Project MUSE®: SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 39 (1999) through current issueLatest Articles: SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900TWOProject MUSE®SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-19001522-92700039-3657Latest articles in SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Feed provided by Project MUSE®SEL Transitions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983654
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Dear SEL reader:With this issue we begin a milestone year in the history of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. Envisioned at what was then Rice Institute by Carroll Camden and first published in 1961, shortly after the name change to Rice University, the journal has grown and adapted across six and a half decades, sustaining its core commitments to rigor, range, and innovation. In 2026, SEL turns sixty-five. We are delighted to celebrate this anniversary year with you, our readers, Editorial Board members, contributors, and scholarly community.The present issue, appearing in March—International Women’s Month—is one among several ways that SEL is marking the occasion, in this case by gathering essays in a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallSEL Transitions2026-02-19text/htmlen-USSEL Transitions2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®105812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Reproduction Without Bodies, Bodies Without Reproduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983655
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“I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.”“Reproduction Without Bodies, Bodies Without Reproduction” departs from SEL’s customary structure of centering each issue on a discrete historical era. Instead, this transhistorical issue moves chronologically from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, tracking a course through a literary history we often call “modernity.” Yet this transhistorical issue is also motivated by a pressing awareness of the present. It is difficult to write about bodies and reproduction without being reminded of the assaults on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy that provide the contemporary backdrop to our writing. The present feels
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallReproduction Without Bodies, Bodies Without Reproduction2026-02-19text/htmlen-USReproduction Without Bodies, Bodies Without Reproduction2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®376802026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Abortive Poetics and Tragedies of Reproduction on the Early Modern English Stage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983656
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In the fourth act of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), the Provost calls an executioner to the stage: “What hoa, Abhorson! Where’s Abhorson there?”1 The repetition of the name demands audience attention. Editors such as J. W. Lever and N. W. Bawcutt gloss the term as a portmanteau of “abhor” and “whoreson.”2 But Mario DiGangi notes that the name is also “a virtual homonym for ‘abortion.’”3 DiGangi’s interpretation of this name is supported by the plot. Abhorson is called forward to execute Claudio for the crime of having sex outside of wedlock—a new, harsher punishment put in place by the overzealous interim duke, Angelo. This crime is only discovered because Juliet, Claudio’s lover, has become pregnant.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallAbortive Poetics and Tragedies of Reproduction on the Early Modern English Stage2026-02-19text/htmlen-USAbortive Poetics and Tragedies of Reproduction on the Early Modern English Stage2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1074372026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Early Modern Pastoral Drag and Nonprocreative Reproduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983657
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From its first line, “Come live with me, and be my love,” Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” showcases the scope of reproduction in poetic contexts and its expansion beyond procreation: living and loving are not contained by institutional or procreational paradigms, and thus offer the possibility of evading both marriage and expectations of lineage.1 In the poem, the Shepherd’s invitation foregrounds erotic passion alongside the pleasures of pastoral abundance: instead of a proposal to generate offspring, the speaker offers a fecund landscape. The bucolic setting of “The Passionate Shepherd” overflows with environmental abundance, which the speaker carefully details for his unnamed “Love,”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallEarly Modern Pastoral Drag and Nonprocreative Reproduction2026-02-19text/htmlen-USEarly Modern Pastoral Drag and Nonprocreative Reproduction2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®834532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Margaret Cavendish’s Imaginative Reproductions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983658
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“Then let us talk of Thoughts: for thoughts are the children of the Mind, begot betwixt the Soul and Senses.”1Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was remarkably fruitful, as a writer. She published and widely circulated twenty-five editions of fourteen manuscripts, constantly revising and reis-suing them. Her literary output spanning drama, poetry, fiction, and philosophical treatises engages with an astounding range of themes. Nonetheless, her marriage to William Cavendish—thirty-one years her senior—produced no children, though their union was meant to, given it was his second marriage to a much younger wife. As a natural philosopher, Margaret Cavendish approached everything rationally and empirically
