Research & Innovation

Edited by Mary Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda Dove, and Karen Nelson

Winner of the 2000 Award for Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women

In Tudor and Stuart Britain, women writers were shaped by their culture, but they also helped to shape and reproduce culture through their writing, their patronage, and their networks of family and friends. Through the lens of cultural studies, the editors explore women's material culture, women as agents in reproducing culture, popular culture and women's pamphlets, and women's bodes as inscriptions of culture.

In addition to essays by the editors on Mary Queen of Scots, poetry and gift-exchange, Lady Mary Wroth's anti-absolutist sonnets, and Elizabeth Cary's portrait of the queen in Edward II, the book includes Georgianna Ziegler's description of Esther Inglis's gift books; Margaret Hannay on class in Pembroke's psalms; Mary Ellen Lamb on Aemilia Lanyer and patronage; Elaine Beilin on Anne Dowriche's Protestant history; Ilona Bell discussing the Maydsens of London; Barbara McManus on the pamphlet controversies about women; Esther Cope on Eleanor Davies; Marilyn Luecke on Elizabeth Clinton's Countess of Lincolnes Nurserie; Carole Levin on the assimilation of female saints into reformation England, and Kathi Vosevich describing the rhetorical training that Mary and Elizabeth Tudor received.

What can a reassessment of this contentious first lady of American letters add to an understanding of the gay identities that have emerged in America over the past century? Although it has been proven posthumously by scholars that Cather had lesbian relationships, she did not openly celebrate lesbian desires, and even today is sometimes described as homophobic and misogynistic. As Lindemann shows in this study of the novelist's life and work, Cather's sexual coming-of-age occurred at a time when a cultural transition was recasting love between women as sexual deviance rather than romantic friendship. At the same time, the very identity of "America" was characterized by great instability as the United States emerged as a modern industrial nation and imperial power. 

This study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand's new readings of texts by and about Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, the Earl of Suffolk, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Gresham, James Burbage, and Lionel Cranfield reveal a blend of affect and cognition concerning finance that includes nostalgia, anger, contempt, embarrassment, tenacity, bravado and humility.

Born in present-day Ghana, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped at the age of thirteen and sold into slavery by his fellow Africans in 1770; he worked in the brutal plantation chain gangs of the West Indies before being freed in England. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery is the most direct criticism of slavery by a writer of African descent. Cugoano refutes pro-slavery arguments of the day, including slavery's supposed divine sanction; the belief that Africans gladly sold their own families into slavery; that Africans were especially suited to its rigors; and that West Indian slaves led better lives than European serfs. Exploiting his dual identity as both an African and a British citizen, Cugoano daringly asserted that all those under slavery's yoke had a moral obligation to rebel, while at the same time he appealed to white England's better self.

Stowe's second antislavery novel was written partly in response to the criticisms of Uncle Tom's Cabin by both white Southerners and black abolitionists. In Dred (1856), Stowe attempts to explore the issue of slavery from an African American perspective. In his introduction, Robert Levine outlines the antislavery debates in which Stowe had become deeply involved before and during her writing of Dred. Levine shows that in addition to its significance in literary history, the novel remains relevant to present-day discussions of cross-racial perspectives.

In 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a slave ship, sold to a local family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. Struck by Phillis' extraordinary precociousness, the Wheatleys provided her with an education that was unusual for a woman of the time and astonishing for a slave. Phillis published her first poem in 1767 at the age of 14, winning much public attention and considerable fame. This volume collects both Wheatley's letters and her poetry: hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions.

Comprises nearly 400 authoritative yet accessible entries on canonical writers, key texts, genres, literary debates, colonized regions, and related terminology

In Tudor and Stuart Britain, women writers were shaped by their culture, but they also helped to shape and reproduce culture through their writing, their patronage, and their networks of family and friends. Through the lens of cultural studies, the editors explore women's material culture, women as agents in reproducing culture, popular culture and women's pamphlets, and women's bodes as inscriptions of culture.

Melodic and firmly rooted in nature, Plumly's Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000 deepens and sharpens the themes of his work. The result is a musical, multifaceted, and deeply moving series of poems-a panoramic view of thirty years of poetic inquiry.

"Dark splendor" are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier's new work balances on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown, revealing the hidden depths of relationships. The poems in THE LEDGE are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. They render the world beautifully mysterious as they slide into unexpected emotional territory. A son loses his father's favorite hammer, and with it his trust. In "The Wave," the enthusiastic crowd at a baseball game rises and sits in frightening unison, belying their hopeful cheering.