women of Millenium Hall possess fortunes acquired in the New World. By tracing how such fortunes compromise the health of the men who earned them, this article argues that the novel offers evidence of Scott’s apprehension that colonial wealth may be deeply tainted and may even become a source of moral contagion and physical deterioration whose effects can be mitigated only by a process of inheritance and transmission. After analyzing the role of the creole narrator, the article suggests that because the novel links colonial wealth to moral contagion, the women’s putative moral superiority is cast in doubt.

ELIZABETH VEISZ

Writing the Eighteenth-Century Household: Leapor, Austen, and the Old Feudal Spirits

This essay argues that Mary Leapor’s poem “Crumble-Hall” (1751) and Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (1818) guide us to a new framework for interpreting domesticity and domestic ideology in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature. Both works are set in estates with feudal foundations, and both authors use this setting to underscore the tensions between tradition and modernization that shape the domestic sphere. Working in different decades and from different class positions, Leapor and Austen nonetheless make some tellingly similar aesthetic choices in these works: both employ a self-consciously knowing and parodic voice, contain thematic elements that would come to be associated with Gothic literature, and render visible the ordinarily invisible figure of the domestic servant. The servants’ presence undermines an evolving paradigm that prescribes a strict separation of work and home centered symbolically on the figure of the “leisured” bourgeois wife.

KEVIN A. MORRISON

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Dog Days

Nineteenth-century female poets frequently wrote about their pets. A pervasive tendency among contemporary critics has been to dismiss these poems as engaged in the conventions of mawkish, sentimental anthropomorphism that modernist writers, lauded for inaugurating a process of seriously rethinking human and nonhuman animal relations in terms of reciprocity and responsibility, are seen to debunk. This view has forestalled...