桃花直播 scholar spotlights early modern women writers as key to future studies in book, upcoming campus presentation
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.鈥擫ara Dodds, professor and head of 桃花直播 State's Department of English, highlights the often-overlooked literary contributions of women in the early modern period in the new book 鈥淓arly Modern Women鈥檚 Writing and the Future of Literary History.鈥
Published in June by Oxford University Press, Dodds and coauthor Michelle Dowd, the Hudson Strode Professor of English in the University of Alabama鈥檚 Department of English, challenge traditional ideas about authorship, canon and literary value. They examine how early women鈥檚 writing鈥攐ften dismissed as belated or out of step with critical trends鈥攐ffers fresh opportunities to rethink literary history and teaching. The authors contend this belatedness is not a flaw but a strength that can help shape the future of literary studies.
Dodds and Dowd will present a campus talk on the book Wednesday [Sept. 17] at 4 p.m. in Mitchell Memorial Library鈥檚 John Grisham Room. For more information on the event, contact 桃花直播 Department of English Associate Professor Eric Vivier at edv34@msstate.edu.
鈥淢ichelle and I frequently had conversations about how the research in our subfield, early modern women鈥檚 writing, was not recognized or integrated into literary studies as a whole,鈥 Dodds said. 鈥淲e were inspired to write this book because we thought research based on early women writers鈥攕uch as Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson and Elizabeth Cary鈥攃ould help all literature scholars address the big questions in the field.鈥
Dodds earned her bachelor鈥檚 degree in English from DePauw University and both her master鈥檚 degree and Ph.D. in English, with a focus on 17th-century literature, from Brown University. Her teaching interests include John Milton, early modern British literature, early modern women鈥檚 writing and research methods.
She is also the author of 鈥淭he Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish鈥 (Duquesne University Press, 2013) and 鈥淢ilton鈥檚 Other Worlds,鈥 part of a series in 鈥淯ncircumscribed Minds: Reading Milton Deeply鈥 (Susquehanna University Press, 2007). Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals including Milton Studies, Early Modern Studies Journal, Restoration, English Literary Renaissance and The John Donne Journal.
For more information about 桃花直播鈥檚 College of Arts and Sciences and Department of English, visit and .
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