At the 2008 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers conference (BWWC), Ann Cvetkovich, Susan Fraiman, and Susan Stanford Friedman presented the opening-night plenary panel devoted to mapping feminist scholarship’s current priorities and concerns. Conference participants reported being both intrigued and perplexed by the speakers’ seemingly bleak view of “women writers” as a useful scholarly category. This essay, conducted by the authors as a year-long email conversation, extends that plenary discussion. In addition to sketching the intellectual history of feminism within the American academy and assessing how Women’s Studies (broadly defined) engages with a host of pressing interdisciplinary concerns, the authors also revisit their discussion of what defines and justifies continued work on 18th- and 19th-century British women writers.

June 2010: Susan Fraiman is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.  Her publications in the area of gender and culture include Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993); Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003); and articles in such journals as Critical Inquiry, Feminist Studies, PMLA, and New Literary History.  She writes frequently on Jane Austen and is editor of the Norton Critical Northanger Abbey (2004).  Her thoughts about the “new” Women’s Studies are elaborated in South Atlantic Review (2008).  She is currently writing about marginal versions of domesticity (queer, post-traumatic, feminist, homeless, etc.).

June 2010: Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2009, she received the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies. She is the author of Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, winner of the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies; Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.; and Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction. She edited Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle, Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, and (with Rachel Blau DuPlessis), Signets—Reading H.D. A Special Issue on Comparison of New Literary History edited with Rita Felski has just appeared, and Contemporary Women’s Writing, an Oxford University Press journal she co-edits, won the 2009 award for Best New Journal from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, Serbian, and Hungarian. She is at work on books on planetary modernisms and on migration narratives.

June 2010: Miranda M. Yaggi is a PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington, specializing in the 18th- and 19th-century British novel and women writers. She is at work on her dissertation, "Architects of a Genre: Literati, Critics, and the British Novel's Critical Institution," which revises the traditional narrative that features print-journalism at the heart of the novel's "rising" professional institution and proposes, instead, to account for the early institution's heterogeneric and heteroglossic nature.

This essay analyzes Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in relation to the 1856 murder trial thought to have inspired it: that of William Palmer, the notorious “Rugeley Poisoner,” a physician accused of poisoning his patients under the guise of medicating them. While most critics have followed Collins’s lead in emphasizing the format of the legal trial – specifically, its sequence of testifying witnesses – as the inspiration behind the novel’s then-innovative rotating cast of narrators, for Tucker, the Palmer trial illuminates The Woman in White as much by way of its status as a revelatory moment in the history of modern anatomical medicine as it does as a moment in British legal history. The difficulty of definitely distinguishing between clinically salutary medicating and criminal poisoning that made Palmer’s crimes possible and their prosecution vexing also served to point up some fundamental contradictions at the heart of anatomical medicine’s claim to be able to diagnose what goes on in the interiors of sick patients’ bodies, claims that rest upon the presumption of the interchangeability of human bodies. The plot of Collins’s novel details the process of this interchange of bodies rather than simply presuming such interchangeability, and as a consequence makes apparent some of the mid-century challenges attendant upon the effort to recognize, identify and control particular bodies through time, as they age, sicken, die.

Addressing his colleague Paul Fry who has recently published Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, the author of the article places Fry’s book within the context of major issues in Wordsworth criticism and explains his difference from Fry’s ontic (atheologic and non-transcendental) emphasis.

Bluestocking Catherine Talbot is now perhaps best known as the closest and most “angelic” friend of the learned Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, poet, translator, and prolific letter-writer. But Talbot’s literary afterlife as a relatively marginal figure in Carter’s illustrious career is hardly accidental. Hers are the only letters placed alongside Carter’s in the volumes published by Montagu Pennington after Carter’s death, and yet she is introduced to us (and remains throughout) Carter’s “deceased friend.”  The letters chart her painful decline and then repeatedly eulogize her after death, keeping her memory alive. Though the letters are obsessed with Catherine Talbot, living and dead, Talbot’s is always a voice from the past, from memory, from the margins, and that voice serves an important function: it becomes a way for Carter to represent the unrepresentable, death.

This essay argues that Keats’s Isabella and Hyperion not only present the aesthetics of suffering (“Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self”) but also reveal that within profound loss and pain there lie ethical possibilities that can be discovered through fidelity to existential and psychological uncertainty, or in Keats’s terms, through lingering “at the yawning tomb.”  As Isabella inconsolably weeps over her pot of basil and Saturn lies “nerveless” on the earth, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of a state of total uncertainty and doubt are explored in the poems. A re-reading of these two poems suggests that negative capability is often attained by an encounter with the ultimate mystery, death, an experience that challenges and even overwhelms the subject’s sense of identity. Situated within a complex matrix of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, Keats’s concept of negative capability suggests that an encounter with death is not merely a disaster -- it also serves as a self-negation that forcibly empties the mind of personal, social, and historical certainty. This emptied mind is then capable of imagining hitherto unforeseen ethical possibilities. Keats’s negative capability then, beyond its aesthetic productivity, suggests that within traumatic loss there lies the potential for fundamental socio-political reorientation.

