The Eighteenth Century / The Closet: Two Introductions – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Reading: ➢ closet, n. v. Oxford English Dictionary

Fig. 5. Patrick Allan-Fraser, Oliver Cromwell Closeted with the Spy.
Courtesy of the collection of The Patrick Allan-Fraser, Hospitalfield Trust.

The course begins with separate introductions to the closet and eighteenth-century history. Then students are invited to start to connect the two. Perusing OED definitions and citations for closet, noun (Figure 2) and closet, verb (Figure 3) as well as two paintings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English closets (Figures 1 and 5) brings many of its now obsolete inflections into view. In this period a closet could be a room for private prayer (1b), family worship (2b), or quiet study (1c), a small bedroom or antechamber (4), a dressing room “for a lady to make her redy in” (1a), a water closet (7), sewer (9), or a repository for valuables or cabinet of curiosities (3a). The closet’s role as a site and symbol of politicized intimacies is important throughout the course: a schematic floor plan of an early modern household (Figure 4) helps to make sense of the unique privacy and social capital of this room, filling out definition 2a: “The private apartment of a monarch or potentate; the private council-chamber.” The storage function of the marginal architectural spaces we now call closets (3b) has a long history as well. At the end of the eighteenth century, when Jane Austen observed “[a] Closet full of shelves… should… be called a Cupboard rather than a Closet,” she was acknowledging, and hoping to curtail, the semantic reduction of the word to this strictly functional space.

We also explore the use of the word as a general metaphor for privacy and seclusion. Some of these metaphors are negatively charged: closet as a marker of “mere theories as opposed to practical measures” (1c) or of painful, shameful secrets, including, especially since the late 1960s, secrets about one’s sexuality (3c, 3d, and 10b). Other metaphors are more neutral: closet as an analogy for a hidden interior site—”the Closet of your Conscience” (6b)—or as an adjective that qualifies a particular experience or thing as inward—”closet-sins” as opposed to “stage-sins” (10a). It is not surprising that, as the private room known by this name proliferated in English culture, closet began regularly to be used as a verb meaning “to retreat,” whether alone or—as in the title of Allan-Fraser’s painting (Figure 5)—with another person.

With reference to such events as the Glorious Revolution, the lapse of the Print Licensing Act, and the founding of the Royal Society and the Bank of England listed on a timeline (Figure 6), my opening lecture characterizes the long eighteenth century as a period of gradual, uneven transition—from absolutism to constitutional monarchy, a land- to commodity- and money-based economy, from manuscript to print culture, and from a court public to a modern public sphere. Then, turning back to the OED definitions and citations, we consider in which of them the closet seems to encapsulate traditional values, in which of them progressive values, and in which a tension between the two. This collective interpretive work helps to ground a basic thesis of the course: that closets became central to eighteenth-century English discourse and culture because they were such flexible and such evocative spaces.

The Philosophy of Progress – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Readings:
➢ John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, selections
➢ John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, selections

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke contests traditional notions of knowledge; in the Two Treatises, he contests traditional notions of government. Our discussion of excerpts from these texts gives depth to the historical transformations introduced in the opening lecture.

Our conversation about the epistemology touches on Locke’s rejection of prior models of innate knowledge. We note his special use of such terms as sensation and reflection, and explore various images of human understanding at work turning experience into ideas, including that of the “closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without.” We then approach the political theory as a comparable rejection of top-down authority. Students become familiar with such key concepts as patriarchy/patriarchalism, the state of nature, property, social contract, civil society, and paternal power.

Finally we find links between these two foundational texts of liberal democratic thought. I ask students to think with me about how the empirical mind is served by civil society and vice versa. We also discuss contradictions and gaps within and between Locke’s epistemology and his political theory, particularly relating to the status of women. On the one hand, Locke’s (largely) universal models of learning and political engagement cut against traditional views of female cognitive and political inferiority. On the other hand, though Locke refutes the traditional equivalence of political and familial authority, he ultimately rationalizes male superiority within the family and more or less takes it as a given within the state.

Rooms for Improvement – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Reading: ➢ Samuel Pepys, Diary, selections

During the nine years he kept his Diary (1660-1669), Samuel Pepys had three closets: he constantly renovated and redecorated them, and just as constantly wrote about them. Thus the Diary serves as a valuable social historical document of the period’s rich closet culture. Social mobility was then a tricky operation, only indirectly dependent on wealth. “Rooms for Improvement,” the title of this section, underscores the multiple important roles closets played in Pepys’s efforts to climb the social ladder.

Fig. 7. Samuel van Hoogstraten, View of the Corridor © National Trust.

Many of Pepys’s closet episodes are easy to collate with the OED entries for closet, an exercise that reinforces the range of uses and resonances of this space. Pepys undertakes concentrated solitary work in his own closets, updates his journal in them, and, on at least one occasion, retreats to a closet to pray (10 August 1662). He also builds and nurtures valuable alliances as a frequent guest in royal and noble closets and, eventually, as a host in his own. And he develops his taste by paying close attention to closet contents and décor, like the perspective painting on the door to his colleague Thomas Povey’s closet that he frequently admired. [In their authoritative University of California edition of the Diary, Robert Latham and William Matthews suggest that the painting was probably Samuel van Hoorgarten’s 1662 View of the Corridor (Figure 7), a fine example, in any case, of the baroque aestheticization of receding space.] Pepys filled his own closets with maps, decorative plates, curiosities, like the tennis-ball-sized stone he had had removed from his bladder (27 August 1664), and his books—an ever-growing and much-prized collection that he had gilded for display in purpose-built bookcases. We sketch the parameters of closet gift exchanges among the Restoration elite. One memorable series of entries details the way Pepys provoked his colleague’s mistress, Abigail Williams, by “not giving her something to her closet” (6 August 1666)–pointedly excluding her from his chosen social circle (see also 19 March 1666, 10 February 1667, 22 August 1667, 15 May 1668).

Class discussion is also elicited by those closet episodes that underscore Pepys’s social aspirations and fraught relationships with women. Though his wife Elizabeth participates in several of Samuel’s schemes to prettify their closets (see 5 October 1663, for example), he clearly sees himself as master of all these rooms–even the one officially designated for her use. Closets feature in entries exposing Pepys’s infidelity. He corners several young lowborn women into sexual indiscretions in closets (28 November 1666, 18 February 1667, 20 June 1667) and when setting up his office closet, drills a hole so that he can spy on the maid who cleans the common area (30 June 1662). Observing Mr and Mrs Pepys’s relationships to domestic space allows us to explore the period’s new ideals of companionate marriage and female privacy, and their limits under couverture, the longstanding legal convention that subsumed a wife’s identity into that of her husband.

The personal journal is the first of several genres with close ties to the closet that we discuss over the course of the semester. We consider the type of self-relation Pepys’s Diary reflects and reinforces, paying attention to linguistic tics like his use of a sexual cipher—as in: “my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl con my hand sub su coats” (25 October 1668)—and reflexive language—as in: “I do thinke myself obliged to thinke myself happy and do look upon myself at this time in the happiest occasion a man can be” (26 February 1666). How and to what extent is this journal a record of inner experience? In what way is Pepys a “private” man? For students, as for other critics, there tends to be significant disagreement on these questions.

Privacy and Modernity I: The Family – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Readings:
➢ Philippe Ariès, Introduction to The History of Private Life III: The Passions of the Renaissance
➢ Michael McKeon, “Chapter 5: Subdividing Inside Spaces” in The Secret History of Domesticity:
Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge

Because a major goal of the course is to enrich and complicate notions of both private and public, students are invited to provide synonyms any time they find themselves using either of these words in discussion or writing. In this way, we can begin to uncover and, where necessary, let go of our assumptions about both categories and the relationships between them. Excerpts from two major histories of privacy ground the rethinking we have already begun: both Philippe Ariès and Michael McKeon narrate privacy’s emergence in relation to the development of the modern family.

Ariès contrasts the communality of medieval Europe–-“private was confounded with public” (1)–-to the compartmentalized forms of nineteenth-century social life – when private and public separated as the family home became a refuge from a basic state of anonymity everywhere else. According to Ariès, increasingly bureaucratic governments, the flourishing of print and literacy, and internalized religious practices like confession and closet prayer were major cultural factors in the shift from communality to compartmentalization. Early modern privacy consisted not only in more intimate family interactions than ever before in more intimate rooms than ever before, but also in changing discourses and practices of selfhood, including new concerns with bodily modesty, reflexive reading and writing, and friendship, which was increasingly characterized as shared solitude.

Fig. 8a. Longleat House, 1570. From Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 253. Marquand Library, Princeton University Library.

Fig. 8b. Longleat House, c1809. From Michael McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 254. Marquand Library, Princeton Univesrity Library. By permission of Oxford University Press.

In his Secret History of Domesticity, McKeon situates the increasing coherence and complexity of the private in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within a series of interrelated categorical and disciplinary divisions, including the separation of science from the arts and humanities and, most significantly, the separation of workplace from household. Our initial encounter with McKeon’s book focuses on his exploration of the architectural corollaries to this process. In the chapter on “Subdividing Inside Spaces,” McKeon is interested in how changing domestic designs mirrored and precipitated the conceptual evolution of privacy in the period. Privacy had traditionally been defined—and designed—as a withdrawal from the fundamental publicness of the household. Later, the generous use of corridors made individual rooms discrete and less permeable (see Figures 8a and 8b), thereby reinforcing the new feeling that privacy was a positive and distinct value. Separate rooms variously accommodated women’s desire for distance from men (and vice versa), family members’ desire for distance from servants, and the desire of any and all members of the household for distance from outside visitors. McKeon’s chapter also provides our third catalogue of the varieties of the closet and cabinet in the period, including the cabinet of curiosities and closet as study, library, boudoir, harbour of secrets, and site of secretarial business.

Privacy and Modernity II: The Public Sphere – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Readings:
➢ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, selections
➢ Michael Warner, “Public and Private” in Public and Counterpublics
➢ Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, Numbers 1, 10, 217

An introduction to public sphere theory extends students’ understanding of changing ideas and practices of privacy as corollaries or complements (and not necessarily in opposition) to changing ideas and practices of publicness. This section turns on Jürgen Habermas’s influential account of how new modes of political action and interpersonal connection, independent of the state, were made possible by the growth of capitalism, personal wealth, and print culture in eighteenth-century England. We note that here, not only is the family the major site in the development of privacy “in the modern sense of a saturated and free interiority” (28), but it is also the subjective condition of possibility of the modern public sphere (43).

Fig. 9. Public and private
From Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 29-30

Fig. 10. Private and public. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30.

With reference to three essays from Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s highly successful, daily London periodical, The Spectator (one of Habermas’s exemplary texts), we observe how print’s quick turnaround and low costs facilitated a more reciprocal relationship between authors and readers. This is most obviously manifested in the many letters from readers that Mr Spectator solicits, publishes, and engages with in print. In Number 10, when Mr Spectator declares, “I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets…,” he makes the private room symbolize the antiquated, impenetrable form of intellectual authority that he explicitly rejects in favor of a more interactive mode of engagement. (As we will see in Section 7, in the eighteenth century, the closet or cabinet “opened” in fact became a very common figure for the unprecedented accessibility of commercial print.) The issue of women’s access to the public sphere is especially charged in the Spectator. Mr Spectator represents female readers as important beneficiaries of the daily guidance provided by his publication because they are naturally susceptible to frivolity and other passionate excesses, but he also seems eager to discipline female embodiment and women’s collective agency beyond the home. In Number 217, for example, Mr Spectator responds with bemused reproach to “Kitty Termagant”’s description of a “Club of She-Romps,” a wild all-female midnight gathering.

Convinced by Habermas’s narrative in outline, Michael Warner emphasizes the democratic potential of modern media publics while criticizing the ways their putative universality in fact privileges heterosexual white men. Warner especially champions the idea and manifestations of counterpublics, that is virtual collectives in which the embodied conditions of gender and sexuality are not denied and repressed as in conventional publics but rather treated as “the occasion for forming publics, elaborating common worlds, making the transposition from shame to honor, from hiddenness to the exchange of viewpoints with generalized others” (61). For instance, Warner finds in the “Club of She-Romps” in Spectator Number 217 a striking illustration of an early counterpublic. This part of Warner’s argument causes some debate among students, some of whom are skeptical that this obviously satirical essay can be read so much against the grain. Warner’s discussion of a famous anecdote about Diogenes masturbating in the marketplace succinctly illustrates “the visceral force behind the moral ideas of private and public” (21). Another very helpful point of reference is his comprehensive chart of definitions (Figure 9), which elaborates the wide range of meanings of private and public, some but not all of which are opposing. We use it to review Habermas’s specific uses of the terms private and public (Figure 10) (which may seem contradictory but in fact are not) and we return to this chart often throughout the semester to make sense of our own and other current investments in these categories.

The Courtly Closet and the Closet of Devotion – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Readings:
➢ Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of Count Grammont, selections
➢ Edward Wettenhall, Enter into thy Closet, selections

Fig. 11. C. Delort, Miss Hobart and Miss Temple.
From Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Grammont, Walter Scott, ed. (New York: Dutton, 1905).

Fig. 12. L. Boisson after C. Delort, Miss Hobart and Miss Temple.
From Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of Count Grammont, Henry Vizetelly, ed. (London: Vizetelly, 1889).

Excerpts from Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of the Count Grammont, a secret history of the Restoration court, and Edward Wettenhall’s Enter into thy Closet, a frequently republished prayer manual, open up distinctive but overlapping modes of political and spiritual privacy: court favouritism and closet devotion. At court, decisions about when and to whom to grant access to the closet were exercises in arbitrary power and the status and roles of secretaries and other royal favorites were explicitly defined in relation to the closet. As one sixteenth-century secretary had put it: “To a Closet, there belongeth properly, a doore, a locke, and a key: to a Secretorie, there appertaineth incidently, Honestie, Troth, and Fidelitie.” We consider the many examples of closet relations in Hamilton’s Memoirs, focusing on (1) a funny and puzzling episode involving the Duchess of York, Miss Hobart (the Duchess’s favourite), Miss Temple (the Duchess’s favorite’s favorite), and the Restoration’s most notorious rake, the Earl of Rochester (Figures 11 and 12), (2) the author’s bond with his biographical subject, his brother-in-law Philibert de Comte de Gramont, and (3) the virtual transfer of favor to readers throughout this text and in the genre of secret history in general.

We especially consider the politics of same-sex closet relations: Who gains what through relations of patronage and favoritism between people of the same sex? Under what circumstances and in what way do these relationships become erotic? What are the broader social and political implications of this kind of ambitious intimacy? At first glance, the prayer closet seems a very different space from the courtly closet. Satisfying the basic Protestant impulse to strip away Catholic mediations, the King James translation of the Bible (1611) gave a new specificity to the injunction to pray alone in Matthew 6.6: “But when thou prayest enter into thy Closet…” Along with new modes of self-examination, closet prayer formalized a special kind of closeness to God and Jesus. With reference to Wettenhall’s manual, we parse out the key components of closet prayer and the interesting notions of time and timelessness associated with this practice. Wettenhall writes that the most powerful prayers belong to those “whose daily and frequent application of themselves to the throne of grace hath rendred them there well acquainted and favourites” (29). Students are asked to think about how the discourse of favouritism connects the prayer closet to the courtly closet. We also discuss the homoerotics of closet prayer with reference to Richard Rambuss’s Closet Devotions, which argues that the prayer closet was an important site for the internalization of sexuality.

