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  • Some Current Publications
  • Magi Smith

Mary Astell

Schillace, Brandy Lain. “Reproducing Custom: Mechanical Habits and Female Machines in Augustan Women’s Education.” Feminist Formations 25.1 (2013): 111-137. This article “explores the rhetoric of women who seized their historical moment to reexamine the concept of intellectual liberty, freedom of will, and the separation of the reflective mind from the physically limiting female body.” Schillace discusses pedagogical defects in women’s education of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the women who overcame them to become pre-feminists.

See also: Thomas Hobbes (Monod).

Elizabeth Barry

Hamilton, Kate C. “‘The Famous Mrs. Barry’: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 42 (2013): 291-320. This article explores “Barry’s celebrity strategy within the context of the Restoration.” Hamilton argues that Barry’s relationships with well-known figures such as the Duchess of York and Rochester “affected how audiences interpreted her theatrical roles.” Hamilton presents Barry’s sexuality and physical aging as a type of body politic personifying the Restoration.

Aphra Behn

Ballaster, Ross. “‘Heart-Easing’: Charm in the Eighteenth Century.” Essays in Criticism 63.3 (2013): 249-274. Ballaster argues that in her efforts to attain fame, Behn learned to duplicate charms associated with male libertines, thus feminizing [End Page 91] them. “Behn self-consciously evokes the ‘charm’ of poetic numbers and metrical verse as a means of both summoning and resisting the personal ‘charm’ of the male libertine embodied” in Rochester.

Bowden, Scarlet. “Queering the Sexual Impasse in Seventeenth-Century “‘Imperfect Enjoyment’ Poetry.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 19. 1 (2013): 31-56. Bowden explicates the “ways aesthetics and formalism can both produce and decathect the numbing affects of normativity to create alternative forms of communality and sociality by examining a series of seventeenth-century English poems that thematize a sexual impasse.” She discusses the lingering psycho-social effects of the genre of male impotence poetry.

Molineux, Catherine. “False Gifts/Exotic Fictions: Epistemologies of Sovereignty and Assent in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” ELH 80. 2 (2013): 455-488. This paper argues that Behn’s biography and ambiguous political affiliations unnecessarily complicates the novella’s messages. Molineux shows that putting aside Behn’s politics “allows [Oroonoko’s] analysis of the uncertainty and fragility of social and political bonds to come powerfully into view.”

Orr, Leah. “Attribution Problems in the Fiction of Aphra Behn.” The Modern Language Review, 108.1 (2013): 30-51. Orr reconsiders anonymously and posthumously printed works that have been attributed to Behn. This article points to Behn’s well-known poverty and the “problematic and untrustworthy” and “careless and dishonest” nature of compilers of Behn’s posthumously published works as reasons to question her authorship. Orr evaluates contemporary and modern compilers’ criteria for attributing fiction to Behn.

See also: John Dryden (Shanahan), Queen Mary II (Phillips), Catherine Trotter (Goode), De-Larivier Manley (Joule).

Robert Boyle

See: John Dryden (Armistead), Thomas Hobbes (Minogue), Thomas Shadwell (Black).

Anne Bradstreet

Hall, Louisa. “The Influence of Anne Bradstreet’s Innovative Errors.” Early American Literature 48.1 (2013): 1-27. Preferring Bradstreet’s status as a pioneering poet over the merits of her style and ability, Hall argues that “Bradstreet’s early accomplishment as that of striving to create space for a distinctly feminine perspective [returns] Bradstreet to her position as a sociological triumph.” However, in Hall’s view, Bradstreet is “an author who should not only be read because she was the first published poet in America, or because she clears a space for female subjectivity, but because she was an influential poet in her own stylistic right.”

See also: Delarivier Manley (Joule).

John Bunyan

Jackson, Gregory S. “A Game Theory of Evangelical Fiction.” Critical Inquiry 39. 3 (2013): 451-485. Jackson explores [End Page 92] the ways that nineteenth-century board games based on Pilgrim’s Progress and other religious novels “reveal the underlying structure of Protestant homiletic practice that provides the foundation for some of the most popular novels of the last two centuries.” This article argues that these board games reify the texts’ original reading strategies for nineteenth-century consumers.

Margaret Cavendish

Fredrick, Anne. “First Lady.” Chemical Heritage 31.1 (2013) 10-11...

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