Womens WritingPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2022.2117899
Pamela Buck
{"title":"Colonialism and Disease in Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Two Voyages to Sierra Leone","authors":"Pamela Buck","doi":"10.1080/09699082.2022.2117899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2022.2117899","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Anna Maria Falconbridge’s 1794 travel journal Two Voyages to Sierra Leone documents Britain’s resettlement of formerly enslaved people to Sierra Leone and the endemic disease and high rates of mortality that beset the colony. This essay argues that Falconbridge employs the authority of medical discourse to criticize British colonialism in West Africa. Advocating for disease prevention, she adopts medical practices to regulate illness and ensure the settlement’s success. However, she opposes the colonial initiative after an epidemic kills nearly half the settlers and endangers her own life. Locating the source of disease in colonial mismanagement and racism, she confronts abolitionists in England and questions the legitimacy of their project. By focusing on Falconbridge’s account of disease in Sierra Leone, this essay shifts attention away from formal networks of colonial knowledge to the more informal practice of recording done by women. Her work is significant for revealing women’s role in debates on abolition and resettlement and providing an alternative perspective on colonialism in the early Atlantic world.","PeriodicalId":42325,"journal":{"name":"Womens Writing","volume":"29 1","pages":"533 - 548"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47903541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Womens WritingPub Date : 2022-09-12DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2022.2120669
Fatima Borrmann
{"title":"Medical obstacles and eugenic solutions in Arabella Kenealy’s The Mating of Anthea (1911)","authors":"Fatima Borrmann","doi":"10.1080/09699082.2022.2120669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2022.2120669","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Eugenics told many stories. A story of a degenerative present, a story of a dystopian future and, more importantly, a story of how to avert this perceived imminent decay. Put together, these stories read like an unraveling of a linear plot, with a suspended conclusion. At the same time, eugenicists liked to constantly highlight the scientific foundations of their theory. In the “science” of eugenics, however, the narrating is contained and limited, only serving to legitimize the scientific ideas. Literature, on the other hand, remains free to speculate further. An investigation of literary texts might reveal how the combination of eugenic ideas with fictional plots and literary innovation inevitably introduced complexity and ambiguity, thus undermining rather than reinforcing the scientific authority eugenics was eager to claim. By looking at some of Dr. Arabella Kenealy’s novels, this article analyses the problems associated with dramatizing eugenic aims in fictional plots, especially when it comes to women’s professional and familial position.","PeriodicalId":42325,"journal":{"name":"Womens Writing","volume":"30 1","pages":"52 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45615326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Womens WritingPub Date : 2022-09-08DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2022.2116869
Christine Jacob
{"title":"“[A]n Imaginary Feast”: Hospitality and Health in Margaret Cavendish’s Alimentary Poetics","authors":"Christine Jacob","doi":"10.1080/09699082.2022.2116869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2022.2116869","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As previous scholarship has observed, Margaret Cavendish’s ambitious intellectual project—spanning subjects as dissimilar as fairies and fevers—is driven by fancy, an inherently speculative mode of thought, and her correlation of fancy to women’s work is a stratagem that licenses her writing. Beginning with the evocative image of Cavendish as the host(ess) of “an Imaginary Feast,” however, this essay argues that the pervasive alimentary conceit is not merely functional but that it illuminates the essential materiality of fancy as an object that is produced, consumed, and incorporated via the matter and motions of the mind and body. Cavendish intimates a poetics that is shaped by Galenic dietetics and the holistic view of health that she expounds in her treatises on natural philosophy. Drawing on the symbolism and currency of recipe form and customs of hospitality, Cavendish demonstrates, especially in Poems and Fancies and with regards to poetry, that fancy’s effects are substantial and potentially salubrious.","PeriodicalId":42325,"journal":{"name":"Womens Writing","volume":"29 1","pages":"497 - 513"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41707543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Womens WritingPub Date : 2022-09-06DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2022.2120281
Hamish John Wood
{"title":"“Every Rascally Scribbler”: Mary Davys’s Novel Innovations in a Newly Identified Pseudonymous Text, Love and Friendship (1718)","authors":"Hamish John Wood","doi":"10.1080/09699082.2022.2120281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2022.2120281","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In important accounts of Mary Davys’s short epistolary work Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1725), Riley (1995) and Wakely (2005) suggest Davys subverts the amatory mode through its Whig, and feminist, inversion of the Tory seduction narrative. This paper’s identification of an early edition of the text, printed for J. Roberts, and attributed to the pseudonym “Dick Fisher” in 1718 complicates these accounts while providing a new vantage point from which to read the text. Importantly, new prefatory and paratextual material associated with the publication demonstrate both Davys’s commercial acumen and the porous character of the book trade in the early eighteenth century. Using this publication as a case study, this paper examines authorial agency and the complex nature of book production in the early British book trade, arguing that understanding such multiplicities is necessary for the reading of early women writers and their work.","PeriodicalId":42325,"journal":{"name":"Womens Writing","volume":"30 1","pages":"33 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42718008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Womens WritingPub Date : 2022-08-24DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2022.2113614
P. Harrison
{"title":"Irish Women Poets Rediscovered: Readings in Poetry from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century and A History of Irish Women’s Poetry","authors":"P. Harrison","doi":"10.1080/09699082.2022.2113614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2022.2113614","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42325,"journal":{"name":"Womens Writing","volume":"30 1","pages":"170 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48072196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Womens WritingPub Date : 2022-06-22DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2022.2089962
Kristen Brill
{"title":"The Rhetoric of Enslavement in White Confederate Planter Women’s Civil War Diaries (1861–65)","authors":"Kristen Brill","doi":"10.1080/09699082.2022.2089962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2022.2089962","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Recent historiography has shown how slaveholding white women in the antebellum South United States often played active and eager roles in the administration of slavery and used violence against enslaved persons. Building on this recent historiography, this article will show how in the American Civil War (1861–65), such white middle and planter class women not only played central roles in slavery on antebellum plantations, but how this rhetoric of enslavement played a central role in how these women discussed their own experiences of war in the Confederate South. Particularly from 1862, when the ideology of secession and nationalism met the material circumstances of surviving on a wartime home front, middle and planter class white women resorted to the language of secular and non-secular enslavement to convey their own lived wartime experiences. As both enslaver and “enslaved”, these planter women framed their wartime identities in the same system of power, violence and degradation they had been instrumental in sustaining before the war.","PeriodicalId":42325,"journal":{"name":"Womens Writing","volume":"30 1","pages":"19 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47071352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}