Suggested Presentation Topics:

The history of court favoritism
The history of the secretary
The secret history and court memoir
The homoerotics of the prayer closet

Fig. 13: Enter into thy Closet.
Frontispiece from Edward Wettenhall, Enter into thy Closet.

The Cabinet of Curiosity and the Dressing Room – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Readings:

➢ Selections from The Ladies Cabinet broke Open, Modern Curiosities of Art and Nature, Cabinet of Momus,
and Cabinet of Choice Jewels
➢ Alexander Pope, “Rape of the Lock” and “The Key to the Lock”

Fig. 14. Franz Ertinger, Le Cabinet de la
Bibliothèque de Sainte Geneviève
© The Warburg Institute – University of London.

Fig. 15. The Cabinet Maker.
© British Library Board, RB.23.a.18153 plate opposite 73.

Fig. 17: A Rich Cabinet. Frontispiece of A Rich Cabinet.

When the British elite and a growing group of merchants developed a taste for collecting in the middle of the seventeenth century, they brought into their closets freestanding wooden repositories, and the word cabinet–- from the French for “closet”–-was increasingly attached to this latter smaller enclosure (Figure 14). In the eighteenth century, cabinet-makers had a booming trade (Figure 15). Multi-sectioned, lockable cabinets permitted not only the safe storage and organization of books, art works, antiquities, natural specimens, and other curios, but also their elegant display. I briefly introduce this practice with reference to a subsection of Michael McKeon’s “Subdividing Spaces” (218-19) and Patrick Mauriès’s beautifully illustrated Cabinets of Curiosity (see especially III “The Collector: senex puerilis,” and IV “The Phantom Cabinet: 18th-19th Centuries”), emphasizing the triumph of systematic methods of organization over the collector’s subjective experience of awe or wonder. In the eighteenth century, as Mauriès explains, “The concept of the cabinet of curiosities began to change when differences became more important than correspondences. This would lead to the breaking up of the great collections and their re-allocation to specialized institutions, the naturalia to natural history museums and the artificialia to art galleries” (193). The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, opened in 1683, housed the collection that John Tradescant had originally displayed in his private home; the British Museum, the first national public museum in the world, was founded in 1753 to exhibit the contents of the private cabinets of naturalist and collector, Sir Hans Sloane.

Closets Without Walls (Figure 16) is my bibliography of 170 publications, most from eighteenth-century England, called “closets” and/or “cabinets,” many of which were also qualified as “unlocked” or “broken open.” Its title alludes to the phrase “libraries without walls,” which was coined by book and media historian Roger Chartier to refer to the textual bibliothèques— book catalogues—popular in eighteenth-century France. Whereas in the French “libraries without walls,” publishers confronted the longstanding fantasy that all the books in existence (or at least their titles) might be gathered in one place, the books in the Closets Without Walls archive highlight the important metaphorical role played by private spaces for publishers, and others in the book trade, coming to terms with the growing popularity of print in eighteenth-century England. I introduce the figurative appeal of the closet or cabinet opened with reference to the frontispiece of John White’s Rich Cabinet (Figure 17), whose array of boxes is suggestive not only of the residual chaos of natural philosophical knowledge in the seventeenth century but also of the novelty and excitement associated with their public exposure in print. To further investigate this appeal, I ask students to analyze the front matter of The Ladies Cabinet broke Open, Modern Curiosities of Art and Nature, Cabinet of Momus, and Cabinet of Choice Jewels as well as three other texts of their own choosing, which they select on the Closet Without Walls bibliography then locate on Early English Books Online or Eighteenth Century Collections Online. As the Notes column (G) on the bibliography indicates, in textual closets and cabinets, the figure of private space serves as a very flexible conceptual bridge between an elite, exclusive, manuscript-centered culture of knowledge production and exchange and a growing print culture in which accessibility was increasingly valued.

The discussion of “Rape of the Lock” focuses on the new light that histories of the closet can shed on it. The dressing room was the fashionable version of the closet reserved for storing and putting on clothes, accessories, and cosmetics. Following a brief introduction to this space by way of Tita Chico’s Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, we explore the impact of a burgeoning consumer culture in eighteenth-century rituals of privacy, especially as depicted in the famous toilet scene at the end of Canto 1 (lines 121-48). Pope clearly both scorns and delights in his characters’ love of surfaces. We discuss if and how the quality of this ambivalence differs where the different sexes are concerned. Next we approach the poem as a sort of collector’s cabinet: a container for arranging things in relation to one another. In particular, we consider how the poem’s many odd groupings—like the “Counsel” and the “Tea” that Queen Anne “sometimes takes” (3.8) or the “twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt,” “three Garters,” and “half a Pair of Gloves” (2.38-39) on the Baron’s altar to love—comment on the difficulties of Pope’s contemporaries in distinguishing between style and substance. Finally, with reference to the satirical paratext “The Key to the Lock,” which Pope wrote himself, we consider if and how the poem parodies the genre of secret history.

Suggested Presentation Topics:

Cabinets of curiosities
The dressing room
The history of the encyclopedia, the dictionary, the miscellany, and/or the anthology
Roger Chartier, “Libraries Without Walls”
Pope’s grotto
Eighteenth-century cosmetics

Privy Pastoral – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Readings:
➢ Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”
➢ Jonathan Swift, “Panegyric on the Dean,” “The Lady’s Dressing Room,”
“A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,”
“Strephon and Chloe,” and “Cassinus and Peter”
➢ Mary Wortley Montagu, “Reasons that induced D— S— to Write a Poem Called ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’”
➢ Samuel Rolleston, Philosophical Dialogue Concerning Decency

Fig. 18. A plaine pot of a privie in perfection.>
John Harington, Metamorphosis of Ajax, 196.

Is the desire for excretory privacy innate? Our discussion of some eighteenth-century responses to this question is informed by the material history of the water closet and the literary history of country-house poetry. A mechanized privy pot, capable of instantly flushing away waste, built into a room reserved exclusively for solitary excretion had been invented in the sixteenth century (Figure 18), but such a machine did not have wide appeal until the late eighteenth century. Before then, even among those who could have afforded to install special equipment, simple chamber pots, which could be used anywhere and emptied by servants, were vastly more common. The fundamental value encapsulated by the water closet – the fantasy of perfect excretory autonomy – was, however, already in the air, and already subject to critique, in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Pastoral, georgic, and country-house poetry focus on relationships among nature (including the body and its impulses), culture (including art, labour, and agriculture), and retreat. The primary texts in this section all draw on the interrelated forms of nature poetry to depict excretory privacy as a fraught gender issue. Though each juggles a unique set of presuppositions about the extent to which culture can or should compensate for apparently natural sexual differences, all toy with the common (and enduring) belief that women are particularly shamed by the exposure of primal bodily functions. Mary Wortley Montagu’s retort to Swift’s “Lady’s Dressing Room” is an engaging way into these issues: Is there evidence in the poem that Montagu or any of her characters share Strephon’s fear of Celia’s shit? We then consider Rolleston’s Dialogue Concerning Decency as a countertext to Swift’s longest, earliest, and most explicit scatological poem. “Panegyric on the Dean” commemorates the pair of his-and-hers outdoor privies Swift had just built on the country estate of his patroness, Lady Anne Acheson, and is written for her (and in her voice). As they explore the modern ideal of complete excretory autonomy, both texts ask not only (1) whether the ideal is aligned with or contrary to nature and (2) whether it is or should be equally shared by both sexes, but also (3) whether it reinforces social or selfish impulses. These questions guide our conversation.

Suggested Presentation Topics:

The history of the water closet
Swift’s “excremental vision”
Pollution issues: Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger
Michael Edson, “‘A Closet or a Secret Field’: Horace, Protestant Devotion and British Retirement Poetry”

Epistolary Spaces – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Readings:
➢ Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess
➢ Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded

Closet discourses and practices provide concrete tools for exploring the rise of the novel in the final weeks of the semester. We read four influential and entertaining novels in chronological sequence. Many critics have argued that the modern novel shaped and reflected the growth of bourgeois domestic ideology in eighteenth-century England. Focusing on the novel’s links to the secret history, our exploration emphasizes the gradual, uneven process of this development. Cynthia Wall has pointed out that most of the settings in eighteenth-century novels are only vaguely sketched if at all. Yet there is nevertheless a preponderance of closets and cabinets (and antechambers, keyholes, closed gardens, backdoors, backstairs, and underground passages) in them. Other clear, concrete marks of the influence of secret history on eighteenth-century novels include the elevated/public status of key characters, the elliptical rendering of certain names (such as Mr B—), and the centrality to their plots of private correspondence and sexual scandal. Joseph Highmore’s Mr. B— Finds Pamela Writing encapsulates a number of these themes. We consider how novels finally challenge the secret history’s traditional economy of value in which the importance of private affairs lies in the way they impinge upon or allegorize larger—national and/or political—concerns. In the eighteenth century, novelists were asking if and how the personal, the domestic, and ordinary people might be valued in and of themselves. McKeon’s discussion of the secret history is very helpful here (469-505) in relation to his rereading of Pamela (639-59): McKeon shows that it is the carefully crafted political aura in Richardson’s novel that invests Mr B— and Pamela’s amatory entanglement with “socio-ethical weight” (642).

Our discussions of Love in Excess and Pamela also look at how female privacy helped to lay the groundwork for the radical questioning of traditional gender roles and social hierarchies. Haywood uses the privileged, highly literate and reflexive solitude of her elite female characters to work out a new ideal of rational sexual agency for all women, dramatically revising the longstanding association of female virtue with chastity. In Richardson’s novel, Pamela’s surprising sophistication and self-awareness reflect her earlier dressing-room intimacy with her mistress, Lady B—, and the countless hours she later spends reading and writing letters in one closet or another: in other words, her exceptional access to privacy equips Pamela, morally and intellectually, to play the heroine. Ultimately, for both novelists, some substantial degree of female autonomy is the basic precondition of a good—that is, a companionate—marriage. Some students feel frustrated by the hypocrisies and contradictions in this formulation, which seems to assess female agency in terms of its advantages to men and heterosexuality. It can help to recall the older patriarchal values and practices–arranged marriages or marriages of alliance, for example—to which Haywood and Richardson were reacting.

Our study of the novel as a modern genre in the making also focuses on key scenes of private reading of Pamela and Love in Excess. Haywood is especially interested in how reading helps her curious but virtuous heroine, Melliora, to cultivate and ultimately to discipline her passion. In Pamela, Mr B— learns to love Pamela respectfully only after reading all of her letters and coming to sympathize with her suffering. We discuss how these metatextual subplots model the virtual and internal experiences of intimacy that were increasingly understood to be characteristic of novels and at the core of their moral power.

Suggested Presentation Topics:

Ros Ballaster on amatory fiction and the female reader
Eighteenth-century reading practices
Literacy in the eighteenth century
Desire and Domestic Fiction
The novel and masturbation

(Homo)Erotic Closets – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Reading: ➢ John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

Fig. 19. closet, sb.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 65.

Fig. 20. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, L’Armoire (The Closet)
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the most famous English pornographic novel, focuses our attention on the erotics of privacy, and the network of associations linking privacy, sincerity, and sex. Fanny Hill announces on the first page that her narrative will present “stark, naked truth”: “I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually rose to me in nature…” Significantly, she defends the decorousness of her sexual explicitness with reference to domestic space: “The greatest men, those of the first and most leading taste, will not scruple adorning their private closets with nudities, though, in compliance with vulgar prejudices, they may not think them decent decorations of the staircase, or saloon” (1).

Throughout the novel, not only do people have sex in closets and similarly enclosed spaces, but such rooms also give shape to formative solitary sexual experiences. Notably, Fanny Hill is introduced to heterosexual intercourse by spying from a closet on Mrs Brown, her first madam, and a young soldier (24), and then on Polly, one of her brothel sisters, and an Italian merchant (28). We ask if and how Cleland’s depictions of sexual voyeurism seem to serve a metatextual function akin to scenes of reading in other novels. That is, do Cleland’s scenes of virtual intimacy also serve to clarify the kind of vicarious learning the author wants his readers to do? The end of the novel provides an important focal point for musing on the novel’s apparently contradictory lessons about sex and propriety. Ultimately Fanny claims that her experiences as a prostitute have made it possible for her to recognize the morally and sensually superior pleasures of the reproductive matrimonial bed. For many critics Cleland’s turn to married love and virtue in what Fanny calls her “tail-piece of morality” (187) is a cheap parody of the expected finale of the domestic novel. This skepticism may seem less warranted if we recognize the extent to which Cleland has tried to distinguish Fanny’s reunion with Charles, her husband-to-be, from all the sexual encounters that have preceded it (181-186). Especially striking in this regard is Cleland’s metaphor aligning Charles’ penis with a maternal breast at which infants “in the motion of their little mouths and cheeks… extract the milky stream prepar’d for their nourishment.”

We go on to consider the novel as a cabinet of sexual curiosities in which a wide range of sexual practices, including virgin hunting, flagellation, hair and glove fetishes, and sodomy, is gathered and displayed. While Fanny’s rhetoric of “taste” and “universal pleasure” accommodates this range (see especially 144), Cleland also links certain practices to social and/or physiological deficiencies. Indeed he often reinforces a new tendency in the period to turn on its head the traditional idea of good blood: the sexual taste of the aristocracy comes off as especially depraved. The publication and reception history of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, succinctly summarized in Peter Sabor’s 2000 review essay, particularly highlights the importance and complexity of the novel’s oft-censored sodomitical theme. On the one hand, sex between men was virulently condemned in the period and Cleland’s novel echoes some of the dehumanizing rhetoric associated with this condemnation. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that Cleland’s own sexual preference was for men: as David Robinson discusses in his chapter on Cleland in his Closeted Writing and Gay and Lesbian Literature, it may make most sense to read this text as sympathetic to sodomites though in a roundabout way.

Finally, the opening chapter of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet provides a springboard for a conversation about the queer closet, then and now. The private domestic space became our most common metaphor for queer secrecy and shame with the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. How did this special signification of closet take root and what are the implications of this term’s use in this context? Sedgwick opens some doors for speculating about the etymology of the queer closet with the selection of OED definitions she includes at the start of her Epistemology of the Closet (Figure 19). To Sedgwick’s suggestions, we add others that seem relevant from the complete OED entries for closet (Figures 2 and 3). Definition 3d. of closet, n., is especially relevant here, as is definition 1c., which suggests that one historical bridge to our current metaphor may have been the use of the closet as a symbol of a negative, stifling attachment to privacy. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting, L’Armoire (translated as The Closet) (Figure 20), points up the basic spatial connection between the closet and the bad feelings following illicit experiences: near the bed and large enough to hide a lover, the freestanding wardrobe was a logical symbol of sexual shame.

Suggested Presentation Topics:

The history of pornography
Peter Sabor, “From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble: Reading the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from the 1960s to the 1990s”
Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: The Cultural History of Masturbation
Eve Kosowsky Sedgwick, “Introduction: Axiomatic” in Epistemology of the Closet
David Robinson, “The Closeting of Closeting: Cleland, Smollett, Sodomy, and the Critics” in Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century

Overview – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

The English closet took on many new shapes and functions as it proliferated in the long eighteenth century. It had origins in sixteenth-century palace apartments designed in enfilade: the lockable room at the end of a series of adjoining chambers had been crucial to the performance and consolidation of absolute power in the Tudor and early Stuart courts. In these secluded places, kings and queens could store valuables and special documents, read, write, or pray alone, and exchange confidences with their most trusted courtiers. Yet closets proved remarkably resilient over the next two centuries, even as power drifted away from the court. In the houses of people of quality and, increasingly, those of the middling sort, private rooms served as prayer closets, cabinets of curiosity, dressing rooms, libraries, art galleries, and impromptu bedrooms; and merging with the bath or privy, closets were transformed into bathing closets, closets of ease, outdoor privies known as earth closets and, eventually, water closets.