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallMargaret Cavendish’s Imaginative Reproductions2026-02-19text/htmlen-USMargaret Cavendish’s Imaginative Reproductions2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1032802026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Ruining Reproductive Futures
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983659
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Scholars often turn to Lucy Hutchinson’s epic poem, Order and Disorder (1679), for its complex rendering of the maternal body. Inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667–74), the poem reconsiders the place of women within Christian creation, and, by connection, the purposes and effects of childbirth and childbearing. For the most part, scholars have tended to read in Hutchinson a desire to make use of representations of motherhood to oppose seventeenth-century models of patriarchy. Shannon Miller, for instance, notes that Hutchinson’s “emphasis on maternal activity counters the royalist, monarchical impulses of patriarchal theory.”1 By dramatizing how both parents share possession of and dominion over the child
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallRuining Reproductive Futures2026-02-19text/htmlen-USRuining Reproductive Futures2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®910132026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Doubtful Reproduction and the Medicolegal Regulation of Intersex Bodies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983660
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In the three-volume An Historical Miscellany of the Curiosities and Rarities in Nature and Art (1794), the anonymous author includes the section “Of Androgynes, or Hermaphrodites,” part of the “Curiosities and Rarities” chapter. He writes,Androgyne is a name given to those living creatures which, by a monstrous formation of their generative parts, seem to unite in themselves the two sexes, that of the male and of the female. This lusus naturæ, this defect, or perhaps redundancy, in the animal structure, is described by medical authors in the following manner. “There is a depravation in the structure of the parts intended by nature for propagation … that of the two instruments of generation one is feeble and inert;
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallDoubtful Reproduction and the Medicolegal Regulation of Intersex Bodies2026-02-19text/htmlen-USDoubtful Reproduction and the Medicolegal Regulation of Intersex Bodies2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1309412026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Punitive Reproduction in The Fortunate Transport
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983661
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The anonymously published ca. 1750 novel The Fortunate Transport appears to have been the subject of many satirical prints.1 The one seen below is attributed to George Bickham and dated 1741, but, as is often the case with prints, there are other extant copies, which are dated differently (Figure 1). While the 1741 date is consistent in both the British Museum and Yale’s Lewis Walpole collections, the John Carter Brown Library collection mentions 1770 as the publication year. My reason for pointing out this variance is simply this: in all of these holdings, the paintings are said to be inspired by “the novel of the same title,” yet some of the prints predate the purported source of inspiration.2 Tempting though it
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallPunitive Reproduction in The Fortunate Transport2026-02-19text/htmlen-USPunitive Reproduction in The Fortunate Transport2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®998022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19The Antiabortion Movement’s Reclamation of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Future of Feminist Recovery
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983662
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Both before and after the overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973), mainstream news outlets devoted significant space to antiabortion feminists. Predictably, arguments about fetal personhood took center stage; more surprising was the role Mary Wollstonecraft played in the conversation. A segment on CNN subtitled “Anti-Abortion Activists Say Abortion Must Be Banned for Men to Become More Responsible Fathers,” for example, featured Erika Bachiochi, credentialed as the director of The Wollstonecraft Project.1 In addition to appearing on CNN, Bachiochi has been interviewed on The Ezra Klein Show, debated the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decision with Loretta J. Ross and Joshua Prager on TedTalksDaily
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallThe Antiabortion Movement’s Reclamation of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Future of Feminist Recovery2026-02-19text/htmlen-USThe Antiabortion Movement’s Reclamation of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Future of Feminist Recovery2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1080092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Policing the Family in British Atlantic Anti-Slavery Narratives from Scott to Wedderburn
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983663
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In his autobiography The Horrors of Slavery (1824), the Black ultraradical, abolitionist, and proto-communist Robert Wedderburn remediates a heated exchange with his white half-brother, Andrew Colvile, which took shape in the pages of Bell’s Life in London. After Wedderburn submitted a letter praising the weekly’s “observations on the Meeting of the Receivers of Stolen Men” and detailing his intimacy with the violence of plantation slavery—the purchase, rape, and abuse of his mother, Rosanna, by his planter father, James Wedderburn—Colvile litigiously demanded that the editors print his defense of James and the Jamaican plantocracy.1 For the editors, this response turned on “Slave-Dealers’ logic,” Colvile’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallPolicing the Family in British Atlantic Anti-Slavery Narratives from Scott to Wedderburn2026-02-19text/htmlen-USPolicing the Family in British Atlantic Anti-Slavery Narratives from Scott to Wedderburn2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1187102026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Nonfruiting Bodies: Biopolitics and Botanical Metaphor in Victorian Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983664
