ENGL 2581: Women Writers
Spring 2006
University of Minnesota Duluth
T 8:00-9:50 Chem 155; Th 8:00-9:50 H403
Dr. Carolyn Sigler


Fall 2006 syllabus

Fall 2006 Reading Schedule

Click here for class handouts and supplemental readings

Scroll down for links to background information on writing, research, literary background, and individual authors.

LINKS TO WEB RESOURCES FOR WOMEN WRITERS

AND FEMINIST THEORY

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WRITING AND DOCUMENTATION

LITERARY BACKGROUND AND CRITICISM

  • The Internet Public Library Online Literary Criticism Collection:  This literary metasite contains over 1,000 annotated metasites and articles devoted to literary criticism, biographical, and other information about 123 authors from Dante Alighieri to Arthur Miller to William Butler Yeats. The links to criticism information can be to sites or articles (some of which have access restrictions). Visitors can browse the site by author, title, or literary period (for British and American literature). In addition, both a literary criticism guide and a pathfinder are provided for those who wish to further explore web and print resources on the topic (from The Internet Scout Report).
  • Biographical and critical resources about many of the authors in this class can be found at the Literature Resource Center, a site that allows you to search through hundreds of Gale reference volumes, including the Dictionary of Literary Biography series as well as many other biographical and critical sources.
  • The Voice of the Shuttle literary resources
  • Key Literary Terms
  • A Glossary of Poetic terms

VICTORIAN BACKGROUND

  • Dictionary of Victorian London: Designed and maintained by Lee Jackson, an author and librarian, the Victorian Dictionary is a useful resource on Victorian London history during the 19th century. This site contains over 40 categories that range from architecture, to clothing and fashions, to dates and events, to entertainment and recreation, to words and expressions. The site also contains a bibliography containing most of the resources used for the site, as well as links to other related sites (Copyright 1994-2004 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu).
  • What was Jane Eyre's £50 per year salary really worth? Economic History Resources' "How Much Is That Worth Today?" enables users to determine the purchasing power of British currency for any year from 1600 to the present.
  • Victoria Research Web: An offshoot of the VICTORIA discussion list and hosted by Indiana University, this site is designed to assist researchers, teachers, and students studying nineteenth century Britain. Users will find a number of helpful items such as a guide to Victorian holdings in selected archives, book reviews on-line, bibliographies, a guide to using the new British Library, tips on planning a research trip, sample syllabi, and a guide to major journals in the field. Additional resources include a list of related discussion groups and a search engine for the VICTORIA archives. VICTORIA equally welcomes the contributions of students of literature, social history, politics, gender studies, publishing, art, and intellectual history in "the long 19th century" (Copyright 1994-2004 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu).
  • The Victorian Web: Literature, History and Culture in the Age of Victoria.
  • A commprehensive list of Victorian studies and author Web sites maintained by Mitsuharu Matsuoka.
  • Victorian British Literary Resources from the Voice of the Shuttle.
  • BBC Timelines: England and Scotland:  The BBC History 2000 project offers these multi-level timelines of the histories of England and Scotland from the Neolithic age to the present. As timelines go, these are unusually detailed and provide paragraph-length descriptions -- often accompanied by photos, artwork, or 3-D online models -- about such events and personages as the building of Hadrian's wall; Jane Grey, the nine-day queen; and Robert the Bruce, the famous Scottish warrior-king who secured his country's independence from England in 1328. Users can view the timelines separately or together, allowing for comparative consideration of the evolution of these two often warring, but still tightly knit, nations.
  • 1901: Living at the Time of the Census [Quicktime, MediaPlayer]: Assembled from the vast historical treasures of the UK Public Record Office (PRO) (last mentioned in the June 15, 2001 Scout Report), this virtual exhibition "uses words, pictures and documents to open a door onto life in 1901." Intended as an easily understood introduction to family and community historical research, the exhibition also works well in explaining the life and times of the people documented in the 1901 census. The essays are well written and accessible, with many illustrative images of historical documents (i.e., maps, photos, etc.). It is divided into 4 thematic sections--Cinema (silent film footage courtesy of the British Film Institute), People and Places of 1901, Living in 1901, and Events of 1901 (Copyright 1994-2004 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu).
  • Penguin Classics Website -- contains short articles, biographies, synopses, and feature essays on many Victorian authors
  • Victorian Social History: An Overview (from The Victorian Web). Contains a treasure trove of pages devoted to such social issues as public health, labor, race, class, gender, education and economics.
  • Old Bailey Proceedings Online: Formally known as the Central Criminal Court of London, the Old Bailey is arguably the world's most well-known criminal court. Serving the Commonwealth since the 17th century, the Old Bailey has seen hundreds of thousands of trials for every offense imaginable, along with serving as the setting for many important trials of the famous and infamous. Designed as a collaboration between the University of Sheffield and the University of Hertfordshire, this ambitious project aims to create a fully searchable digitized collection of the Old Bailey's entire proceedings from 1674 to 1834. Currently, visitors can browse through 22,000 trials, from December 1714 to December 1759. The Web site indicates that the entire proceedings should be online by spring of 2004, so interested persons should continue to check back frequently. From the main page, visitors can search the proceedings (and elect to read a transcription of each trial or view the original document), read about the nature of the proceedings, and read some engaging background essays on crime and punishment through the court's history (Copyright 1994-2004 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu).
  • Historical Directories: Sometime you may find yourself wondering one of the world's eternal questions: How many cutlers were in Sheffield during the 1850s? Well, you might not be actively seeking the answer to that particular query, but this incredibly extensive digital library created by the University of Leicester may help you solve other related historical questions. This digital library contains a host of local and trade directories for England and Wales from 1750 to 1919, many of which were previously only accessible by making a special trip to any number of local historical societies or archives. Curious visitors can search the directories through an interactive map of England and Wales in order to find the information that is most relevant to their interests. Currently, the project provides at least one directory for each segment from the interactive map from the 1850s, 1890s, and 1910s. Visitors can also search the entire digitized archive by keyword, location, and name (Copyright 1994-2004 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu).
  • What was the weather like?: This Web site offers chronological descriptions of notable weather events in British history, including the first and second halves of the nineteenth century.