While multiplying and morphing in material culture, these intimate spaces also made significant appearances in all kinds of writing. The closet was, for example, a metaphor for the space of the mind in empirical philosophy, a symbol of female vanity in satirical poetry, and a setting for introspection, sexual intrigue, and letter writing in fiction. Along with its close cousin, the cabinet, the closet also gave a name and an implicit structure to hundreds of miscellanies or anthologies in eighteenth-century England, from how-to books like The Golden Cabinet of Useful Knowledge to recipe and remedy books like The Queen-Like Closet.

Fig. 1. Green Closet, Frogmore © British Library Board, 747.f.3, volume 2, plate opposite page 19.

Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Culture of the Closet is a course that I developed to explore the functional, narrative, and symbolic roles closets played in eighteenth-century life and literature. Focusing on discourses and practices of the closet especially helps to illuminate the changing parameters of privacy in the period and the centrality of this category to concurrent developments in politics, religion, science, architecture, gender, and sexuality. First defined as a kind of withdrawal available only to the elite, privacy became in the eighteenth century a positive category of experience, as desirable as it was variable. The course takes a special interest in how privacy shapes and reflects literary styles and genres of the period, including the secret history, the prayer manual, the anthology, the country house poem, and the novel.

I have taught this semester-long course three times—once as a multilevel, interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar at Emory University and twice as a graduate English seminar at Concordia University in Montreal. I have also incorporated aspects of this course in introductory surveys of eighteenth-century literature. When I first designed it, my research agenda was at the forefront of my mind: the course was an opportunity for me to test, refine, and expand my ideas on the proliferation of closets in eighteenth-century architecture and writing, and to work on communicating them as clearly as possible. I have returned to the course and its themes again and again because they are clearly engaging for students as well. Advanced students enjoy the many open-ended explorations. At the same time, because the question of privacy was so central in eighteenth-century Britain, and a major preoccupation for canonical figures on the syllabus such as Locke, Pepys, Haywood, Pope, and Richardson, the course works well as a general introduction to the period.

There are intellectual challenges for everyone. Our objects of study are three moving targets: (1) the closet as a flexible architectural construct, (2) privacy’s evolution in relation to other historical developments of the period (especially new practices and ideas of publicness), and (3) the reciprocal relationship between changing literary forms and writers’ inventive use of closets as settings and symbols. Each of these themes invites a distinctive disciplinary orientation—those of material culture, social theory, and literary history respectively—while meta-thematic analysis of the processes of transformation—historicism—connects them all. Both depth and breadth of analysis are required, and maintaining the balance between them has been important to me each time I teach the course. On the one hand, there are a great many opportunities for creative and critical leaps. On the other hand, the specificity—the materiality—of our objects demands a special rigor and precision.

Below, I explain the key historical, cultural, and theoretical ideas I have emphasized during each of the course’s eleven separate sections and I outline some of the most fruitful topics of conversation. I have found it useful initially to approach each theme on its own. After several weeks of overview (Sections 1 through 5), the course moves roughly chronologically through a range of interrelated texts (Sections 6 through 11). Early on we spend a good deal of time deciphering the closet’s range of functions and uncovering our ideas about the meaning and value of private and public—detective work that is above all about careful close reading of primary texts. Later, we enter more abstract territory as we ask how various literary genres celebrate, reinforce, or challenge different kinds of private experience, not least those of readers. Near the end of the semester, many students have pieced together a basic narrative of privacy’s emergence in and around literary form and will be ready to make their own intuitive leaps.
Teachers interested in the course as a whole will find it productive to peruse the sections in order. However, the lists of section headings and readings allow for more selective encounters.

Starting with Section 6, I have suggested presentation topics designed to familiarize the class with a range of complementary materials. Writing projects for the course have generally been a series of short response papers, in which students are asked to document their initial impressions of the readings, then a long final research paper, preceded by an annotated bibliography and prospectus, in which inquiries emerging during response papers and class discussions are extended. My students’ final essays have covered such topics as Pepys at the coffee house, Castle of Otranto as a secret history, the feminism of Swift’s scatology, Rape of the Lock as cabinet of curiosities, the feminization of privacy in Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, status implications of the word alone in the seventeenth century, among many others: the pleasure they have taken in defining and pursuing their projects for this course has in turn been one of the greatest pleasures of the course for me as well. Please use the seminar outlines below in your classroom however you wish. I welcome your questions and comments at danielle.bobker@concordia.ca

Gothic Collections, Gothic Chambers – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Reading: ➢ Horace Walpole, Castle of Otranto

Fig. 21. Edward Dayes, Strawberry Hill, the Seat of the Honourable Horace Walpole. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Fig. 23. Gallery at Strawberry Hill.
Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Fig. 24. Library at Strawberry Hill.
Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Fig. 25. The Cabinet.
Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Fig. 22: Strawberry Hill, Before and After
Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

In our last week of the course we explore the influence of Horace Walpole’s eclectic tastes on the genre of the Gothic novel he invented. Walpole’s continual renovations of his estate, Strawberry Hill (Figures 21 and 22), reflected his passion not only for feudal architecture but also for his own eccentric collections of antique coins, old and contemporary paintings, and antiquarian curios including Mary Tudor’s hair in a gold locket, Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat, and an ivory comb from the twelfth century. Walpole was not interested in the empirical systems of classification privileged by many eighteenth-century collectors. Instead he was concerned with immediate affective and imaginative charge of medieval material culture—especially its delightful dreariness, or “gloomth” as he called it—and he went to great lengths to create interior settings appropriate for the display of the things he loved (Figures 23, 24, 25, and 26).

In the introduction to Castle of Otranto, Walpole writes that his inspiration for the novel came from a dream he had had about the medieval suit of armor he kept in the main staircase at Strawberry Hill (Figure 27). We approach the novel as the literary corollary of Walpole’s unorthodox antiquarianism. In particular, we pay close attention to moments where the very modern immediacy of characterization and dialogue bump up against the romantic plot, settings, and “properties”—such as Mathilda and Isabelle’s late-night exchange about their shared attraction for Theodore, for example. Ultimately, we focus on the ideological complexity of Walpole’s Gothicism. How is the novel’s melodramatic resolution a reflection of this ideological complexity? It seems clear that Walpole’s nostalgia is for the surfaces and style of Europe’s feudal past, rather than its top-down political and religious institutions. Does he succeed in showing his appreciation for the former but not the latter? Another favorite topic of conversation for students is the relationship between Walpole’s homosexuality and his taste, which we might now label as campy or kitschy.

Suggested Presentation Topics:

Gothic architecture
Strawberry Hill and/or Walpole as collector
Cynthia Wall, “Writing Things” in The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” from Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Walpole’s closet drama, The Mysterious Mother

Fig. 26. Beauclerk Closet, Strawberry Hill.
© World Monuments Fund.

Fig. 27. Staircase at Strawberry Hill.
Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Image Gallery – Bobker

Danielle Bobker


Fig. 1. Green Closet, Frogmore © British Library Board, 747.f.3, volume 2, plate opposite page 19.	Fig. 2. closet, n. Oxford English Dictionary.	Fig. 3. closet, v. Oxford English Dictionary.	Fig. 4. The axis of honour in the formal house. From Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House, 145. Courtesy of Yale University Press.

Fig. 5. Patrick Allan-Fraser, Oliver Cromwell Closeted with the Spy. Courtesy of the collection of The Patrick Allan-Fraser, Hospitalfield Trust.	Fig. 6. Long eighteenth-century timeline of English political and cultural events.	Fig. 7. Samuel van Hoogstraten, View of a Corridor © National Trust.	Fig. 8a. Longleat House, 1570. From Michael McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 253. Marquand Library, Princeton University Library.

Fig. 8b. Longleat House, c1809. From Michael McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 254. Marquand Library, Princeton University Library. By permission of Oxford University Press.	Fig. 9. Public and Private. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 29-30.	Fig. 10. Private and public. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30.	Fig. 11. C. Delort, Miss Hobart and Miss Temple. From Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Grammont, Walter Scott, ed. (New York: Dutton, 1905).

Fig. 12. L. Boisson after C. Delort, Miss Hobart and Miss Temple. From Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Grammont, Henry Vizetelly, ed. (London: Vizetelly, 1889).	Fig. 13. Enter into thy Closet. Frontispiece from Edward Wettenhall, Enter into they Closet.	Fig. 14. Franz Ertinger, Le Cabinet de la Bibliothèque de Sainte Geneviève © The Warburg Institute — University of London.	Fig. 15. The Cabinet Maker © British Library Board, RB.23.a.18153 plate opposite 73.

Fig. 16. Closet Without Walls a bibliography.	Fig. 17. A Rich Cabinet. Frontispiece of A Rich Cabinet.	Fig. 18. A plaine pot of a privie in perfection, John Harington, Metamorphosis of Ajax, 196.	Fig. 19. closet, sb. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Epistemology of the Closet, 65.

Fig. 20. Jean-Honore Fragonard, L’Armoire (The Closet) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.	Fig. 21. Edward Dayes, Strawberry Hill, the Seat of the Honourable Horace Walpole. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.	Fig. 22. Strawberry Hill, Before and After. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.	Fig. 23. Gallery at Strawberry Hill. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Fig. 24. Library at Strawberry Hill. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.	Fig. 25. The Cabinet. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.	Fig. 26. Beauclerk Closet, Strawberry Hill © World Monuments Fund.	Fig. 27. Staircase at Strawberry Hill. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Closets Without Walls – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

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«A — B — C — D — E — F — G — H — I — J — L — M —P — R — S — T — V — W»

A
A Book of Rarities: Or, Cabinet of Curiosities Unlock’d (1743)
A brief history of the Restauration (1729)
A cabinet of choice jewels (1701)
A cabinet of choice jewels (1762)
A Cabinet of Fancy (1799)
A Cabinet of Jewels opened to the Curious, by a key of Real Knowledge (1757)
A Cabinet of Miscellanies (1794)
A call to the unconverted (1746)
A catalogue of a pleasing assemblage of prints… (1792)
A catalogue of a well-chosen and select collection of Pictures (1791)
A Catalogue of that Superb and Well Known Cabinet of Drawings of John Barnard, Esq. (1787)
A catalogue of the cabinet of birds, and other curiosities (1769)
A catalogue of the collection of pictures, etc. (1758)
A catalogue of the elegant cabinet of natural and artificial rarities of the late ingenious Henry Baker, Esq. (1775)
A Catalogue of the genuine, curious, and valuable (1779)
A catalogue of the valuable museum (1794)
A closet for ladies and gentlewome (1608)
A Closet Piece: The Experimental Knowledge of the Ever-Blessed God (1721)
A collection of curious prints and drawing by the best masters in Europe (1718)
A Companion to Bullock’s Museum (1799)
A coppy of verses writt in a Common Prayer Book (1710)
A general history of the proceedings and cruelties of the court of inquisition in Spain, Portugal (1731)
A key to natural history (1798)
A key to the cabinet of the Parliament, by their remembrancer (1648)
A key to the Kings cabinet (1645)
A key to the Six Per Cent Cabinet (1798)
A letter from the Man in the Moon to Mr. Anodyne Necklace (1725)
A manual history of Repentance and Impenitence (1724)
A rich cabinet of modern curiosities containing many natural and artificial conclusions… (1704)
A satyr, occasioned by the author’s survey of a scandalous pamphlet intituled, the King’s cabanet opened (1645)
A Thousand Notable Things on Various Subjects (1776)
A true narration of the surprizall of sundry cavaliers (1642)
A vindication of King Charles (1648)
An Account of a Useful Discovery (1756)
Apollo’s Cabinet or the Muses Delight (1757)
Aristotle’s Last Legacy (1711)
Art’s Master-Piece (1768)

Beautiful Cabinet Pictures (1798)

Cabinet Litteraire (1796)
Cabinet of Curiosities, No. 1 (1795)
Catalogue of the geniune (1798)
Catalogue of the intire Cabinet of Capital Drawings, collected by the late Greffier Francois Fagel (1799)
Christ’s famous titles (1728)
Coins and medals, in the cabinets of the Earl of Fife (1796)
Copys of several conferences and meetings (1790)
Cupid’s Cabinet Open’d (1750)
Cupids cabinet unlock’t (1641)
Curiosities: or, the cabinet of nature (1637)
Curtius’s Grand Cabinet of Curiosities (1800)

Delights for young Men and Maids (1725)
Duties of the Closet (1732)

Elegant and Copious History of France. Number 1. (1791)
Elegant Drawing and Cabinet Pictures (1785)
England’s choice cabinet of rarities; or The famous Mr. Wadham’s last golden legacy (1700)
England’s Mournful Monument (1714)
Every Lady her own Physician or the Closet Companion (1788)

Flower-Garden Display’d (1732)
For the Inspection of the CuriousFor the inspection of the curious…a cabinet of royal figures (1785)
Fragment of the chronicles of Zimri the Refiner (1753)

Gale’s Cabinet of Knowledge (1796)
Gloria Britannorum or, The British Worthies (1733)

History of Mother Bunch of the West (1797)
History of Mother Bunch of the West, Part the Second (1797)
Hocus Pocus (1715)

Incomparable varieties (1740)
Instructions for a prince (1779)

Jocabella, or a cabinet of conceit (1640)

Ladies Cabinet broke open, Part 1 (1718)
Letters, poems, and tales (1718)
Lineal Arithmetic (1798)

M—-C L—-N’s cabinet broke open (1750)
Miss C–Y’s cabinet of curiosities (1765)
Mist’s Closet Broke Open (1728)
Monthly Beauties (1793)
Mother Bunch’s Closet broke open…Part the Second (1800)
Mrs. Pilkington’s Jests (1764)

Particulars of and conditions of sale for a large and valuable estate called Goldings (1770)
Phylaxa Medinae. The cabinet of physick (1799)
Proposals for publishing by subscription from the curious and elaborate works of Thomas Simon (1753)
Psalmes of confession found in the cabinet of the most excellent King of Portinga (1596)

Religion the most delightful employment (1739)
Ruperts sumpter, and private cabinet rifled (1644)

Seven conferences held in the King of France’s Cabinet of Paintings (1740)
Specimens of British Minerals selected from the Cabinet of Philip Rasleigh (1797)
Sunday Thoughts .4 (1781)

Thane’s second Catalogue (1773)
The accomplish’d Lady’s Delight (1706)
The Believer’s Golden Chain (1763)
The Book of Psalms Made Fit for the Closet with Collects and Prayers (1719)
The British Phoenix (1762)
The Cabinet (1797)
The Cabinet (1754)
The Cabinet of Beasts (1800)

