Early Modern Women Writers (overview)
English 231: Early Modern Women Writers, 1550-1800, Spring 2020
Instructors: Patricia Fumerton and Kristy McCants Forbes
Class Meetings: Tuesdays 3:00 - 5:50 pm PST via Zoom (formerly to be held in Early Modern Center, SH 2510)
Office Hours for Prof. Fumerton: T 2:00-4:00 pm. PST and by email appointment
Office Hours for Dr. Kristy McCants Forbes: MW 11012 PST and by email appointment
Join Zoom Meeting for Classes T, 3-4:45 pm. PST:
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/548477362
Join Zoom Meeting for Office Hours, R 2-4 pm. PST (you will be placed in a waiting room till it's your turn):
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/756264117
Kristy's Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00AM-12:00PM
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/263403250
This course fills English Department Field Requirements 1 and 2.
Co-taught by Patricia Fumerton and Kristy McCants Forbes, this course offers both an extensive and intensive understanding of women writers in England, c. 1550-1800, whose work will be at all times viewed within a historical, social, biographical, theoretical, and critical context. The course aims to go beyond, while riding upon, earlier waves of women's studies: the initial feminist activism of the 1960s and ’70s that sought a voice for women scholars as well as authors, which led to the establishment of heavily theoretical women's studies programs in the 1980s; the concomitant “recovery” of unknown women authors (most notably through the Brown Women's Writers Project, founded at Brown University in 1986, and dedicated to making available hand-typed transcriptions of women's works published in their own time but not available in any modern edition); the merging of women's studies with gender studies in the 1990s (in an effort to include men as well as women and multiple sexual orientations); the gradual "mainstreaming" of feminist research and theory across the humanities, accompanied by a call for more critical (vs theoretical or biographical) analysis of their work; and the new modes of "recovery" of women writers through both manuscript studies and digital technologies that remake the marginal into the global. As a result of all these movements, early modern women writers are no longer non-existent (a claim made to Professor Fumerton by her Renaissance colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1980s). But some will be far more familiar to the specialist of the earlier periods than others.
Drawing on both old and new discoveries and formats, Fumerton and McCants Forbes seek to open your eyes to a blazing new world of women writers 1550-1800 that is much populated with both familiar and new faces and much open to cutting-edge criticism both written and awaiting writing. Join us on the adventure.
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