Rebecca West was a protean artist (author of, among other works, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon [1941]), a leading public intellectual, and a visionary commentator on the twentieth century. This paper shows the connection between her major philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas and her attitude towards exile. Following a brief historical overview of the main kinds of responses to the state of exile, from Ovid’s laments to modernist celebrations, I document Rebecca West’s fear of exile, so powerful that it could override even her dominant philosophy of process, her revisionist thinking, and her love of metaphor. Twentieth-century artists and thinkers tended to associated the state of exile with heightened artistic creativity, linking it with epistemological “privilege” (Simmel), or seeing it as instrumental to self-invention (Olsson). For West these ideas were not acceptable. Her patriotism, determinism, existentialism, and essentialism combined with her encounters with refugees during the 1940s and the 1950s to bring about a powerful conviction regarding the misery of exile, one that challenged other parts of her own belief system.

For nineteenth-century Protestant authors, the reign of Mary I (1553--1558) epitomized the horrors of a world in which Roman Catholics were in charge. Catholic Emancipation (1829) stimulated new Protestant anxieties about the threat to British stability posed by the nation’s Catholic residents -- and abetted by dangerously liberal Protestants. Protestant novelists and poets thus turned to the Marian persecutions, often by adapting narratives from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, to warn their audiences that violent martyrdom might well be on the brink of return.  In particular, their fictions staged a conflict between the treatment of Queen Mary’s body and the martyr’s body, especially the female martyr’s body: Mary I’s excessive passion for Philip of Spain and her false pregnancy emblematize the pathologies that underlie religious persecution and threaten English nationhood itself, whereas the injuries inflicted on the female martyr’s body testify to the universal truths of Protestant faith. As the article’s first section demonstrates, Victorian representations of Mary I and her body frequently originate from the work of the Catholic historian John Lingard; even Evangelical visions of Mary draw heavily on Lingard’s and Agnes Strickland’s accounts of a virtuous but ultimately frail Queen. But for Protestants, this sentimental Mary threatens the nation through her perverse sexuality and equally perverse religious obsessions.

            The second half of the essay turns to the role of the popular martyr Rose Allin in novels by Anna Eliza Bray and Emily Sarah Holt.  Allin’s resistance to torture suggested how heroic women could counteract the moral threat posed by the queen’s weakness.

The paper reads Bakhtin’s philosophical itinerary through the prism of continental philosophy in an attempt to reconstruct the philosopher's conception of subjectivity from the incomplete corpus of his surviving works. The introductory section focuses on the work of Henri Bergson, suggesting that his privileging of time over space in the theory of the “durée,” formulated at the turn of the twentieth century, is a response to this ancient paradox of omniscience vs. free will, which serves as the point of departure for the work of Bakhtin and some of his continental contemporaries (notably Merleau-Ponty and Levinas). The discussion then focuses on the transition in Bakhtin’s work from the early essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (ca. 1922--1924), where the conception of authorial omniscience is founded on a synchronic and ocular paradigm, to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929; 2^nd ed. 1963), which inaugurates, according to Bakhtin, a “small-scale Copernican revolution.”

            The full implications of this revolution, philosophical rather than literary, become clearer if we relate it to the “chronotope of liminality,” which is at the very core of Dostoevsky’s work, a persistent questioning of physical, cultural, and psychological boundary-lines and enclosures. I would suggest that Bakhtin extrapolates the same conception of liminality to the workings of the genre of the novel, to discourse as such, and ultimately to the dynamics of ethical subjectivity which is, by definition, non-coincident with itself and, as such, refuses  be subsumed and enframed under the gaze of an authorial other. The principle of polyphony which informs Dostoevsky’s work, and the irreducibly dialogic quality of his characters’ discourse, inaugurate a radical shift, a Bakhtinian rather than Dostoevkian revolution, in the conception of both inter-subjectivity and intra-subjectivity: from the ocular to the auditory, from synchrony to diachrony; and, most significantly, from aesthetics to ethics.

The essay argues that typical readings of Smith as a poet writing in a traditional Romantic mode, creating lyrics that depict a melancholic individual subject drawing inspiration and education from the natural world, risk marginalizing her. Recognizing exile as both biographical reality and literary trope is central to an understanding of Smith’s verse, for she also wrote poetry with a significant political agenda, one that distinguishes her from her early Romantic contemporaries and challenges the parameters of English Romantic nationalist discourse.

That Conrad’s novels and shorter tales are rife with dangerous women has often been noted. Typically, the beauty, exoticism and richly sexual allure of these women threaten the protagonists’ self-possession that is tantamount, for them and for Conrad, to masculine integrity and self worth. But woman in these fictions constitutes a threat not only to the protagonists’ success, survival, or well being, but to the coherence of Conrad’s texts. Deeply embedded in an ancient and persistent tradition that identifies woman with truth itself, woman in Conrad is an emblem of dangerous or forbidden knowledge. Her pervasive presence, then, is both a symbol and an effective cause of the narratives’ ambivalent attitude toward revelation, discovery, and truth. Fascinating, promising, and seductive, like truth itself, she draws the internal seeker and the author on. Menacing and forbidden, she thwarts all efforts at possession. Beginning with evidence of the explicit identification of woman with truth in Conrad’s fictions, the essay focuses on the literary, philosophical, mythic, and psychological history of the equation, connecting her variegated representations in the texts with comparable images of woman in these sources.