The Cabinet of Genius (1787)
The Cabinet of Love (1792)
The Cabinet of Momus and Caledonian Humorist (1786)
The cabinet of the arts (1799)
The cabinet of True Attic Wit (1783)
The cabinet of wit (1797)
The Christian mans closet (1591)
The Christian’s Closet-Piece: Being An Exhortation to all People To forsake their Sins, Which too much Reign in the present Age: As Pride, Envy, … (1770)
The Christian’s duty from the sacred scriptures (1730)
The Christian’s New Year’s Gift: containing a companion (1764)
The Christian’s Plea for His God and Saviour Jesus Christ (1719)
The Christian’s Preparation for the worthy receiving of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (1772)
The chyrugians closet (1630)
The Closet Companion (1791)
The Closet of Counsells conteining the advice of divers philosophers (1569)
The Compleat English and French Vermin-Killer (1710)
The Copper Plate Magazine (1792)
The Country Physician (1703)
The Cyprian Cabinet (1783)
The Female Pilgrim1 (1762)
The French Momus (1718)
The General State of Education in the Universities (1759)
The Gentleman and Lady’s Palladium (1752)
The Genuine Letters of Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell (1726)
The Golden Cabinet (1790)
The Golden Cabinet (1793)
The Golden Cabinet (1765)
The housekeeper’s valuable present (1790)
The Irish Cabinet (1746)
The Irish cabinet: or His Majesties secret papers (1646)
The Key to the kings cabinet-counsell (1644)
The King of Scotlands negotiations at Rome (1650)
The Kings cabinet opened (1645)
The Ladies Cabinet (1743)
The ladies cabinet opened (1639)
The Lady’s companion (1743)
The Laird of Cool’s Ghost (1786)
The Last Night (1790)
The Lord George Digby’s cabinet and Dr Goff’s negotiations (1646)
The Lovers Cabinet (1755)
The Modern Family Physician (1783)
The Muses Cabinet (1771)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 1 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 2 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 3 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 4 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 5 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 6 (1799)
The New Week’s Preparation for a Worthy Receiving of the Lords Supper (1770)
The Oxford Cabinet (1797)
The Parallel (1762)
The Parents Pious Gift (1704)
The Phenix Volume One (1707)
The Pleasing Instructor (1756)
The Poor Man’s Help, and Young Man’s Guide (1709)
The private tutor to the british youth (1764)
The rich cabinet furnished with varietie of excellent discriptions (1616)
The riches and extent of free grace displayed (1772)
The Royal Jester (1792)
The second part of Mother Bunch of the West (1750)
The Second Volume of the Phenix (1707)
The Spirit of Liberty (1770)
The state of France (1760)
The treasurie of commodious conceits (1573)
The world’s doom: or the cabinet of fate unlocked. Vol. 2 (1795)
The world’s doom: or the cabinet of fate unlocked. Vol.1 (1795)
To a vertuous and judicious lady who (for the exercise of her devotion) built a closet (1646)
To be seen in Curtius’s Cabinet of Curiosities (1792)
Two spare keyes to the Jesuites cabinet (1632)

Vox Populi (1774)

Who Runs next (1715)
Wit’s Cabinet (1715)

Closets Without Walls – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

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«1500 — 1550 — 1600 — 1650 — 1700 — 1710 — 1720 — 1730 — 1740 — 1750 — 1760 — 1770 — 1780 — 1790 — 1800 »

1550 – 1600

1569      The Closet of Counsells conteining the advice of divers philosophers
1573      The treasurie of commodious conceits
1591      The Christian mans closet
1596      Psalmes of confession found in the cabinet of the most excellent King of Portinga

1600 – 1650

1608      A closet for ladies and gentlewomen
1616      The rich cabinet furnished with varietie of excellent discriptions
1630      The chyrugians closet
1632      Two spare keyes to the Jesuites cabinet
1637      Curiosities: or, the cabinet of nature
1639      The ladies cabinet opened
1640      Jocabella, or a cabinet of conceit
1641      Cupids cabinet unlock’t
1642      A true narration of the surprizall of sundry cavaliers
1644      Ruperts sumpter, and private cabinet rifled
              The Key to the kings cabinet-counsell
1645      A key to the Kings cabinet
              A satyr, occasioned by the author’s survey of a scandalous pamphlet intituled, the King’s cabanet opened
              The Kings cabinet opened
1646      The Irish cabinet: or His Majesties secret papers
              The Lord George Digby’s cabinet and Dr Goff’s negotiations
              To a vertuous and judicious lady who (for the exercise of her devotion) built a closet
1648      A key to the cabinet of the Parliament, by their remembrancer
              A vindication of King Charles
1650      The King of Scotlands negotiations at Rome

1700 – 1709

1700      England’s choice cabinet of rarities; or The famous Mr. Wadham’s last golden legacy
1701      A cabinet of choice jewels
1703      The Country Physician
1704      The Parents Pious Gift
              A rich cabinet of modern curiosities containing many natural and artificial conclusions…
1706      The accomplish’d Lady’s Delight
1707      The Second Volume of the Phenix
              The Phenix Volume One
1709      The Poor Man’s Help, and Young Man’s Guide

1710 – 1719

1710      The Compleat English and French Vermin-Killer
              A coppy of verses writt in a Common Prayer Book
1711      Aristotle’s Last Legacy
1714      England’s Mournful Monument
1715      Hocus Pocus
              Who Runs next
              Wit’s Cabinet
1718      A collection of curious prints and drawing by the best masters in Europe
              Ladies Cabinet broke open, Part 1
              Letters, poems, and tales
              The French Momus
1719      The Book of Psalms Made Fit for the Closet with Collects and Prayers
              The Christian’s Plea for His God and Saviour Jesus Christ

1720 – 1729

1721      A Closet Piece: The Experimental Knowledge of the Ever-Blessed God
1724      A manual history of Repentance and Impenitence
1725      A letter from the Man in the Moon to Mr. Anodyne Necklace
              Delights for young Men and Maids
1726      The Genuine Letters of Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell
1728      Mist’s Closet Broke Open
              Christ’s famous titles
1729      A brief history of the Restauration

1730 – 1739

1730      The Christian’s duty from the sacred scriptures
1731      A general history of the proceedings and cruelties of the court of inquisition in Spain, Portugal
1732      Duties of the Closet
              Flower-Garden Display’d
1733      Gloria Britannorum or, The British Worthies
1739      Religion the most delightful employment

1740 – 1749

1740      Incomparable varieties
              Seven conferences held in the King of France’s Cabinet of Paintings
1743      The Ladies Cabinet
              A Book of Rarities: Or, Cabinet of Curiosities Unlock’d
              The Lady’s companion
1746      The Irish Cabinet
              A call to the unconverted

1750 – 1759

1750      Cupid’s Cabinet Open’d
              M—-C L—-N’s cabinet broke open
              The second part of Mother Bunch of the West
1752      The Gentleman and Lady’s Palladium
1753      Proposals for publishing by subscription from the curious and elaborate works of Thomas Simon
              Fragment of the chronicles of Zimri the Refiner
1754      The Cabinet
1755      The Lovers Cabinet
1756      The Pleasing Instructor
              An Account of a Useful Discovery
1757      Apollo’s Cabinet or the Muses Delight
              A Cabinet of Jewels opened to the Curious, by a key of Real Knowledge
1758      A catalogue of the collection of pictures, etc.
1759      The General State of Education in the Universities

1760 – 1769

1760      The state of France
1762      The British Phoenix
              The Female Pilgrim
              The Parallel
              A cabinet of choice jewels

1763      The Believer’s Golden Chain
              The private tutor to the british youth
1764      The Christian’s New Year’s Gift: containing a companion
              Mrs. Pilkington’s Jests
1765      The Golden Cabinet
              Miss C–Y’s cabinet of curiosities
1768      Art’s Master-Piece
1769      A catalogue of the cabinet of birds, and other curiosities

1770 – 1779

1770      The Christian’s Closet-Piece: Being An Exhortation to all People To forsake their Sins, Which too much
                        Reign in the present Age: As Pride, Envy, …
              The New Week’s Preparation for a Worthy Receiving of the Lords Supper
              Particulars of and conditions of sale for a large and valuable estate called Goldings
              The Spirit of Liberty
1771      The Muses Cabinet
1772      The riches and extent of free grace displayed
              The Christian’s Preparation for the worthy receiving of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper
1773      Thane’s second Catalogue
1774      Vox Populi
1775      A catalogue of the elegant cabinet of natural and artificial rarities of the late ingenious Henry Baker, Esq.
1776      A Thousand Notable Things on Various Subjects
1779      A Catalogue of the genuine, curious, and valuable
              Instructions for a prince

1780 – 1789

1781      Sunday Thoughts .4
1783      The cabinet of True Attic Wit
              The Cyprian Cabinet
              The Modern Family Physician
1785      Elegant Drawing and Cabinet Pictures
              For the Inspection of the CuriousFor the inspection of the curious…a cabinet of royal figures
1786      The Laird of Cool’s Ghost
              The Cabinet of Momus and Caledonian Humorist
1787      A Catalogue of that Superb and Well Known Cabinet of Drawings of John Barnard, Esq.
              The Cabinet of Genius
1788      Every Lady her own Physician or the Closet Companion

1790 – 1799

1790      The housekeeper’s valuable present
              The Last Night
              The Golden Cabinet
              Copys of several conferences and meetings
1791      A catalogue of a well-chosen and select collection of Pictures

              Elegant and Copious History of France. Number 1.
              The Closet Companion
1792      The Copper Plate Magazine
              A catalogue of pleasing assemblage of prints…
              The Cabinet of Love
              The Royal Jester
              To be seen in Curtius’s Cabinet of Curiosities
1793      Monthly Beauties
              The Golden Cabinet
1794      A catalogue of the valuable museum
              A Cabinet of Miscellanies
1795      Cabinet of Curiosities, No. 1
              The world’s doom: or the cabinet of fate unlocked. Vol.1
              The world’s doom: or the cabinet of fate unlocked. Vol. 2
1796      Cabinet Litteraire
              Coins and medals, in the cabinets of the Earl of Fife
              Gale’s Cabinet of Knowledge
1797      History of Mother Bunch of the West
              History of Mother Bunch of the West, Part the Second
              The Oxford Cabinet
              Specimens of British Minerals selected from the Cabinet of Philip Rasleigh
              The Cabinet
              The cabinet of wit
1798      A key to natural history
              A key to the Six Per Cent Cabinet
              Lineal Arithmetic
              Beautiful Cabinet Pictures
              Catalogue of the geniune
1799      The Naturalist’s Pocket 1
              The Naturalist’s Pocket 2
              The Naturalist’s Pocket 3
              The Naturalist’s Pocket 4
              The Naturalist’s Pocket 5
              The Naturalist’s Pocket 6
              Phylaxa Medinae. The cabinet of physick
              Catalogue of the intire Cabinet of Capital Drawings, collected by the late Greffier Francois Fagel
              A Cabinet of Fancy
              The cabinet of the arts
              A Companion to Bullock’s Museum

1800

1800      The Cabinet of Beasts
              Curtius’s Grand Cabinet of Curiosities
              Mother Bunch’s Closet broke open…Part the Second

Closets Without Walls – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

DOWNLOAD SPREADSHEET FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION

Spirtual Advice | Educational Miscellany | Religious Miscellany | Miscellany of Art & Music | Miscellany
Catalogue | Fiction | Recipe Book | Miscellany of Biographical Material | Literary Miscellany | Historical Miscellany

Spiritual Advice

A cabinet of choice jewels (1762)
A Closet Piece: The Experimental Knowledge of the Ever-Blessed God (1721)

The Christian’s Plea for His God and Saviour Jesus Christ (1719)

Educational Miscellany

A Book of Rarities: Or, Cabinet of Curiosities (1743)
A brief history of the Restauration (1729)
A Cabinet of Jewels opened to the Curious, by a key of Real Knowledge (1757)
A Cabinet of Miscellanies (1794)
A catalogue of the cabinet of birds, and other curiosities (1769)
A closet for ladies and gentlewomen (1608)
A general history of the proceedings and cruelties of the court of inquisition in Spain, Portugal (1731)
A key to natural history (1798)
A key to the cabinet of the Parliament, by their remembrance (1648)
A key to the Six Per Cent Cabinet (1798)
A rich cabinet of modern curiosities containing many natural and artificial conclusions… (1704)
A satyr, occasioned by the author’s survey of a scandalous pamphlet intituled, the King’s cabanet opened (1645)
A Thousand Notable Things on Various Subjects (1776)
A true narration of the surprizall of sundry cavaliers (1642)
An Account of a Useful Discovery (1756)
Aristotle’s Last Legacy (1711)
Art’s Master-Piece (1768)
Cabinet of Curiosities, No. 1 (1795)
Cupids cabinet unlock’t (1641)
Curiosities: or, the cabinet of nature (1637)
Delights for young Men and Maids (1725)
Elegant and Copious History of France. Number 1. (1791)
Every Lady her own Physician or the Closet Companion (1788)
Gale’s Cabinet of Knowledge (1796)
Gloria Britannorum or, The British Worthies (1733)
History of Mother Bunch of the West (1797)
History of Mother Bunch of the West, Part the Second (1797)
Hocus Pocus (1715)
Instructions for a prince (1779)
Jocabella, or a cabinet of conceit (1640)
Ladies Cabinet broke open, Part 1 (1718)
Lineal Arithmetic (1798)
Monthly Beauties (1793)
Mother Bunch’s Closet broke open…Part the Second (1800)
Mrs. Pilkington’s Jests (1764)
Phylaxa Medinae. The cabinet of physic (1799)
Ruperts sumpter, and private cabinet rifled (1644)
Seven conferences held in the King of France’s Cabinet of Paintings (1740)
Specimens of British Minerals selected from the Cabinet of Philip Rasleigh (1797)
The accomplish’d Lady’s Delight (1706)
The British Phoenix (1762)
The Cabinet (1754)
The Cabinet (1797)

The Cabinet of Genius (1787)
The Cabinet of Momus and Caledonian Humorist (1786)
The cabinet of True Attic Wit (1783)
The chyrugians closet (1630)
The Closet of Counsells conteining the advice of divers philosophers (1569)
The Complete English and French Vermin-Killer (1710)
The Country Physician (1703)
The Country-Man’s Vade-Mecum (1709)
The Female Pilgrim (1762)
The General State of Education in the Universities (1759)
The Gentleman and Lady’s Palladium (1752)
The Golden Cabinet (1790)
The housekeeper’s valuable present (1790)
The Irish Cabinet (1746)
The Ladies Cabinet (1743)
The ladies cabinet opened (1639)
The Lady’s companion (1743)
The Lovers Cabinet (1755)
The Modern Family Physician (1783)
The Muses Cabinet (1771)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 1 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 2 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 3 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 4 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 5 (1799)
The Naturalist’s Pocket 6 (1799)
The Parallel (1762)
The Phenix Volume One (1707)
The Pleasing Instructor (1756)
The Poor Man’s Help, and Young Man’s Guide (1709)
The private tutor to the british youth (1763)
The rich cabinet furnished with varietie of excellent discriptions (1616)
The Royal Jester (1792)
The second part of Mother Bunch of the West (1750)
The Second Volume of the Phenix (1707)
The Spirit of Liberty (1770)
The state of France (1760)
The treasurie of commodious conceits (1573)
To be seen in Curtius’s Cabinet of Curiosities (1792)
Two spare keyes to the Jesuites cabinet (1632)
Vox Populi (1774)
Wit’s Cabinet (1715)

