January 2011: Justyna Kostkowska is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN.  She is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Experiment in Genre and Politics 1926–1931: Visioning and Versioning The Waves (Mellen 2005). She is working on a new book entitled Ecological Imagination and Narrative in Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith.

Yaakov Mascetti is lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. His work focuses on metaphysical poetry, early-modern conceptions of sight and cognition, the role of occultism in the rise of modernity, and definitions of femininity in early-modern English literature. He recently completed his first book on Humanist sign-theory and Protestant sacramentalism in early-modern

January 2011: Carole K. Harris is a professor of literature and writing at New York City College of Technology, City University of New York.  She received her B. A. in French Literature from Duke University and her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.  Her early scholarship focused on the received idea in Flaubert. Currently, she is at work on a collection of essays entitled Flannery O’Connor: The Politics of the Cliché, as well as a creative non-fiction piece on three generations of her family.  Through her photography, exhibited in local venues, she also explores the cliché as a visual phenomenon.

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.

Through readings of contemporary medical accounts of shell shock alongside Dorothy L. Sayers’ (1893--1957) popular detective novels, this essay argues that through the character of Peter Wimsey, a veteran of the World War I and a survivor of shell shock, Sayers not only participates in the creation of a new kind of male literary protagonist, distinguished by his vulnerability rather than virility, but also intervenes in a contemporary debate about the place of a shell-shocked soldier in post-war society. While the medical literature aligned the doctor, detective, and policeman against the soldier, shell shock victim, and criminal, Sayers exposes and revises the implied alignment of shell shock and criminality, using shell shock as the pre-condition for the creation of an empathic, flawed, and profoundly modern detective in a traumatized and diminished post-war England.

The special issue of Partial Answers devoted to British women writers is organized around the theme of marginalia, a concept that shifts attention away from the commonplace critical understanding of “margin” as merely an indicator of status and toward the intellectual work that occurs within it. The relation of “margin” to “center” articulates the position that women authors have historically occupied vis-à-vis a male tradition of literary creation; however, the margin is also a space of possibility that invites women authors to enter into an intellectual exchange with this tradition and to generate their own responses to it. The introduction surveys the essays collected in the issue as reflecting in different ways on the complex literary and discursive effects of women’s liminal locations.

This essay explores one version of a recurring pattern in the Victorian novel, the tendency to compare English and French models of national character. While many novelists, including Charlotte Brontë, portray French women as possessing an immoral theatricality, and deploying deceptive “public” personae that contrast with the Englishwoman’s devotion to her national and domestic homes, Brontë’s Villette endows French theater with the power to question British national gender ideals.

The essay discusses the way in which the eighteenth-century writer Anna Seward created an interface between literature and science by challenging the theories of a renowned astronomer through her poetry. No matter what their level of interest, women in the eighteenth century had little recourse to an education in science. Seward’s education was literary, and she paid little attention to the sciences until she attended a lecture in Lichfield given by the astronomer, Robert Evans Lloyd. He illustrated his talk with an orrery. Joseph Wright’s painting, The Philosopher giving that lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun (1766), demonstrates the prevalent fascination with astronomy. After the lecture, Seward wrote a poem on the same subject, “The Terrestrial Year, passing through the signs of the Zodiac,” but not before she had interrogated Lloyd on his presentation of the juxtaposition of Earth and the constellations, publicly questioning his theories. Although her knowledge of astronomy was founded on references to the zodiac in the poems of Milton and Thomson, she engaged with further scientific research and was able to prove that Lloyd’s system was flawed. Her findings inspired her to write her poem which, despite its origins, has more reference to classical literature than to science. An interesting part of the poem, however, is the introductory ‘Proem’ which gives the scientific rationale for the work, tracing Seward’s challenge and her educational progress. Her proem leads us into the poem and leaves us in no doubt that Seward’s exploration of the complexities of the solar system finds new poetic ground through her quest for scientific knowledge.