Research & Innovation

Over the past three decades women’s and gender studies have evolved into disciplines that have energized”and transformed”the study of the early modern period. But the study of women and gender is not the same. As a discipline, feminism begins with the assumption that the sexed body changes the interaction of the subject in political space, regardless of other considerations of subject position. How these other social categories inflect the position of woman as a social actor and political subject does in many ways define the discipline of feminist inquiry, but the sex of the body, irrespective of gender identification, has always informed feminist analysis, which concerns primarily the political uses to which the body is put: in its labor; its social position; its religious identity; its cultural participation. Gender studies, by contrast, typically elides biological sex, inquiring into how gender identity and identification crucially alter social and political engagement, and how gender is imbricated in the social, political and even epistemological arrangements and assumptions of culture.

Now, however, we occupy a historical moment when this disciplinary divide has begun to collapse: when the sex of the body can be altered to adhere to the gender identity of the subject, when calls have been made to appropriate the long-eschewed science of biology for feminist analysis, our thinking about the sexed subject in political space must inevitably change. Our political moment alters our scholarly and theoretical practice. This volume presents a comprehensive examination of the scholarship on women and gender in Anglophone literature during the early modern period. It examines women’s lives, their practical and cultural work, the ideologies of gender that underwrite cultural production, and the divide between ideology and lived experience.

As the novels act in conversation with one another, each work presents a different but relevant depiction of the costs of toxic masculinity in the aftermath of sexual violence, as evidenced by the victims’ coping mechanisms and ongoing trauma. Oftentimes, these literary portrayals reflect real-life stigmas that impact adolescent male victims. As the novels discussed in this paper demonstrate, these stigmas vary depending on a variety of characteristics, including sex/gender of the perpetrator, the victim’s relationship with his offender, and the age difference between victim and perpetrator.

I haven’t been able to stop asking myself this question since the election of Donald Trump in November. Whitehead’s novel is, after all, constructed around an historical falsehood. As a kid, the author reports, he thought that the Underground Railroad was a literal subway slaves used to escape to the North. Many children who learn about the Railroad make the same mistake (as did Porsha Stewart in an episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta). Taking his former confusion as a point of departure, Whitehead literalizes the metaphor. His protagonist Cora escapes from slavery in Georgia on an underground steam-powered locomotive. Fleeing the slave-catcher Ridgeway, she traverses a variety of states, each of which skews from the historical record in more or less dramatic ways. “Every state is different,” one character in the novel suggests. “Each one a state of possibility.” Historically informed readers will note that Whitehead’s novel incorporates anachronistic references to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazism, as well as twenty-first-century modes of oppression (such as stop and frisk and mass incarceration) into his vision of the 1850s.

Prairie Schooner is published in cooperation with the University of Nebraska Press and the Creative Writing Program of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English Department and is endowed by the Glenna Luschei Endowed Editorship and Fund for Excellence at Prairie Schooner.

The first academic organization dedicated to nineteenth-century American literary studies, C19 was co-founded by CALS faculty members Hester Blum, Chris Castiglia, and Sean Goudie, who currently serve on the C19 Advisory Board.

President: 2020-2022

Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.

This scholarly edition comprises extensively annotated facsimile copies of Military Equitation: or, A Method of Breaking Horses, and Teaching Soldiers to Ride (1793), by Henry Herbert, 10th Earl of Pembroke, and A Treatise on Military Equitation (1797), by William Tyndale.

This detailed, annotated bibliography surveys some 70 guides, monographs, policy statements, and reports pertaining to graduate education published by the Council of Graduate Schools between the 1960s and 2010s with particular attention to CGS’s invaluable and widely read series of “best practice monographs.”

Students may receive each award twice during their graduate education at UMD, once before the achievement of candidacy (including master’s students) and a second time after the achievement of candidacy.

While scholars have often looked to this period in order to narrate the triumph of methodical rigor as a quintessentially modern intellectual value, Simon describes the appeal of open-ended receptivity to the protagonists of the New Science. In straying from the work of self-possession and the duty to sift fact from fiction, early modern intellectuals discovered the cognitive advantages of the undisciplined mind.