Religious Miscellany

A call to the unconverted (1746)
A copy of verses writt in a Common Prayer Book (1710)
A manual history of Repentance and Impenitence (1724)
Christ’s famous titles (1728)
Duties of the Closet (1732)
Religion the most delightful employment (1739)
Sunday Thoughts (1781)
The Book of Psalms Made Fit for the Closet with Collects and Prayers (1719)
The Christian mans closet (1591)
The Christian’s Closet-Piece: Being An Exhortation to all People To forsake their Sins, Which too much Reign in the present Age: As Pride, Envy, … (1770)
The Christian’s duty from the sacred scriptures (1730)
The Christian’s New Year’s Gift: containing a companion (1764)
The Christian’s Preparation for the worthy receiving of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (1772)
The Closet Companion (1791)
The New Week’s Preparation for a Worthy Receiving of the Lords Supper (1770)
The Parents Pious Gift (1704)
The world’s doom: or the cabinet of fate unlocked. Vol.1 (1795)
The world’s doom: or the cabinet of fate unlocked. Vol.2 (1795)
To a vertuous and judicious lady who (for the exercise of her devotion) built a closet (1646)

Miscellany of Art & Music

A cabinet of choice jewels (1701)
A catalogue of a well-chosen and select collection of Pictures (1791)
Apollo’s Cabinet or the Muses Delight (1757)
Cupid’s Cabinet Open’d (1750)
Flower-Garden Display’d (1732)
For the Inspection of the Curious (1785)
Proposals for publishing by subscription from the curious and elaborate works of Thomas Simon (1753)
The Cabinet of Beasts (1800)
The cabinet of the arts (1799)
The Copper Plate Magazine (1792)
The Oxford Cabinet (1797)

Miscellany

England’s choice cabinet of rarities; or The famous Mr. Wadham’s last golden legacy (1700)

Catalogue

A catalogue of pleasing assemblage of prints (1792)

A Catalogue of that Superb and Well Known Cabinet of Drawings of John Barnard, Esq. (1787)
A catalogue of the collection of pictures, etc. (1758)
A catalogue of the elegant cabinet of natural and artificial rarities of the late ingenious Henry Baker, Esq. (1775)
A Catalogue of the genuine, curious, and valuable (1779)
A catalogue of the valuable museum (1794)
A collection of curious prints and drawing by the best masters in Europe (1718)
A Companion to Bullock’s Museum (1799)
Beautiful Cabinet Pictures (1798)
Cabinet Litteraire (1796)
Catalogue of the genuine (1798)

Catalogue of the intire Cabinet of Capital Drawings, collected by the late Greffier Francois Fagel (1799)
Coins and medals, in the cabinets of the Earl of Fife (1796)
Curtius’s Grand Cabinet of Curiosities (1800)
Elegant Drawing and Cabinet Pictures (1785)
For the inspection of the curious (1785)
M—-C L—-N’s cabinet broke open (1750)
Particulars of and conditions of sale for a large and valuable estate called Goldings (1770)
Thane’s second Catalogue (1773)
The Last Night (1790)

Fiction

A Cabinet of Fancy (1799)
A letter from the Man in the Moon to Mr. Anodyne Necklace (1725)
Copys of several conferences and meetings (1790)
Fragment of the chronicles of Zimri the Refiner (1753)
Miss C–Y’s cabinet of curiosities (1765)
The Cabinet of Love (1792)
The cabinet of wit (1797)
The Cyprian Cabinet (1783)
The Female Pilgrim (1762)
The Laird of Cool’s Ghost (1786)

Recipe Book

Incomparable varieties (1740)

Miscellany of Biographical Materials

A key to the Kings cabinet (1645)
A vindication of King Charles (1648)
England’s Mournful Monument (1714)
Letters, poems, and tales (1718)
Mist’s Closet Broke Open (1728)
Psalmes of confession found in the cabinet of the most excellent King of Portinga (1596)
The French Momus (1718)
The Genuine Letters of Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell (1728)
The Irish cabinet: or His Majesties secret papers (1646)
The King of Scotlands negotiations at Rome (1650)
The Kings cabinet opened (1645)
The Lord George Digby’s cabinet and Dr Goff’s negotiations (1646)
The Queen’s Closet Opened (undated)
The riches and extent of free grace displayed (1772)
Who Runs next (1715)

Literary Miscellany

The Golden Cabinet (1765)

Historical Miscellany

The Key to the kings cabinet-counsell (1765)

Bibliography – Bobker

Danielle Bobker

Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. The Spectator. Ed. Donald Bond. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Print.

Ariès, Philippe. Introduction. The History of Private Life III: The Passions of the
Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. Print.

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.

Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.

Brooks, Thomas. Cabinet of Choice Jewels Or, A Box of precious Ointment. EEBO. London: 1669. Web. 30 Aug. 2007.

Cabinet of Momus. London: 1786. ECCO. Web. 30 Aug. 2007.

Chartier, Roger. “Libraries without Walls.” Future Libraries. Spec. Issue of Representations 42 (Spring 1993): 38-52. Print.

Chico, Tita. Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005. Print.

Cleland, John. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Oxford World’s Classics. Print.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Boston: Routledge, 1979. Print.

Edson, Michael. “‘A Closet or a Secret Field’: Horace, Protestant Devotion and British Retirement Poetry.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.1 (2012): 17-41. Web. 15 Dec. 2012.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1995. Print.

Hamilton, Anthony. Memoirs of Count Grammont. Whitefish MT: Kessinger, 2010. Print.

Haywood, Eliza. Love in Excess. Peterborough ON: Broadview, 2000. Print.

Jonson, Ben. “To Penshurst.” Norton Anthology of British Literature: Vol 1B. Ed. George M. Logan, Stephen Greenblatt, and Barbara Lewalski. New York: Norton, 2000. 1399-1401. Print.

The Ladies Cabinet broke Open. London: 1710. ECCO. Web. 30 Aug. 2007.

Laqueur, Thomas. Solitary Sex: The Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone Books, 2003. Print.

Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Print.
——. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.

Mauriès, Patrick. Cabinets of Curiosity. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Print.

McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Print.

Modern Curiosities of Art & Nature. Extracted out of the Cabinets of the most Eminent
Personages of the French Court. London: 1685. EEBO. Web. 30 Aug. 2007.

Montagu, Mary Wortley. “The Reasons that Induced Dr S[wift] to Write a Poem Call’d the Lady’s Dressing Room.” Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy. Ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. Print.

Pepys, Samuel. Diary. Project Gutenberg Literary Editions. Web. 30 Aug. 2007.

Pope, Alexander. “Rape of the Lock” and “The Key to the Lock.” New York: Bedford, 2007. Print.

Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1998. Print.

Richardson, Samuel. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Robinson, David M. Closeted Writing and Gay and Lesbian Literature: Classical, Early
Modern, Eighteenth-Century. Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2006. Print.

Rolleston, Samuel. Philosophical Dialogue Concerning Decency. London: 1751. ECCO. Web. 1 Feb. 2006.

Sabor, Peter. “From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble: Reading the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from the 1960s to the 1990s.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.4 (2000): 561-78. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosowsky. Introduction: Axiomatic. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York:
Picador, 2001. 275-92. Print.

Swift, Jonathan. Complete Poems. Ed. Pat Rogers. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983. Print.

Wall, Cynthia. “Writing Things.” The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the
Eighteenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print.

Walpole, Horace. Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Oxford World’s Classics.
——. The Mysterious Mother. Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother. Peterborough ON: Broadview, 2003. Print.

Warner, Michael. “Public and Private.” Public and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Print.

Wettenhall, Edward. Enter into thy Closet. London: 1684. EEBO. Web. 30 Aug. 2007.

Works Cited – Klein

Aull, Laura L. “Students Creating Canons: Rethinking What (and Who) constitutes the Canon.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 12.3 (2012): 497-512. Print.

Ball, Cheryl, and Ryan Moeller. “Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media.” The Fibreculture Journal 10 (2007) Web. 16 Aug. 2014.

Barst, Julie M. “Pedagogical Approaches to Diversity in the English Classroom: A Case Study of Global Feminist Literature.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 13.1 (2013) 149-57. Print.

Koh, Adeline. “Introducing Digital Humanities Work to Undergraduates: An Overview.” Hybrid Pedagogy (14 Aug. 2014). Web. 23 Aug. 2014.

Keleman, Erick. “Critical Editing and Close Reading in the Undergraduate Classroom.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 12.1 (2011): 121-38. Print.

Lari, Pooneh. “The Use of Wikis for Collaboration in Higher Education.” The Professor’s Guide to Taming Technology. Leveraging Digital Media, Web 2.0. Ed. Kathleen P. King and Thomas D. Cox. Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2011. 121-33. Print.

Marsden, Jean I. “Beyond Recovery: Feminism and the Future of Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies.” Feminist Studies 28.3 (2002): 657-62. Print.

Moskal, Jeanne. “Introduction: Teaching British Women Writers, 1750-1900.” Teaching British Women Writers, 1750-1900. Ed. Jeanne Moskal and Shannon R. Wooden. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print. 1-10.

Shesgreen, Sean. “Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 293-318. Print.

Takayoshi, Pamela, and Cynthia L. Selfe. “Thinking about Multimodality.” Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Ed. Cynthia L. Selfe. New York: Hampton Press, 2007. 1-12. Print.

Weber, Elizabeth Dolly. “Lighting Their Own Path: Student-Created Wikis in the Commedia Classroom.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 13.1 (2012): 125-32. Print.

Reflections on the Course – Klein

The goals of the course (revisited) were to:
• introduce students to eighteenth-century British culture and eighteenth-century British women’s poetry;
• explore the interaction between the poetry of women and men in eighteenth-century Britain;
• understand the position and oppression of women in eighteenth-century Britain;
• gain an appreciation of eighteenth-century poetic forms and styles; and
• contribute to the popularization of understudied women’s literature

At the end of the course, students had acquired an appreciation of poetic forms (like sonnets, odes, and heroic couplets), read a variety of poems from the eighteenth century by English, Scottish, and American women, and had first-hand experience with literary research using both primary and secondary sources. Through in-class presentations and supplementary readings, students were also introduced to eighteenth-century culture and life in Britain and America, with particular attention paid to the position of women at the time. The course included poetry by women, both rural and London-based, well-known in their own time and obscure, rich and poor, black and white. The course focused on issues of inclusivity, diversity, feminist recovery, canonicity, and community. Students demonstrated their mastery of literary terms and analysis through their final project, and, through the wikis and class discussions, they also showed their new-found interest in the female authors we studied.

Where I feel the course could be improved was with regard to the formal elements of poetry, such as the uses of meter, rhyme, line breaks, etc. While some of these elements were covered in the course, there was not enough time to explore them in-depth. Similarly, in a full-length, semester-long course, there might have been time for students to give a second oral presentation on an element of eighteenth-century life, especially pertaining to women. Instead, the burden of introducing students to the historical period fell to me, the instructor, and was limited by time.

Additionally, it bears mentioning that although my initial hope was that the students would have time to revise the wiki entries and then use them to edit the existing author pages on Wikipedia, the students did not seem overly eager to share their work publicly. Some of them actively expressed their fear of publishing in a public forum. Pooneh Lari notes that this is a fairly common fear of students: “another concern noted about the use of wikis is the idea of ‘hidden audience’….Wheeler and Wheeler (2009)…noted that students were aware of a hidden audience of visitors that would visit the wiki that could be tracked by the hit counter….A simple solution to this problem is to create a password for accessing the wiki, thereby excluding outside visitors” (123).

Another solution to this issue might have been to include time for revision, further class/instructor collaboration, and then edit the Wikipedia pages together, collaboratively. Lari notes, however, that “a community of practice provides an environment for social interaction between learners in which they can have a dialogue and discuss their learning and perspectives” (124). Even though the students ultimately did not publish their wiki entries, they still gained important experiences through the course discussions and dialogues that grew out of the wiki project.

The main goals of this website (revisited) are to:

• introduce scholars of the eighteenth century to digital projects for the literature classroom;
• demonstrate that digital projects actively generate student interest in research and broaden their abilities to write in a digital medium;
• examine the limitations of students and literature courses at the university undergraduate level, especially with regard to eighteenth-century
literature broadly and women’s literature specifically;
• suggest methods for making students more aware of canon-formation and feminist practices; and
• open up a discussion among scholars on the relation of digital pedagogy and feminist recovery practices in the classroom.

While it may not be practical or possible to run such specific poetry courses at other universities, it may be possible to adapt these ideas and materials to a single unit of a course on poetry, eighteenth-century literature, or even a British survey course. One of the major ideas that guided my choices during this course and the ensuing online project about it was that even the most general courses can accommodate lesser-known writers and works, works by women, lower-class writers and writers of color, as well as digital, multimodal projects and writing.

I hope that this project will inspire other instructors to incorporate course wikis and other interactive, multimodal projects into their classes. Additionally, it is my hope that this web project will also spark further conversation about how such projects can enhance literary studies while working in tandem with projects that focus on issues of equality. Research projects that engage actively in understanding, sifting through, altering and analyzing public knowledge, especially those that focus on issues relating to sex, race, class, sexuality, nationality and empire, can, in a digital forum, leave the classroom and contribute to changing public paradigms of thought on these topics. Digital projects have the power to engage students in textual studies while also helping them become twenty-first-century thinkers and digital writers.

Final Questions for Discussion

What is the future of the “traditional” literary research paper in the undergraduate classroom?

How might instructors make use of digital forms of writing to make literature courses, from the introductory course to the survey to the upper-level seminar, more effective and student-centric?

What kinds of digital projects are best suited to the literature classroom?

How can digital technologies change/augment classroom syllabuses, “traditional” anthologies, and classroom instruction?

What kinds of projects help students gain first-hand understanding of literary theories and practices, including, but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism and transnational conceptions of literature and literary canons?
Next Section: Works Cited . . .

Sample Student Wiki – Klein

Introduction

A woman of intractable talent, Mary Darby Robinson was one of the leading English actresses, as well as one of the forerunners of feminist prose, during the Romantic Era in the Eighteenth Century. She was an intelligent, witty, inexhaustible powerhouse of creativity whose legacy all at once serves as an inspirational force and a tragic lesson. For quite some time, Robinson was incomprehensibly sidelined during scholarly research and study of writers in that era. Fortunately, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in her life and work.

Biography (BPK)

Mary Robinson was born in College Green, Bristol in 1758 on November 27th (Robinson 3). Robinson was brought up by her father, Captain John Darby, and her mother, Hester Seys (Robinson 2). Mary Darby Robinson was one of five children (Lonsdale 468). Robinson’s upbringing was not one of wealth, but of constant financial difficulties. Her father often abandoned the family to go on business, leaving them in financial distress (Lonsdale 468). Robinson began her schooling in a school in Chelsea, London (Robinson 468). For financial reasons Robinson’s mother opened her own school where Robinson assisted in her adolescent years (Lonsdale 468). Robinson then continued schooling, where she met David Garrick, who would later become her mentor in the world of theatre. However, prior to this Robinson was married to Thomas Robinson in April 1774 at age fifteen (Lonsdale 469). During her husband’s imprisonment in 1775, Robinson wrote poetry in order to pay off her husband’s debts and cared for their daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who was born in November 1774 (Lonsdale 469). After her husband’s release from prison Robinson resumed her pursuit of the stage and with the help of Garrick had her debut performance as Juliet in December of 1776. Robinson became famous for her theatre work and early poetry. Robinson is best known for her role as Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. This led to her relationship with the Prince of Wales, later to become George IV. She would later be contracted to be his mistress. Robinson was later dismissed from being the Prince’s mistress, before the Prince’s coming of age (Luria 6). After the loss of this engagement with the Prince of Wales and other men of the time, Lord Malden and Charles James Fox, Robinson’s “scandals” became public and tarnished her “celebrity status” (Lonsdale 469). Robinson, who once coveted her celebrity identification, often detested the falsehood and shallowness of society later in her works (Mole 194). Following her theatre career, which ended in May 1780, Robinson began writing again, and became the poetry editor of the Morning Post, a literary magazine of the time (Mole 188). As editor, she came into contact with many of her well known literary contemporaries, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (Cross 40). Later in her life, Robinson suffered from intense rheumatoid medical problems and passed away on the 26th of December in 1800 (Lonsdale 470), leaving her autobiography, Memoirs, unfinished. Robinson only completed up to her affair with the Prince of Wales. However, the remainder was edited by her daughter and published in 1801 with some of her other, older poetic works. Overall, Robinson had a strong influence on the Romantic period and is regarded today as a well-known eighteenth century celebrity, poet, actress, and literary rival to many of her contemporaries.