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What is a woman without reproductive prospects? For Victorian writers, it would have been difficult to frame this question in anything but biopolitical—and often even agricultural— terms. Consider, for example, Jane Eyre’s (1847) reflection on the protagonist’s changed reproductive prospects at the end of volume two:Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman— almost a bride—was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hay-field and corn-field lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, today were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallNonfruiting Bodies: Biopolitics and Botanical Metaphor in Victorian Poetry2026-02-19text/htmlen-USNonfruiting Bodies: Biopolitics and Botanical Metaphor in Victorian Poetry2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®891842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Reproduction Without Women: Demothering the Biological in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983665
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Historically, the ability to become pregnant, gestate a child, and give birth has been highly valued, even considered divine, since reproduction allows humans to approximate the creation of the world and determine the shape of the future, seemingly from nothing. Patriarchal societies have told stories of the masculine assumption of “the power and supremacy” associated with birth, along with women’s removal from the reproductive process for millennia.2 In Greek mythology, Zeus gives birth to Athena from his head; in Euripides’s Medea, first performed in 431 BC, Jason complains that “It would have been better far for men / To have got their children in some other way, and women / Not to have existed. Then life would
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallReproduction Without Women: Demothering the Biological in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction2026-02-19text/htmlen-USReproduction Without Women: Demothering the Biological in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1404072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19SEL: The Exchange
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983666
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Susan Fraiman, Professor of English, University of Virginia (left), and Gayle Salamon, Professor of English, Princeton University (right). Photographs courtesy of the authors.Part of SEL’s Living Discourse Initiative, “SEL: The Exchange” features two senior scholars, whose work overlaps in compelling ways, in an extended, informal exchange of ideas about their own scholarship, timely concerns, and the study of literature broadly. The conversation could occur as a series of exchanged emails or Zoom conversation transcripts. We envision a collegial format akin to the letters exchanged in Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Rehearsals for Living (2022): two sharp minds, sparking and riffing off one another
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallSEL: The Exchange2026-02-19text/htmlen-USSEL: The Exchange2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®934302026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Thematic Review: Reproduction and Sexuality
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983667
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The recent scholarly books surveyed in this review reveal the varied and sometimes surprising ways in which reproduction and sexuality were described and represented between approximately 1500 and 1900. Long understood as sources of both wonder and anxiety, reproduction and sexuality in these books have mutable meanings and connotations and are treated as forces that refuse a neat historical trajectory, revealing intersections and disjunctions between discrete periods and between past and present more broadly. Covering a vast archive of material, some authors focus on visual sources and historical records, but most concentrate primarily on literary texts (notably poetry, fiction, and drama) or texts with literary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallThematic Review: Reproduction and Sexuality2026-02-19text/htmlen-USThematic Review: Reproduction and Sexuality2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®757862026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Awards
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983668
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THE ELIZABETH DIETZ MEMORIAL AWARDis presented annuallyin memory of the late Professor Elizabeth Dietzof Rice University.THE ROBERT LOWRY PATTEN AWARDis presented annuallyin honor of the distinguished scholarly andeditorial career of Bob Patten of Rice University andSEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.2025 Patten Award Recipientfor her contribution to eighteenth-century British literary studiesKevis GoodmanUniversity of California, BerkeleyPathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and PoeticsYale University PressTHE MONROE KIRK SPEARS AWARDis presented annuallyto honor the distinguished and humane career ofthe late Professor Monroe K. Spears,sometime editor of the Sewanee Review
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/178/image/coversmallAwards2026-02-19text/htmlen-USAwards2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®50842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19