JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION最新文献

Abstract:

In The Hermaphrodite (ca. 1846) and “Collected by a Valetudinarian” (1870), Julia Ward Howe and Elizabeth Stoddard indulge in fantasies in which their protagonists, Laurence and Alicia, embrace fully Romantic modes of authorship. Laurence and Alicia can fulfill Romantic ideals of authorship partly because they publish their work through the circulation of ideas rather than in printed, mass-produced form; they also embrace life writing as a genre and explore the aesthetics of manuscripts’ materiality. Through these characters, Howe and Stoddard explore the costs and consequences of self- and literary authorship at the intersections of two overlapping mid-nineteenth-century media traditions: nonprint salon and manuscript cultures and the more recent tradition of commercial print culture. Even as The Hermaphrodite and “Collected” emphasize life writing’s artistry and authenticity and showcase nonprint modes of authorship and circulation as a way of embracing literary and personal autonomy, they also reveal those pathways as imperfect. When read together, these works neither condemn one tradition nor condone the other. Rather, they ask readers to reassess—and address—critical paradigms that limit conceptions of authorship and literary careers.

Abstract:

Jane Austen’s novels insist that readers notice characters’ professions and vocational choices. This essay argues that Austen’s ideas develop from—and expand on—Wollstonecraft’s claims about the power and potential of vocational choice to benefit self and society. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft famously critiques clergy, soldiers, and sailors because too often men in these professions were—like women of the time—without choice of career and without self-determination within those careers. Austen illustrates novelistically many of the complaints Wollstonecraft levels against men in clerical and military professions, but she also offers examples that redeem these professions and the men who intentionally adopt them. Previous studies of Wollstonecraftian influence on Austen have largely overlooked Austen’s insistent attention to men’s careers and the ways in which they affirm Wollstonecraft’s critiques as well as extend the possibility of moral and social benefits to be realized from vocational choice, equipping men, too, to be better marriage partners and citizens. This essay provides an overview of Wollstonecraft’s theories about vocational choice and Austen’s fictional echoes of these theories within the context of contemporary ideas of vocation and the professions. Then it turns to two case studies from Austen’s fiction and two characters who most directly and extensively discuss their choices of profession: Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (1814). Bringing these elements together not only illuminates another aspect of Wollstonecraft’s influence on Austen that has received scant critical attention but also reveals Austen’s contribution to changing notions of profession and egalitarian marriage partnerships.

Abstract:

Katie Farris’s chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving, chronicles the author’s diagnosis and subsequent treatment of breast cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Farris directly invokes Dickinson on several occasions and employs some of her stylistic idiosyncrasies, such as the em dash. Farris taps into a connection between the societal fears of tuberculosis during Dickinson’s lifetime and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as between the two poets’ personal challenges: the fact that both Dickinson and Farris experienced health issues that hindered their ability to create. Speaking directly to these parallels, other scholars have noted the ways in which tuberculosis informs Dickinson’s writing and have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will influence contemporary authors in many of those same ways. This article describes how Farris turns to Dickinson during her diagnosis, especially in the sense that Dickinson’s preoccupation with death and illness presents a conduit through which Farris can process her own mortality. I argue that Farris finds companionship and camaraderie in Dickinson’s work specifically because, in both instances, the women face potentially fatal illness largely in isolation. Farris’s invocations of Dickinson and of Dickinson’s poems help shed light on the earlier poet’s attempts to process the impact that tuberculosis had on her family, her social circle, and the nation at large.