Upbringing and Education (BPK)

Robinson was brought up by her parents Captain John Darby and her mother Hester Seys (Robinson 2). Although her mother had three miscarriages Robinson was one of five children to be brought up their house in Bristol (Robinson 4). Being a Captain, Robinson’s father was commonly absent in her upbringing. He was often working on shipments and projects. He once took an absence for three years in order to construct a whaling station off the cost of Labrador (Robinson 14). This often placed the family in financial difficulties (Lonsdale 468). However, the family still had some financial means and was able to educate their children. Robinson was first educated at a school in Bristol, taught by the sister of Hannah More, one of Robinson’s literary predecessors (Luria 5). Eventually, Robinson’s father later left the family for a mistress and America (Luria 5). The remainder of the family departed from London, and Robinson continued her education at a school in Chelsea (Lonsdale 468). Her teacher in Chelsea, Mrs. Meribah Lorrington, fostered Robinson’s literary interests (Robinson 21). Out of necessity, due to financial constraints, Robinson’s mother was forced to open her own school for girls in Chelsea, in which Robinson assisted (Robinson 27). Her father, who periodically reconnected with the family, was opposed to this and forced Robinson back into education (Lonsdale 468). With her father now back in London, Robinson began to complete her schooling in a school located in Marylebone called the Oxford House, which was run by Mrs. Hervey (Robinson 30). During this period of schooling Robinson began to address desires to pursue a career in theatre. Through her instructor Robinson was introduce to theatre icons such as Thomas Hull, Arthur Murphy, and David Garrick (Robinson 32). David Garrick would later become her mentor and friend in the world of theatre, and later be her largest supporter. However, Robinson’s aspiration to perform had to be postponed due to her mother’s marriage arrangement. Robinson’s mother arranged a marriage with Thomas Robinson, who was an article clerk at Lincoln’s Inn (Lonsdale 469). Robinson’s marriage was kept secret for a time in order to release him from all youthful debts, secure his inheritance, and keep young women around him to secure social status (Robinson 44). Robinson was alarmed by this request but agreed begrudgingly (Robinson 44). However, Robinson’s husband never gained his inheritance, had many scrupulous affairs that he did not even care to hide, and was generally careless for his wife (Luria 6). Robinson bore her only daughter, Maria Elizabeth, on the 18th of November in 1774 (Lonsdale 469). Shortly following Maria Elizabeth’s birth, the family was forced to flee from London due to debts owed by Robinson’s husband (Lonsdale 469). Robinson’s husband was often described as a frivolous and careless about money, and equally careless about his wife (Lonsdale 469). Robinson later accompanied her husband to prison where she cared for her daughter and wrote poetry (Lonsdale 469). Robinson identifies the experience of debtor’s prison as some of her first foundations for her poetry (115). By appealing to the Duchess of Devonshire Robinson shared her initial works with the Duchess and came to be in her good favor (Robinson 115). Finally with the assistance of the Duchess of Devonshire, Robinson was able to publish her first work Poems in 1775.

Theatre and Societal Status (BPK)

Robinson’s debut performance, as Juliet at the Royal Theatre in Drury Lane in 1776, granted her instant notoriety (Mole 186). Robinson instantly became an icon of the social scene during her time. Robinson was breaking the mold of acting and using a different style pioneered by her mentor David Garrick (Mole 187). Her style was more natural and emphasized physical agility and facial expression over the static and declamatory style of previous actors (Mole 187). Robinson’s celebrity presence went beyond the stage to painting, novels, essay, and caricatures (Mole 199). Thomas Mole describes Robinson’s works as a “multimedia phenomenon, including poems, novels, essays; stage performances, social appearances and fashions; paintings, engravings, and caricatures; newspaper puffs, reviews, and gossip columns” (200). Robinson even took to self-promotion and publicized her plays and writings, which was uncommon for women during this time period (190). Robinson was practiced in the arts of self-promotion, whether in performance or print, argues Thomas Mole (190). Her celebrity identity circulated so widely because it was so appropriated by others in ways that slipped out of her control (190).

Some of Robinson’s roles included Fanny in The Clandestine Marriage (1777), Lady Macbeth in Macbeth (1778), and Cordelia in King Lear (Mole 187). Robinson also contributed to the musical farce The Lucky Escape (1778) (Lonsdale 469). However, Robinson was most well recognized for her role as Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. During this performance Robinson shocked audiences and secured her celebrity status (Gamer 2). Performed in front of the royal family, Robinson was addressed by the Prince (Robinson 155). Under the guise of “Florizel,” according to Luria, the Prince of Wales began to court Robinson, only known at the time as Perdita (6). Robinson reluctantly received the admiration and courtship from the Prince (Robinson 161). Robinson communicated with the Prince secretly for many months, often advising him to wait until he come of age and then to pursue his interests (Robinson 164). Robinson was eventually requested to meet the Prince by the fall of night and disguised in the garb of man (Robinson 167). This has been noted to fit Robinson’s adventurous and promiscuous side (Mole 194). In time, Robinson was engaged to be the Prince’s mistress and paid a sum of 20,000 pounds on his coming of age (Luria 6). However, before this time came, the Prince tired of Robinson and the contract was voided (Luria 6). Robinson’s offstage performances were often more memorable than her onstage ones, as evident by her affairs and social practices (Mole 188). After this period in time Robinson’s reputation faltered, he mindset shifted, and a dramatic change in personality was seen.

Celebrity Status (BPK)

Robinson always identified herself as person who has a “propensity to adore the sublime and beautiful” before she would acknowledge herself as someone of beauty and fame (Cross 39) Robinson later came to show contempt for social media and all the idolized beauty and fame. Robinson complained in her Memoirs that the high visibility her celebrity status brought her was nothing but trouble (Robinson 193). Mole states that Robinson argued that “ despite being an active participant in it, Robinson indicts celebrity culture as a force overturning all that is natural and distorting all that is beautiful” (194). Robinson later wrote about her now changed opinion of celebrity culture in many of her poems, such as “Stanzas,” “The Fugitive,” and “January 1795.” Although acting and her celebrity status had a major impact on Robinson’s life, the theatre only had a three year impact on her 25 year publishing career.

Literary Contemporaries

By the 1790’s Robinson was a well-known writer and poet, and was viewed harshly by society for her promiscuous behavior. Regardless of the public’s opinion, Robinson continued writing and eventually (January 1790) became the editor of The Morning Post, a popular literary magazine at the time (Cross 40). Through The Morning Post Robinson was able to search for a contemporary that she deemed worthy of ‘“the sacred intercourse of the soul, the sublime union of sensibility,’” or sharing and communication through poetry (qtd. in Mole 41). Samuel Coleridge was the individual to rise to Robinson’s challenge. Although Robinson and Coleridge did not meet until 1800, their correspondence began in the late 1790’s (Cross 39). However, it is suggested that Coleridge and Robinson met as early as 1796 at a dinner party at Godwin’s (Cross 39). Coleridge and Robinson worked together in order to bolster their own and each other’s reputation (Cross 41). Coleridge acted as a huge supporter of Robinson in the literary works that she published. Often writing anonymously or outright, Coleridge played an active role in the endorsement of Robinson, and vice versa (Cross 42). Coleridge often wrote in response to Robinson under the pseudonym “Francini” (Cross 46). Robinson reveled in the praise of “Francini” and used this promotion as a way to further her writing. Coleridge also used Robinson’s poems to advance his own writing style. One of the most acknowledged correspondences between Coleridge and Robinson was in her poem “Ode to a Snow-drop” which appeared in Robinson’s novel Walsingham Or, the Pupil of Nature (Robinson 53). In response to Robinson’s poem, Coleridge published his own using the same imagery but elaborating further upon it. Robinson was so pleased with this praise that she published an outstanding response in praise of Coleridge’s poem, “The Apotheosis or the Snow-drop” (Cross 46). This was one of many correspondences between Coleridge and Robinson. Through the use of similar imagery, settings, and published critiques of the other’s literature, Coleridge and Robinson used each other to further their writings (Cross 55). It wasn’t until the year of Robinson’s death, on the fifteenth of January 1800, that Coleridge and Robinson officially met (Cross 40). After Robinson’s passing Coleridge would later go on to be one of Robinson’s biggest supporters (Cross 40).

Complete List of Theatre Roles (Robinson 141) (BPK)

Ophelia, in Hamlet
Viola, in Twelfth Night
Jacintha, in The Suspicious Husband
Fidelia, in The Plain Dealer
Rosalind, in As You Like It
Oriana, in The Inconstant
Octavia, in All for Love
Perdita, in The Winter’s Tale
Palmira, in Mahomet
Cordelia, in King Lear
Alinda, in The Law of Lombardy
Mrs. Brady, in The Irish Widow
Araminta, in The Old Bachelor
Sir Harry Revel, in The Miniature Picture
Emily, in The Runaway
Miss Richley, in The Discovery
Statira, in Alexander the Great
Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet
Amanda, in The Trip to Scarborough
Lady Anne, in Richard the Third
Imogen, in Cymbeline
Lady Macbeth, in Macbeth

Role in Eighteenth Century Literature

Despite being considered a fallen woman after the end of her affair with the Prince of Wales, Robinson’s personal life continued to be of great interest to the public. Anything she published— poems, plays, novels, newspaper essays, pamphlets— was in high demand. As a result, she certainly struggled with wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to desperately conceal her private life from society’s prying eyes. She once mused, “celebrity culture is…as a force overturning all that is beautiful and destroying it” (Mole 194). Her prolific works achieved great notoriety and acclaim but she was often criticized for being a hypocrite, likely because of “calculated maneuvers to increase her visibility or her ambition to move up within the social hierarchy” (Munteanu 127). Being deemed “The English Sappho” was the result of a honed talent, and it is obvious she had considerable aptitude in doing so, which earned her numerous literary successes (Curran 66). Robinson strongly believed that talent was far superior to privilege or status (Munteanu 127).

Perhaps as either a way to experiment with her writings or “a theatrical impulse held over from her early years as an actress” (Feldman and Kelley 261) Robinson used at least nine documented pseudonyms to furnish some of her literary works to the public. They included Anne Frances Randall, Laura Maria, Oberon, Sappho, Julia, Lesbia, Portia, Bridget, and Tabitha Bramble. For example, as Oberon, Robinson penned graceful tributes that lavished praises on women whereas when she wrote as Tabitha Bramble, she was sharp and critical (Feldman and Kelley 260). Their voices, individually and collectively, represented Robinson’s messages to the world. She was able to exploit her experiences because “it was assumed that women’s writing revealed their lives; what they wrote was read as a mirror of their selves” (Cross 573).

Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, written by Paula Feldman and Theresa Kelley, points out that the “poetry venue provided by a daily newspaper in the 1790s was particularly suited to performative modes of self-representation and, as a result, was especially hospitable to Mary Robinson” (253). Publishing poetry in The Morning Post created unique challenges and opportunities for her. She was able to appeal to a far larger audience and was also afforded greater flexibility when it came to subject matter and creativity.

During her time, it was believed that many literary figures drew inspiration from their peers and at times could be construed as plagiarizing. One keen example of this borrowing of ideas can be seen through critical analysis of Wordsworth’s “Ruined Cottage” and “Michael” alongside Robinson’s “Deserted Cottage.” All three poems show significant similarities. It is believed that Robinson’s poem “Deserted Cottage” appropriated many aspects of “Ruined Cottage.” Michael Wiley states in his essay, “Wordsworth responds to such appropriations by re-appropriating and amplifying what Robinson takes from him” (222). Reviewing “…early drafts of “Michael” reveal[s] Robinson’s prosodic importance” (226). This same issue can be found in Robinson’s “Lyrical Tales” and Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads.” Eight days before her death in December of 1800, to the dismay of William Wordsworth, her final collection of poetry entitled Lyrical Tales was published. There had been an exchange of poems between Robinson, Coleridge, and Wordsworth prior to the publication of Lyrical Tales. Robinson had read, and was inspired by, Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. It is true that “Lyrical Tales respond in a variety of ways to the Lyrical Ballads: in particular … both Wordsworth’s ‘Ballads’ and Robinson’s ‘Tales’ ask readers to think actively about the process of reading, and of storytelling” (Bolton 742). It is precisely as Ashley J. Cross posits in her journal article “From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales: Mary Robinson’s Reputation and the Problem of Literary Debt”: there is “a complex web of relations that undoes the possibility of separating categories of self and other, copy and original” (574). Lyrical Tales presents an “abundance of voices, modes of representation, and fertile creativity” (Wilson 26) for its readers to enjoy.

Robinson set herself apart from her contemporaries in many ways and often was the target of other poets’ appropriation of her work. Unlike her contemporaries, many of her poems did not use authorial voice to direct readers’ conclusions to that of her own. She carefully constructed the poems using factual descriptive language in which the readers would irrefutably be drawn to the same conclusion based on societal norms of the time: “In limiting herself to pointing up the hypocrisies of the time, Robinson is extending an implicit critique of any poetry that suggests either the resolution of such contradictions via flights of imagination or, worse, a poet’s use of verse as respite from the responsibilities demanded by commitment to material history” (Krapp 79).

Themes and Meanings in Selected Literary Works

Much of Robinson’s poetry was autobiographical and speaks of sadness, loneliness, and alienation—emotions that were likely no stranger to Robinson after the gossip and public recoil following her several affairs with the Prince of Wales and Banastre Tarleton. When Tarleton and Robinson’s affair ended after fifteen years because of his abrupt marriage to an heiress, Robinson wrote the poems “The False Friend” and “The Natural Daughter” out of anguish and anger. “The False Friend” is a thinly veiled literary characterization that casts Tarleton as a villain while “The Natural Daughter” reminds its readers about an old scandal regarding Tarleton’s new wife. Poems such as “The Savage of Aveyron” (about a traveler who comes across an orphan who only speaks the word ‘alone’), “All Alone” (about a traveler who tries to convince an orphan he is not alone, even though he has lost both parents), and “The Fugitive” (about a persecuted exile whose family has been massacred) gave insight to readers about the inescapable alienation, heartache, and despair felt by society’s outcasts. Her work was paradigmatically Romantic in that she put forth “the diverse and often devastating effects on society of both personal and political social conflicts” (Miskolcze 218). She wrote of orphans and exiles of every kind and characterized them as having “a heightened awareness of mortality” (209).

Not all of her poetry however was filled with gloom. Some of Robinson’s other poetry celebrated Nature’s beauty, peaceful solitude, and the joys of youth. In particular, her poem “Reflections” gives the reader a sense of optimism and hope. Robinson scrutinizes the world around her in her poems “January, 1795” and “London’s Summer Morning.” It is apparent that Robinson “participates in the chief aesthetic innovations of the decade [and] chronicles the major news events of the day” (Pascoe 20). Many of her works serve as a valuable window into the eighteenth century because they allow the reader to become the observer.

