490 research outputs found
Mary Ellen O’Connell was Quoted in the Aleteia Article Iran Nuclear Agreement Hailed as Important Step in NonProliferation
No full textMary Ellen O’Connell, professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Prohibition on the Use of Force for Arms Control: The Case of Iran’s Nuclear Program, said that the deal, announced Tuesday, is in the security interest of the United States
Women's life writing 1760-1830 : spiritual selves, sexual characters, and revolutionary subjects
No full textPhDThis thesis uses print and manuscript sources to analyse and interpret women's life
writing at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. I
explore printed works by Catharine Phillips, Mary Dudley, Priscilla Hannah Gurney,
Ann Freeman, Elizabeth Steele, Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, and Charlotte West and discuss the
manuscripts of Mary Fletcher, Mary Tooth, Sarah Ryan, and Elizabeth Fox. Of these
sources, five have never been analysed in the critical literature and six have received
little attention. Considered as a group, this large corpus of texts offers new insights
into the personal and political implications of different models of female selfhood and
social being.
In chapter one, I compare the religious identities presented in the spiritual
autobiographies of Quakers and Methodists. For these women, religious identification
provides a powerful sense of social belonging and enables public participation.
However, it may also lead to a loss of self in the demand for religious conformity and
self-abnegation. In chapter two, I consider the life writing of late eighteenth-century
courtesans. These women adapt available models of femininity and female authorship
in order to establish themselves as socially connected subjects. However, their
narratives also reveal that dependence on the sexual and literary marketplace puts
female selfhood under pressure. In chapter three, I explore the eyewitness accounts of
British women in the French Revolution. I argue that, for these writers, connecting
personal identity to political history is an enabling source of self-definition but it also
exposes them to the risks of self-fragmentation.
In my focus on the social function of women's life writing, I present an alternative to
the traditional alignment of the eighteenth-century autobiographical subject with the
autonomous self of individualism. These narratives allow us to reconsider the
productive and problematic dialectic between personal expression and representative
selfhood, self-authorship and collective narratives, and individualism and social
being. They suggest that women's life writing has the potential to be both the self-expression
of a unique heroine and the self-inscription of a politicised subject
The Queer Contact Zone: Empire and Military Masculinity in the Memoirs of Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot, 1750-1810
No full textThe cross-dressed female soldier played a prominent role within Anglophone popular culture from the American Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars, appearing in ballads, comic operas, plays, and life writing. Feminist and queer analyses of these figures have largely been celebratory, framing historical military cross-dressers as working-class heroines or important examples of an emerging model of female masculinity. However, these interpretations have yet to acknowledge how these transgressive figures’ claims to subjectivity as representatives of the British military depend upon active participation in the imperial project. These female soldiers’ ability to perform masculinity is contingent upon a narrative and discursive investment in colonialism, violence, and racial hegemony. Using concepts from contemporary decolonial theory as a point of entry into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular culture, this article documents how the memoirs of two combat veterans--Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot--serve as early examples of what Jasbir Puar and others describe as “homonationalism.” By repeatedly marking the difference between their own “queerness” and the strangeness of the cisgender women, slaves, and indigenous people they encounter, Snell and Talbot garner legitimacy within the dominant by aligning themselves with masculinity, patriotism, and imperialism. Re-examining these warriors’ self-proclaimed “surprising adventures” within their colonial context reveals an unsettling relationship between queer historicism and the history of imperialism.Peer reviewe
Utmost Art: Complexity in the Verse of George Herbert
Full text linkGeorge Herbert has always been regarded as a man of singular piety and a poet of uncommon technical ability. Until recent times, however, he was usually thought to have written prosodically ingenious but conceptually thin verse. Mary Ellen Rickey, through a close examination of Herbert’s poetry, reveals the high concentration of ideas in his verse and the richness of his imagery.
Mary Ellen Rickey is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky. She is author of Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1049/thumbnail.jp
“Florizel and Perdita Affair, 1779-80”
No full textThis article examines the cultural and political significance of the Prince of Wales’s early 1780s involvement with Drury Lane actress and poet Mary Robinson. Rather than just a romance between two public figures, the “Florizel and Perdita Affair” had wide-ranging effects that, when examined, offer meaningful insight into everything from the weakening influence of the Hanover dynasty and the campaigns of Whig opposition candidates to the aesthetics of formal portraiture, political cartoons, and popular fashion.Peer reviewe
Fellow-craftsmen : a study of the personal and professional relationship between Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow
Full text linkBiographers and critics tend to vary widely on the attention given to the personal, intellectual, and literary significance of the friendship between Ellen Glasgow and Mary Johnston. In this thesis, the author argues that the two women, obviously drawn together because of personal and professional similarities, shared intellectual interests, a passion for writing, and certainly nurtured each other\u27s creativity. By providing extensive evidence from Mary Johnston\u27s unpublished diaries, notebooks, and journals, as well evidence from the abundance of published and unpublished correspondence between the two women, this thesis refutes past critical assessments and establishes that the relationship between Glasgow and Johnston was indeed intellectual and significant rather than superficially social. This thesis makes the argument that Mary Johnston\u27s own life and ideas, as well as the life engendered in her fiction, affected the life and literary career of Ellen Glagow, much as Glasgow\u27s real and fictional lives influenced Johnston\u27s
Working Mothers on the Romantic Stage: Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson
No full textReproduced by permission of Rowman & Littlefield (https://rowman.com/). All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to copy, distribute or reprint
Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and Sentimental Literature.
