Editors' Blog 2011:

  • By Laura Runge, Editor
    Online Full Text

Welcome to the inaugural volume of Aphra Behn Online, a new, interactive scholarly journal. ABOnline offers something different for scholars and students alike in that it focuses exclusively on the issues related to women in the arts from 1640 to 1830, and it provides cutting edge work in an open access, online format that allows for readers to post comments and engage in a conversation about the ideas presented. This volume is organized around the theme of women's poetry in recognition of the landmark publication of the Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia edition, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), which will redefine the content of eighteenth-century literature courses around the globe. . . More

Scholarship:

  • "Anna Seward and the Sonnet: Milton's Champion" by Claudia Thomas Kairoff
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text / Notes

By studying Seward's defense of the Miltonic or "legitimate" sonnet, we can recover the ways her favored sonnet form supported and advanced her beliefs about the function of poetry, the role of the poet, and why Smith's approach to the sonnet involved stakes so high that Seward vehemently condemned Smith's sonnets. . . More

  • "Lady Mary's Imperfect Employment" by Danielle Bobker
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text / Notes

This essay will argue that Montagu's pose of willful passivity with respect to print and her awareness of the archaism of her position given the development of the publishing industry are central to "Reasons that Induced Dr. S[wift] to write a Poem call'd the Lady's Dressing room," which she wrote within two years of the appearance of Jonathan Swift's most famous scatological poem. . . More

  • "'Calmly to heav'n submit your cause': Jane Cave Winscom and the
    Bristol Bridge Riots of 1793" by Catherine Ingrassia
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text / Notes

Read in the context of Bristol in the 1790s, the poems offer a sustained exploration of the tensions between individual rights and the uses of governmental authority. They address threats to liberty and the oppression of Bristol's marginalized, disenfranchised, or enslaved persons. As such, they offer insight into Winscom, a heretofore little discussed poet, into "the popular experiences and perceptions" of the riot itself (Harrison 559), and into the cultural tensions affecting Britsol and arguably the British nation. . . More

  • "Missing Immortality: The Case of Melesina Trench (A Neglected,
    Celebrated, Dismissed, and Rediscovered Woman Poet of the Long
    Eighteenth Century)" by Katharine Kittredge
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text / Notes

So, given all that can be gained from studying the work of Trench—her clearly written, gripping emotional accounts of private tragedy, her poignant poetry, and her playful experiments in surprising genres—it may seem strange that her writing has gone unrecognized for so long. At first glance she may seem like just one among many early modern female authors whose work was excluded from the male-dominated literary canon, but a closer look at the actual history of the reception of Trench's work reveals a case history that was shaped more by circumstances that were unusual if not unique. . . More

Pedagogy:

  • "Hearing Eighteenth-Century Occasional Poetry by and about Women:
    Swift and Barbauld" by Elizabeth Kraft
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text / Notes

In this essay, I will suggest that our reading of each poem depends upon our "hearing" the poem as it must have "sounded" in its original context. I will further argue that the best way to do that is to read the poem aloud or to perform it, not in our own voice, but in the voice of the text's speaker. . . .To achieve an ethical performance of any poem is to try to recapture that original voicing. And to do so, we must listen and resist the temptation to "overhear," in two senses of the word—to over-interpret and to hear as though we are eavesdropping. Both approaches to "hearing" in "life" produce misunderstandings; the same can be said of art. . . More

New Media / Women on the Web:

  • "Numbering the Streaks on a Digital Tulip: Eighteenth-Century Women
    Poets on the World Wide Web" by Emily Bowles
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text / Notes

In the context of Aphra Behn Online's "New Media" section, bringing Imlac's assessment of poetry to bear on modern configurations of eighteenth-century women's poetry on the Web may help us open a sequence of interrelated questions about the theory and practice of women's poetry, particularly as the contours of women's writing have expanded with new technologies both of gendered identity and textual practices. . . More

Book Reviews:

  • Amy Garnai's Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s. Reviewed by
    Jennifer Golightly
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text

Amy Garnai's work focuses on three radical writers of the revolutionary decade in France: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald. The primary argument of the work is not wholly unsurprising: Garnai asserts that through their novels, poems, plays, and essays, Smith, Robinson, and Inchbald contributed to the formation of a political discourse regarding social and political reform in the 1790s and that their efforts in this respect spanned a decade. That Garnai's analysis of these three writers runs across genres is still a relatively unique feature in studies of radical writing by women of the 1790s. Revolutionary Imaginings includes some important reflections on the traditional association of political writing with the novel, a fact that Garnai rightly identifies as creating a critical blind spot when it comes to the politics of plays and poems written by radical women writers. . . More

  • Chantel Lavoie's Collecting Women: Poetry and Lives 1700-1780.
    Reviewed by Holly Faith Nelson
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text

In her slim but significant and richly suggestive volume Collecting Women: Poetry and Lives, 1700-1780, Chantel M. Lavoie traces and theorizes the afterlives of early-modern women writers and their works in eighteenth-century "miscellanies, anthologies, and collective biographies" (33). . . .As she examines the place of women in these hybrid cultural forms, Lavoie asks us to consider whether their male compilers and editors merely sought to compliment female writers or, alternatively and more radically, to construct a canon of female poets that would complement that of their male counterparts. . . More

  • Anne Milne's Lactilla Tends her Fav'rite Cow: Ecocritical Readings of
    Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class
    Women's Poetry. Reviewed by Dometa Wiegand
    Online Full Text / PDF Full Text

Anne Milne's first monography, "Lactilla Tends her Fav'rite Cow," explores a nascent field of research in a collection of readings of five poems by laboring class women poets of the eighteenth-century. While many scholars working in the field of eighteenth-century literature will be familar with most of the poets as well as the tropes focusing on animals found in this study, few scholars will have examined these particular poems in depth. Certainly few would have considered these poems within the complicated theoretical frameworks of "deep" ecology and ecofeminism that Milne employs here. The purpose of her study, Milne notes, is "to suggest that ecocriticism and ecological feminism cannot thrive without historical projects" (32). The attention to under-represented poets and poems, as well as her desire to marry the theoretical and the historical, raises issues that should be important to all specialists in the field. . . More

Notes and Discoveries:

  • Coming Soon . . .