In 1799, shortly before her death, A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Insubordination was published. In this work of social criticism, Robinson, writing as Anne Frances Randall, contends that it is her “endeavour to prove that, under the present state of mental subordination, universal knowledge is not only benumbed and blighted, but true happiness, originating in enlightened manners, retarded in its progress” (2). It is a reflection of the thinking many female writers during that time put into their writings. Robinson felt very strongly about the unequal dynamic between husband and wife. She expresses her disillusionment about women being pigeon-holed into roles that offered no intellectual stimulation by asserting “that they are not the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates of man: and, where they excel in intellectual powers, they are no less capable of all that prejudice and custom have united in attributing, exclusively, to the thinking faculties of man (Randall 3). She truly believed that women should be afforded the right to declare themselves as capable of making informed decisions about things that directly affected their own well-being or happiness.

Memoirs, Letters, and Posthumous Legacy

Robinson’s health declined during the year 1800. She passed on December 26, 1800 and was buried in the churchyard at Old Windsor. She was gone, but her daughter made sure she was not forgotten for the next several decades. In her Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself, posthumously edited and published by her daughter in 1801, she detailed her earlier years and education, marriage, affairs, and lamented on how the high visibility her celebrity brought her was nothing but trouble (Mole 193). As a precursor to her recollections she declares that, “The early propensities of my life were tinctured with romantic and singular characteristics; some of which I shall here mention, as proofs that mind is never to be diverted from its original bent, and that every event of my life has more or less been marked by the progressive evils of a too acute sensibility” (Robinson 12). These candid and soulful memoirs are “a highly selective narrative of selfhood that conceals and implies meanings in a tenacious effort to steer clear of the genre of the histoire scandaleuse … and promotes a virtuous intersection between sensibility and domesticity, on the one hand, and creative genius, on the other” (Saglia 722). In a set of original letters presented by Sharon Setzer, Robinson provides poignant accounts of her exhaustion and anguish as she struggled to evade merciless creditors by using her pen to earn a meager living.

Her life, particularly the highs and lows, give her story an enduring appeal. Robinson truly is a great example of a Romantic poet. Some argue that she is the embodiment of early feminism while others whole-heartedly disagree, citing Robinson’s adulterous affairs with famous men as her fleeting claim to fame. In truth, Robinson refused to be confined to the domestic lifestyle that so many women in that time frame were forced into accepting. She was a young wife, a mother, a mistress, and worked her way through multiple careers. While vicious caricatures depicted Robinson as a whore and her affairs fodder for newspaper gossip, her writing and actions flouted the double standards and reaffirmed the female right to autonomy.

Works Cited

Bolton, Betsy. “Romancing the Stone: ‘Perdita’ Robinson in Wordsworth’s London.” ELH 64.3 (1997): 727-759. Web. Project MUSE. 9 Aug. 2012.
Cross, Ashley J. “From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales: Mary Robinson’s Reputation and the Problem of Literary Debt.” Studies in Romanticism 40.4 (2001): 571-605. Web. JSTOR. 26 July 2012.
Curran, Stuart. “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism.” South Central Review 11.2 (1994): 66-78. Web. JSTOR. 26 July 2012.
Feldman, Paula R. and Theresa M. Kelley. Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices. Hanover, NH: U P of New England, 1995. Print.
Gamer, Michael, and Terry F. Robinson. “Mary Robinson and The Dramatic Art of The Comeback.” Studies in Romanticism 48.2 (2009): 219-56. Web. JSTOR. 26 July 2012.
Krapp, John. “Female Romanticism at the End of History” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46.1 (2004): 73-91. Web. Project MUSE. 9 Aug. 2012.
Lonsdale, Roger. Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.
Luria, Gina. Introduction. Walsingham Or, the Pupil of Nature. Vol. I. By Mary Robinson. London: Garland, 1974. Print.
Miskolcze, Robin L. “Snapshots of Contradiction in Mary Robinson’s Poetical Works.” Papers on Language & Literature 31.2 (1995): 206-19. Web. JSTOR. 26 July 2012.
Mole, Tom. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
Munteanu, Anca. “Confessional Texts versus Visual Representation: The Portraits of Mary Darby Robinson.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.2 (2009): 124-52. Web. Project MUSE. 9 Aug. 2012.
Pascoe, Judith, ed. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems. New York: Broadview, 2000. Print.
Randall, Anne Frances. A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Insubordination. London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799. Hypertext.
Robinson, Mary Darby. Memoirs of the late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. London: Wilkes and Taylor for R. Phillips, 1801. Hypertext.
Robinson, Mary. Memoirs of Mary Robinson, ‘Perdita.’ Ed. J. Fitzgerald Molloy. London: Gibbings and Co., 1895. Print.
Saglia, Diego. “Commerce, Luxury, and Identity in Mary Robinson’s Memoirs.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 49.3 (2009): 717-36. Web. Project MUSE. 9 Aug. 2012.
Setzer, Sharon. “Original Letters of the Celebrated Mrs. Mary Robinson.” Philological Quarterly 88 (2009): 305-35. Web. JSTOR. 26 July 2012.
Wiley, Michael. “Romantic Amplification: The Way of Plagiarism.” ELH 75.1 (2008): 219-40. Web. Project MUSE. 9 Aug. 2012.
Wilson, Carol Shiner and Joel Haefner. Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994. Print.

Next Section: Reflections on the Course . . .

Final Student Assignment – Klein

Assignments

The final project for the course was creating a course wiki in which students would combine their biographical research on the author along with research on her literary accomplishments and some close readings of her poetry.

The Wikipedia- style format would give students a sense of how literary canons are formed through literary encyclopedias and what information author entries include and (sometimes) exclude. Students had to look up extant Wikipedia entries on their authors, read them, analyze their weaknesses, and then write their own version. The course assignments leading up to the final project were designed to help students prepare materials for the wiki entry.

The main assignments for the course were:

     • a researched, written biography of the author;
     • an oral presentation with a visual element about the author and her works;
     • an annotated bibliography in preparation for the wiki;
     • an online wiki entry for the author; and
     • a reflection paper about the wiki activity.

The biography of the author was due half way through the course, and it functioned to prepare the students for the biographical section of the wiki and the oral presentation to the class on their author. The wiki entry was the final project for the course, and it incorporated research and literary analysis elements.

Why a Wiki?

I chose a wiki entry for the final course project because I felt that such a piece of writing would further engage the students in the precepts of feminist recovery and make clear to them how writers are made popular or marginalized in different time periods. Similarly, I felt that since many of the students were not English majors and even those who were had little to no experience with eighteenth-century literature, they would benefit from understanding how literature of the past can speak to contemporary readers through a digital medium.

The idea of multimodal writing and of encouraging students to be “writer/designers” has met with great success in the composition classroom and is currently growing through a variety of digital humanities projects in literary studies. Digital Humanities projects in the eighteenth century currently include the 18th-Century Common, the digital exhibit “What Jane Saw” as well as the recently-launched website ABOPublic. While it was not within the scope of a six-week course to put together an entire website, I opted to use the course wiki section of our class Blackboard page to create our student-researched wiki.

By engaging students with multimodal ways of writing, I hoped to encourage them to see literary study as a dynamic, ever-changing process of research and discovery. According to Cheryl Ball and Ryan Moeller, “this new [multimodal] version of the university…should value different models of learning and nontraditional academic literacies….The focus of communication would have to shift away from writing to include new media designing as a critical literacy composition practice.” The wiki project embraced such a philosophy by combining traditional literary research with the online encyclopedia platform. Similarly, as Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia L. Selfe point out, when students write in “internationally networked digital environments, texts must be able to carry meaning across geo-political, linguistic, and cultural borders, and so texts must take advantage of multiple semiotic channels” (2). One of the goals of the wiki project was to make students aware of the inadequacy of the existing wiki pages for these authors and the difficulty of making digital texts informative and unbiased.

Similarly, it has been made clear through the work of various scholars that the medium of the wiki itself holds many possibilities for making students more aware of digital communication, the possibilities of modern scholarship, and the continuing gender bias in publicly-available knowledge. Adeline Koh suggests that “Wikipedia editing trains students to think about what constitutes reliable information and what does not, which translates into their academic work.” Similarly, using Wikipedia in gender-related projects can serve to make students more aware of “the gender gap in its [Wikipedia’s] editors–the typical Wikipedia editor is a thirty-year-old, middle-class, English-speaking college-educated male” (Koh). Thus, our wiki project expanded student understanding of feminist approaches to literary studies and the vital need for such approaches.

The course wiki functioned to make students more comfortable with new forms of literacy while engaging them personally in the project of feminist recovery and critical thinking. According to Elizabeth Dolly Weber, when students work on a course wiki, “[it] guides students to recast and reshape information rather than simply reading it, facilitates individualized research and critical thinking, and encourages students to think creatively and to work cooperatively and collaboratively in ways that are otherwise difficult to achieve in the classroom” (125). The class wiki for our summer course achieved all of these goals in a relatively short amount of time.

Author Wiki Entries

In many cases, the existing Wikipedia entries for the authors we studied in the course were extremely short and lacking in detail (such as the one for Elizabeth Tollet). If an author already had a relatively well-developed Wikipedia page (such as those of Anna Laetitia Barbauld or Mary Robinson), then the students were charged with reading the existing post thoroughly and deciding, through their own research, what was missing, biased or under-developed. Finally, students wrote their own wiki entry on the authors using the Course Wiki tool in Blackboard. As a class, we studied the Wikipedia entries of well-known poets like Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth to get an idea of the general sections of a wiki entry. Together we narrowed the scope of the wiki to the following sections:

     • Short Introduction;
     • Short Biography;
     • Role in the Literary Eighteenth Century and Influence on Future Writers;
     • Discussion, with Examples, of Major Themes in Her Work;
     • Optional: Other Literary or Non-Literary Contributions to the Historical Record; and
     • References List (a minimum of 10 references, including both articles and books).

Students were encouraged to include images and hyperlinks in their wikis to make the entries more interactive. I required the students who were working in pairs to split the sections evenly and to make the authorship of each section clear using their initials. Toward the end of the course, students had time in the computer lab to upload all of their information to the Blackboard site. They then presented their wikis to the class on the last day of the course.

The projects were graded on how thoroughly the students covered each section, the amount and quality of primary and secondary sources used, the depth of literary analysis, and the creativity shown in formatting the entry and in using images.

The final part of the assignment was to write a short reflective paper in which students analyzed what they had learned about the process of researching their poet and what they had learned about the process of canon-formation. The idea for the reflection paper came from my experiences teaching composition classes, where the production of reflection papers are a fairly common practice. In the composition classroom, students use the reflection paper as a way of self-assessing and of verbalizing what they have learned in order to gain insight into where they improved as writers and what still lies ahead.

Similarly, the reflection paper on eighteenth-century women poets was meant as a tool for students to describe their research process and what they had learned from it, as well as to reflect on the project of feminist recovery in a digital medium. The reflection paper encouraged students to consider the choices they had made for the content of their wiki and how it compared to the original Wikipedia page online. Additionally, it allowed me, as the instructor, to learn what methods the students had found the most useful in the classroom and what aspects of the final project were the most stimulating intellectually for the students.

Next Section: Sample Student Wiki . . .

Course Materials – Klein

Textbook and Materials
I chose to use Roger Lonsdale’s anthology Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology because it was compact, the poems were ordered by author, and the authors were presented chronologically. Due to the structure of the course and students’ lack of prior knowledge, I felt that working chronologically and by author would best serve our needs. For these reasons I did not use British Women Poets of the Eighteenth Century, by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia, which is organized by subject and genre of poem. I supplemented the Lonsdale, however, with poems from other anthologies.

In my attempt to keep the syllabus as diverse as possible, I included a day on Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, which was not included in the Lonsdale at all. I also included poetry by Scottish poet Joanna Baillie and working-class poets such as Ann Yearsley and Mary Leapor. My reasoning was similar to that of Julie M. Barst, who argues that “we as teachers realize that one of our most important pursuits is to encourage students to understand and consider the positions of peoples within their own communities and around the world who are different from them, not only in terms of gender, race, and sexual orientation but also in terms of religion, class, cultural beliefs and practices, ethnicity, and in many other realms” (149).

I did not want, however, to present these women as writing in isolation from the major literary and political movements of their time period. Thus, I also included some complementary poems by men that demonstrated how male and female poets of the time period interacted with each other in print and how they influenced each other stylistically. For example, we read John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment” alongside Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment,” and Robert Burns’s “Ae Fond Kiss” alongside Joanna Baillie’s “Woo’d and Married and A’” in order to explore how male and female poets used similar forms and styles to explore the same topic from different perspectives.

Resources for Poems:

Backsheider, Paula R. and Catherine E. Ingrassia. British Women Poets of the Eighteenth Century: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. Print.

Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Gale Publishing Group.

Lonsdale, Roger. Editor. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.

Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. C: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century and Vol. D: Romanticism, as well as the Norton Anthology of Poetry

Exploring the Canon: Anthology Activity

When teaching a course on a topic so seemingly narrow and specialized, I felt it was extremely important to convey issues of canonization and feminist recovery practices to the students. The students, though unfamiliar with the time period and content, believed that by virtue of its availability, the course proved the “canonicity” of its content. By contrast, when I mentioned to a (male) colleague (who frequently taught courses on Jane Austen) that I would be teaching a summer course on female poets of the eighteenth century, he jokingly asked me, “Oh, were there any?”

In order to illustrate these kinds of problems to my students, I began the course with an activity in which I brought in various kinds of anthologies of literature for the students to look at in pairs. In doing so, I hoped to make students more aware of the practices of canonization. Laura L. Aull notes that “a limitation to contemporary discussions of survey anthologies is that they imply that canon revision of the classroom consists of making anthologies more inclusive–not by having students engage in anthologizing itself” (498). In order to avoid such limitations, I actively encouraged students to partake in the act of “anthologizing” by actively choosing which poets to read and also by comparing different popular anthologies and their offerings of female poets over time.

Students were instructed to look at the contents of these anthologies and compare them to the syllabus in front of them. Some of the anthologies we looked at were the Norton British literature anthology from the 1960s, one from the 1990s, the Norton Anthology of Poetry in English, the Restoration and 18th Century splits of the Norton and the Longman anthologies, as well as the Lonsdale and the Backscheider and Ingrassia specialized anthologies. In this way, the students were able to identify the ways in which anthologies mold the canon. The activity also illustrated how the poets featured in the course were often marginalized, even in anthologies dedicated to the eighteenth century. Consequently, this activity, completed during the second meeting of the class, illustrated how “anthologies function as shapers of canons, from narrating particular frames for texts to adjusting the original context and appearance of texts in fonts and formats” (Aull 499).

Course Documents

Below is a link to the course syllabus. At the start of the course, the second half of the schedule of readings was empty. This is what the syllabus looked like once the students chose which poets they wished to study.

Also included in the next section are the assignment prompts for the biography, the annotated bibliography, and the Wiki.

» Assignment Course Wiki Full
» Assignments – Bio & Bib
» Syllabus_for_Women_Poetry_Class

Next Section: Final Student Assignment . . .

Structure & Framework – Klein

Course Format
In my past courses, students at Stony Brook had expressed a wish to have greater individual choice of materials in the course. I decided to experiment with this possibility in my course on eighteenth-century women poets. I hoped that in allowing students to have some say in the texts we discussed, they might become more invested in the course and the final assignment. Therefore, I chose the authors for the first half of the course and the students chose the authors for the second half (though they chose from a list compiled by me ahead of time). Thus, in the first half of the semester, I picked out the poems, wrote the reading questions, presented the biographical information on these poets (see below) and led the class discussions.