No full textPhDThis study explores representations of the adorned female body in sentimental
literature. In particular, it addresses the intersection of the discourses of dress, fashion
and sensibility and the political anxieties such intersections expose. These concerns are
located within current critical debate upon the implications of the feminine sentimental
ideal for women readers and writers. Building upon recent scholarship, the introduction
argues that sensibility was predicated upon a concept of the body as an index of feeling.
This argument is subsequently complicated, through a reading of More's `Sensibility'
(1782), which points to the potential of dress to function as both an extension of the
corporeal index and metaphor for sensibility's propensity to lapse into affectation. Dress,
as More implies, not only exposed but embodied the paradox status of sensibility as a
symbol of selfhood externally expressed, and possibly affected mode of display. The
opening chapters explore, in greater depth, the perceived antagonism between dress and
the sentimental body. Chapter One centres on Pamela (1740) and the heroine's
contentious appearance in her homespun gown and petticoat. Chapter Two explores
textual representations of dressmakers and milliners, whose damning association with
fashion ensured that they became personifications of and further justifications for
critiques of dress as a form of social and moral encryption. Subsequent chapters on
ladies' magazines and Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1765) discuss how writers,
across various genres, responded to this antagonism by suggesting ways in which the
adorned female body might become a synecdoche of sentimental virtue. Such texts,
however, reveal the fault line upon which they and, by extension, sensibility rest. In
analogising appearance and worth, writers had to uncomfortably acknowledge that, once
outlined in print, such ideals became accessible to readers, potentially rendering virtue as
easy to put on as a gown or petticoat. The final chapter addresses the escalating
synonymy of fashion and sentiment in the 1790s, as critics argued that the distinction
between genuine feeling and its performance had blurred to obscurity. Edgeworth's
Belinda (1801) is read, in this context, as a counter-sentimental novel, which attempts to
divorce the two through the rehabilitation of the woman of fashion as a woman of `true'
sensibility: a wife and mother
I Am Joseph Your Brother: Relations Between the Catholic Church and the Jewish People Over the Past Half Century
Full text linkViewing of this award-winning documentary film, followed by an inter-religious discussion led by Rabbi Ron Kronish and Sister Mary C. Boys, moderated by Dr. Ellen M. Umansky. [Speaker descriptions] Rabbi Ron Kronish, Director of the Inter-religious Coordinating Council in Israel and noted rabbi, educator, author, and lecturer. Sister Mary C. Boys, Union Theological Seminary, N.Y. Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Teachers College, Columbia University.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1235/thumbnail.jp
"In this moment of alarm and peril": Female Education, Religion and Politics In the Late Eighteenth Century, With special reference to Catharine Macaulay and Hannah More
No full textPhDCatharine Macaulay and Hannah More are conventionally represented as
ideological opposites. Through an analysis which centres on their writings, this
thesis critically examines that representation, and more broadly explores
contemporary perceptions of the roles of women of the middling sort in the late
eighteenth century. It argues that revolution, particularly the French Revolution,
created a climate wherein the duties of women became the subject of increasing
debate. The discussion challenges and builds upon recent work on women's
writing and history, by examining how and why the role of women changed at this
time. This work is concerned with contemporary representations of women, and
concentrates on analysis of primary texts and archival material over a wide range
of genres, including educational treatises, plays, popular tracts, political pamphlets,
historical writing and newspapers - the latter proving a major resource.
Following a critical introduction, the thesis falls into four chapters. Chapter one
discusses the reputation, critical reception and public fame of Macaulay and More,
thereby providing insights into contemporary sexual and social politics. Women
were considered arbiters of morals and manners - believed to play a vital role in
ensuring social stability - and the second chapter examines how the threat of
revolution led to increasing anxiety and debate about the nature of female
education. The third and fourth chapters discuss religion and politics respectively,
and argue that beliefs about the interdependency of Church and State, together with
the feminization of religion, legitimized women's involvement in politics and
enlarged their sphere of influence.
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The conclusion argues that the political and religious climate provided
opportunities for women to reassess and redefine their roles; while often remaining
within parameters defined by commonly held perceptions of femininity, they
politicized the domestic, extended female agency, and elevated the status of
women
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