WOMEN'S STUDIES

WOMEN WRITERS

  • The University of Minnesota's Voices from the Gap Web site, focusing on the lives and works of North American women writers of color.
  • A Celebration of Women Writers provides a comprehensive listing of links to biographical and bibliographical information about women writers, and complete published books written by women.
  • Domestic Goddesses: A site devoted to nineteenth-century American women writers such as Alcott, Stowe and Wharton.
  • American Women's Dime Novels, 1870-1920: examines the genre of women's dime novel writing and its role in changing gender and class formations. This project provides information about the novels themselves, the authors, the readers, and nineteenth century public reception.
  • Domestic Fiction, 1830-1860: discusses the nineteenth-century domestic or sentimental genre, its characteristics, and its practitioners.
  • Women in the Literary Marketplace: The books and letters in this online exhibition present a cross section of writing by English women in the nineteenth century–a period when women entered the literary marketplace in unprecedented numbers.
  • Romantic-era Women Poets
  • WORP: a site devoted to women writers of the Romantic period
  • The Poetess Archive offers bibliographies of material written about or by a group of allegedly “sentimental” British and American writers, most often women, who wrote popular poetry. The site also includes Victorian and modern literary criticism about these authors.

ELECTRONIC TEXTS

  • Project Bartleby
  • The Victorian Women Writers Project: searchable database of e-texts
  • The Brown University Women Writers Project: The Brown University Women Writers Project has recently published the beta-test version of an online textbase. The textbase is a collection of primarily pre-Victorian (1450-1850) literature written by women. The initial release of the textbase will include over 200 texts, and 50 to 100 more will be added in the first year. The collection spans a wide array of topics and genres, providing a unique and valuable resource for the study of women's writing in English.
  • British Poetry 1780-1910 : from University of Virginia's Electronic text Archive
  • An online archive of writings by nineteenth-century American women writers
  • The Emory Women Writers Resource Project is a collection of edited and unedited texts by women writing in English from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century.
  • African-American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century: a digital archive of texts from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center. African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. This collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920. A full text database of these 19th and early 20th- century titles, this digital library is key-word-searchable. Each individual title as well as the entire database can be searched to determine what these women had to say about "family", "religion", "slavery" or any other subject of interest to the researcher or casual reader.