In the second half of the course, after selecting a poet from the pre-selected list students then researched the author, presented on her biography, chose poems for their classmates to read and discuss, and prepared reading questions that the other students had to answer before coming to class. The poems and reading questions were vetted by me before being sent out to the rest of the class, but by and large students were successful in choosing poems that they found interesting and significant for class discussion. In this way, students were active in “editing” our anthology and class list. My usual input as instructor was to limit the number of poems, as students often chose too many for us to cover in one class period.
By giving the students choice over the syllabus content, students were actively encouraged to question the course syllabus and engage in a form of textual criticism, as they often looked for poems outside the anthology to include in the course reading. According to Erick Keleman, “the reasons to bring textual criticism into any classroom are to demystify textual media and thereby to increase students’ ability to negotiate and interpret textual mediations” (122). Thus, by having students choose the poems themselves, they engaged in a kind of critical thinking that led them to question the traditional literature classroom and engage actively in feminist recovery of unanthologized poems.
Students also became emotionally and intellectually invested in the poets they chose as the poet became “theirs” through researching her. This sentiment was especially prominent in the case of the two groups that chose Hannah More and Ann Yearsley and ended up presenting the two sides of those women’s relationship. In this case, again, the course goals of engaging students in a nuanced kind of feminist recovery project were attained. Jean Marsden warns that often female writers with “views we find distasteful” are neglected by feminist scholars (661). In the case of More and Yearsley, both were included in the syllabus and discussed by the students, and students could decide for themselves whether More’s treatment of the impoverished and dependent Yearsley were warranted. The students were offered the chance to study women writers “from a wide range of educational, class, religious, and political backgrounds,” therefore encouraging students to look at the “issues…that separate women rather than unite them” (Marsden 661).
Additionally, in the first half of the syllabus, I paired female writers with male contemporaries in order to make it clearer to students how the women of the time were in conversation with their male peers. This was an important addition to the course as it helped us avoid the problem of women’s writing in anthologies, as described by Jeanne Moskal. Moskal argues that bringing women’s voices into anthologies has resulted in “two versions of women writers’ liminality…the women-only and the mixed-sex anthologies…[F]or the teacher the theoretical choice between integrationism and separatism takes the practical form of which textbooks to order and which poems and novels can be fitted into the syllabus” (2). Although I ended up choosing a women’s-only anthology for the course, I supplemented it with the works by male authors to avoid such “separatism” and to encourage classroom discussions that showed how women poets were central to the larger literary world of the eighteenth century.

Course Poets

Poets Chosen By Instructor:
The poets I chose to teach in the first half of the syllabus were fairly canonical, as I wanted to insure that we would cover the most well-known female poets of the century. At the same time, however, I also made room to include Phillis Wheatley and Joanna Baillie to make sure that the course would feature authors from outside England as well as at least one author of color.
• Aphra Behn
• Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• Charlotte Smith
• Phillis Wheatley
• Joanna Baillie
• Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
List of Poets the Students Could Choose From:
I compiled a list of poets that the students could choose from so that they would not be overwhelmed by the choices in the Lonsdale anthology and to make sure that students ended up with a poet about whom they could find sources. In this class, the students ended up covering almost the entire list (the only poets not covered from this list were Elizabeth Thomas, Elizabeth Hands and Susanna Blamire).
• Sarah Egerton (née Fyge, later Field; 1670-1723)
• Elizabeth Thomas (1675-1731)
• Elizabeth Tollet (1694-1754)
• Mary Leapor (1722-1746)
• Anna Seward (1742-1809)
• Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825)
• Hannah More (1745 – 1833)
• Elizabeth Hands (1746-1815)
• Susanna Blamire (1747-94)
• Ann Yearsley (1752-1806)
• Mary Robinson (1758-1800)

Next Section: Course Materials . . .

Prior Student Knowledge – Klein

Who would take the course? What did they know before entering the classroom?

This course focused on introducing students to various aspects of literary feminist interpretation and research through the poetry of eighteenth-century women, primarily those from Great Britain. It was also one of the goals of the course to introduce the students to eighteenth-century literature and culture more generally. It ran at Stony Brook University as a summer course, which meant it was constrained by a six-week time frame as well as by a lack of prerequisites for the course. The course officially ran as an upper-level, cross-listed English and Women’s and Gender Studies course. I assumed correctly that for most of the students in the class, this course would be their first introduction to eighteenth-century literature and culture, and that their knowledge of the position and role of women and women writers would be equally small. The course content and structure was therefore designed to take these limitations into account and to address them as thoroughly as possible in the time allotted.

What is the eighteenth century? What were the lives of eighteenth-century women like?

The class size was relatively small; there were twelve students in the class, about half of whom were English majors. There were also a couple of Women’s Studies majors, and about four students from various other disciplines, including psychology, biology, and engineering. This was not unexpected, as the course also functioned as an upper-level general education credit. It was important to me, in this case, to give the students an understanding of the eighteenth century and the position of women during this time.

Students were introduced to the eighteenth century through:

» instructor-led lectures on the time period and on pertinent aspects of the culture;
» documentary and narrative film on eighteenth-century subjects; and
» student research on individual eighteenth-century authors.

Instructor-led Lectures

Class usually began with short PowerPoint presentations (see examples for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Phillis Wheatley, and Anne Finch, attached) by the instructor on the time period, the position of women in eighteenth-century Britain, or the specific authors being studied that day. The presentations included images as well as bullet point information about the eighteenth century. This information included political, economic, social, medical, and everyday aspects of eighteenth-century life, mostly in England.

Documentary and Narrative Film

The course used two films to supplement student understanding of women in the eighteenth century. One was a film made to accompany an exhibit of eighteenth-century costumes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, entitled The Eighteenth-Century Woman. The other film was the much newer production, The Duchess, which presents the life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, during the early years of her marriage to the Duke of Devonshire. The first film introduced students to the material culture of the eighteenth century as well as to a variety of important and powerful women to whom the costumes from the Met exhibit belonged. The second film illustrated the limits that even powerful, wealthy women faced in the eighteenth century. The Duchess was also appropriate as students read poems by the Duchess of Devonshire prior to watching the film.

Student Research on Individual Authors

Students were also personally involved in supplementing their understanding of the eighteenth century and eighteenth-century women through biographical research on authors that they carried out during the course of the class. In the second half of the course, students conducted research on a poet of their choice and presented this information to the class. They were required to provide a visual aide, as the instructor had done in the first half of the course.

Next Section: Structure & Framework . . .

Rationale – Klein

Course Rationale, Expanded

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Part I, ninth edition, contains the section on “The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1660-1785).” In this section, which must also compete with the Medieval and Early Modern periods for space, there is limited room for the literature of a time period that is often misunderstood and under-valued by ‘outsiders.’ Thus, eighteenth-century female authors must vie with canonical writers like Dryden, Pepys, Swift, Pope and Johnson for pages. It should come as little surprise that the eighteenth-century female poets included in the Norton are limited to Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mary Leapor. There is also some representation of women poets in the section “Working Class Geniuses,” which includes selections from the works of Mary Collier, Mary Barber, and Mary Jones. A student in a traditional British survey course might, therefore, have little exposure to eighteenth-century women poets specifically and eighteenth century literature more generally. I use the Norton Anthology as a case study because it is one of the most widely used literary anthologies in the United States. In the words of Sean Shesgreen, the Norton Anthology of English Literature is a “hegemonic text” (295), even as other anthologies, such as those published by Broadview and Longman, have gained popularity. Further, anthologies like the Norton are important in the sense that they often dictate what we teach—usually by default. According to Shesgreen, “anthologies control our ways of reading and even shape our conception of what literature is” (295). Therefore, when these same anthologies add women writers but only as “women writers,” these writers are “marked…as marginal [often] through drastic abridgements or ghettoization, as in ‘The Woman Question,’ a subcompartment of ‘Victorian Issues’” (Shesgreen 209). The section on “Working Class Geniuses,” which I mention above, is one type of “ghettoization” of these writers—both as women and as working-class writers.

Thus, when I was given the opportunity to propose a poetry course at Stony Brook University in the summer of 2012, I leaped at the chance and proposed a course specifically on eighteenth-century female poets. The idea for the course grew out of an introductory literature course for non-majors during a regular fall semester, which surveyed British poetry from 1660 to 1900. As a feminist and queer scholar, I emphasized issues of gender, women’s rights, and sexuality frequently in our discussions of poetry that fall, and, at the end of the semester, my students expressed interest in a course on women’s poetry specifically.

The thought behind this course was to offer students the opportunity to study the literature and culture of the eighteenth century and, more specifically, the position of women at this historical moment through the concentrated study of eighteenth-century women poets.

Website Rationale, Expanded

This web presentation grew out of the course via a poster session at ASECS 2013 on course design. The desire to share what I had done in the classroom with other eighteenth-century scholars was, like the course itself, linked to my desire to inform and encourage other scholars to combine the growing discipline of digital humanities with the project of feminist recovery.

In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist scholars working in eighteenth-century studies launched various projects to re-discover eighteenth-century women writers. According to Jean Marsden, the goals of these recovery projects, which were often inspired by the work of Elaine Showalter and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, were “to bring long-lost women writers and their works to light, to bring them into scholarly discourse, and to make their works available to students and scholars” (657). Despite their successes and the inclusion of many more women writers in popular classroom anthologies, however, “much remains to be done…recovery work, and the education that accompanies it, is not, and, perhaps, can never be completely finished” (Marsden 658).

Accordingly, the first goal of this web presentation is to argue that a course on eighteenth-century women writers is not only possible but also necessary. In light of the continued ghettoization of women writers on college syllabi, this project argues that courses focusing on women writers (but not necessarily devoid of discussions of their male contemporaries) can be fruitful and enjoyable for both students and instructors.

The second major goal of this web presentation is to demonstrate the usefulness of digital pedagogies in the classroom at a time when the digital humanities and multimodal writing are becoming increasingly central to the conversation about the evolving university. While the idea for the multimodal component of this course (the course wiki) grew out of the feeling that I “should be” doing digital humanities in my courses, the project ended up serving the purposes of furthering our course goals of feminist recovery.

Next Section: Prior Student Knowledge . . .

The Literature and Culture of the Closet in the Eighteenth Century

Danielle Bobker

Feminist Recovery Practices & Digital Pedagogies: Teaching 18th-Century Women Poets

Ula Klein

IN THE SUMMER of 2012, I was given the opportunity to teach a summer poetry course, and I chose to teach a course on female poets of the eighteenth century. My rationale for the course was that it would allow students to come into contact with poetry that, even as English majors, they would not likely read elsewhere. As I began planning the course, it became clear to me that given certain limitations on our time and prior student knowledge, it would neither be possible nor useful to conduct the course in the manner of a “typical” upper-level literature course during a regular semester. Instead, after some consideration, I decided that the course would combine my desire to trouble the “typical” eighteenth-century canon, as it is conceived in survey courses, with my growing interest in digital humanities and multimodal composition.

As the title of this website indicates, the course was devoted to exploring how to use feminist recovery practices and digital pedagogies in the classroom. The course objectives (below) also included more “traditional” objectives of a literature or poetry course. The objectives for this web presentation (also below) are also multifold. First, I present this information in order to suggest ways in which to create literature courses that are more interactive and digitally-oriented as well as more attuned to feminist recovery practices. Second, I hope that this presentation will make clear the possible “payoffs” for including lesser-taught texts in the classroom.

Course Objectives

The main goals of the course were to:
» introduce students to eighteenth-century British culture and eighteenth-century British women’s poetry;
» explore the interactions between the poetry of women and men in eighteenth-century Britain;
» understand the position and oppression of women in eighteenth-century Britain;
» gain an appreciation of eighteenth-century poetic forms and styles; and
» contribute to the popularization of understudied women’s literature.

This website explores the various pedagogical and scholarly tools that went into designing the course, sets out the operation of the course, and describes the final projects prepared by the students. In addition to sections on students’ previous knowledge, my expectations for the course, the course framework, and information on our materials, there is also a section on the final assignment and an example of one of the student projects submitted for this assignment.

Web Presentation Objectives

The main goals of this website are to:
» introduce scholars of the eighteenth century to digital projects for the literature classroom;
» demonstrate that digital projects actively generate student interest in research and broaden their abilities to
write in a digital medium;

» examine the limitations of students and literature courses at the university undergraduate level, especially with
regard to eighteenth-century literature broadly and women’s literature specifically;
» suggest methods for making students more aware of canon-formation and feminist practices; and
» open up a discussion among scholars on the relation of digital pedagogy and feminist recovery practices in the classroom.

I explain the rationale for using digital pedagogies and feminist recovery practices and their interconnectedness in the sections on rationale, prior student knowledge, and the final student wiki assignment, while the section on the course materials suggests how to make a course of this nature inclusive and diverse.

Ula Klein
Texas A&M International University

Next Section: Rationale . . .

Digital Defoe

Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries

Category Archives: Pedagogies

The Eighteenth Century / The Closet: Two Introductions – Bobker

The Philosophy of Progress – Bobker

Rooms for Improvement – Bobker

Privacy and Modernity I: The Family – Bobker

Privacy and Modernity II: The Public Sphere – Bobker

The Courtly Closet and the Closet of Devotion – Bobker

The Cabinet of Curiosity and the Dressing Room – Bobker

Privy Pastoral – Bobker

Epistolary Spaces – Bobker

(Homo)Erotic Closets – Bobker

Overview – Bobker

Gothic Collections, Gothic Chambers – Bobker

Image Gallery – Bobker

Closets Without Walls – Bobker

«A — B — C — D — E — F — G — H — I — J — L — M —P — R — S — T — V — W»

Closets Without Walls – Bobker

«1500 — 1550 — 1600 — 1650 — 1700 — 1710 — 1720 — 1730 — 1740 — 1750 — 1760 — 1770 — 1780 — 1790 — 1800 »

Closets Without Walls – Bobker

Spirtual Advice | Educational Miscellany | Religious Miscellany | Miscellany of Art & Music | Miscellany
Catalogue | Fiction | Recipe Book | Miscellany of Biographical Material | Literary Miscellany | Historical Miscellany

Bibliography – Bobker

Works Cited – Klein

Reflections on the Course – Klein

Sample Student Wiki – Klein

Final Student Assignment – Klein

Course Materials – Klein

Structure & Framework – Klein

Prior Student Knowledge – Klein

Rationale – Klein

The Literature and Culture of the Closet in the Eighteenth Century

Feminist Recovery Practices & Digital Pedagogies: Teaching 18th-Century Women Poets

«A — B — C — D — E — F — G — H — I — J — L — M —P — R — S — T — V — W»

«1500 — 1550 — 1600 — 1650 — 1700 — 1710 — 1720 — 1730 — 1740 — 1750 — 1760 — 1770 — 1780 — 1790 — 1800 »

Spirtual Advice | Educational Miscellany | Religious Miscellany | Miscellany of Art & Music | Miscellany Catalogue | Fiction | Recipe Book | Miscellany of Biographical Material | Literary Miscellany | Historical Miscellany

Spirtual Advice | Educational Miscellany | Religious Miscellany | Miscellany of Art & Music | Miscellany
Catalogue | Fiction | Recipe Book | Miscellany of Biographical Material | Literary Miscellany | Historical Miscellany