LIBRARIES, ARCHIVES and MUSEUMS 

PERIODICALS

WORKING-CLASS LIVES

WOMEN AND THE DOMESTIC SPHERE

  • A site about Godey's Lady's Book, one of the earliest and most popular nineteenth-century magazines devoted to women's interests and lives, includes background and history as well as a number of searchable issues.
  • Playing House: Homemaking for Children: The world of domesticity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was one that placed a premium on oversight of many aspects of the home. While many instructional devices (such as books and manuals) were created to instruct women in the fine arts of cookery, laundry, and other areas, there were equivalent materials created for young girls. As part of their ongoing work, the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections project has created this digital collection that brings together several of these manuals from this period. All told, the collection contains five such works, including Elizabeth Hale Gilman's Things Girls Like To Do from 1917 and her oft- cited work from 1916, Housekeeping. Each work can be viewed in its entirety, and visitors can also perform searches across the entire collection
    • (Copyright 1994-2004 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu). (Copyright 1994-2007 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu).
  • Ideals of Womanhood in Victorian Britain, by Dr. Lynn Abrahms. A woman’s place was in the home. Domesticity and motherhood were portrayed as a sufficient emotional fulfillment. These constructs kept women far away from the public sphere, but charitable missions began to extend the female role of service and Victorian feminism emerged as a potent political force.
  • Women and Urban Life in Victorian Britain, by Professor Lynda Nead. The idea of femininity was encapsulated in the idea of the "woman's mission" but, as Lynda Nead shows, the moral health of the empire could no longer afford to rely on the passive behavior of its women. They were ready to take to the streets and live an independent life.
  • Play the BBC Women's Rights Game: What use would women have of a university education? Why should women want to keep their earnings for themselves? Who would want to be treated by a woman doctor? Play the game by knocking on the doors of Victorian opportunity - but don't expect too much too soon.

EDUCATION

THE GOTHIC

INDIVIDUAL AUTHORS

Jane Austen

The Republic of Pemberley
Austen.com offers links to online Austen resources, as well as bibliographic, critical and biographical information.
The Jane Austen Information Page
Pride and Prejudice (annotated text)

 

Louisa May Alcott


Charlotte Brontë

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Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Jane Campion
  • A link to an online text of the script for The Piano.
  • Essay by bell hooks, "Misogyny, Gangsta Rap and The Piano." bell hooks reads the film in relation to misogyny, sexism and gangsta rap.
  • Unofficial site for the film, created on web site for Physics Department (!) University of Oslo – Text in English (page has music).
  • Images for The Piano– these are not stills (shots from the film), but publicity photos.
  • Biography for Jane Campion: Site also includes a plot summary and information on Michael Nyman’s music (with links), Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, Anna Paquin.
  • Short biography of Jane Campion, written in 1998, and another.
  • More information about Jane Campion, and short discussion of The Piano.
  • Lengthy article on The Piano, from The Boston Review (this is over 4,500 words). Examines the film in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis – you may have some strong reactions to this essay!

Kate Chopin


Historical and cultural contexts for The Awakening
Background and criticism on The Awakening from The Domestic Goddesses site, devoted to nineteenth-century women writers
The PAL (Perspectives in American Literature) page on Chopin, includes bibliography and study questions

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Susan Glaspell

Marietta Holley

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Shirley Jackson

Harriet Jacobs

Toni Morrison

An extensive collection of critical reviews and essays on Beloved, including historical, psychoanalytic, and feminist interpretations.
Anniina's Toni Morrison site contains biographical, bibliographical and critical resources on Morrison's life and writing
The University of Minnesota's "Voices from the Gaps" Toni Morrison page offers extensive biographical background, as well as bibliographical and critical resources on Morrison's life and writings

Joyce Carol Oates

Dorothy Parker

Christina Rossetti

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Alice Walker

Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930): Links to biographical, bibliographic and background information, as well as a number of photographs of Freeman.
A biography of Freeman from the "Scribbling Women" Web site.
An overview of Freeman's life and works from the PAL (Perspectives in American Literature) Project.
A page on Freeman's supernatural fiction from the Literary Gothic site, includes background on Freeman as well as links to other sites and selected e-texts.
A chronology of Freeman's life.
Check out more of Freeman's stories at HorrorMasters' Women of Horror page.

Mary Wollstonecraft