In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Women Writers Project, we are announcing a new series of short explorations of Women Writers Online: “Thirty Years, Thirty Ideas.” In this series, authors will consider a single topic—such as reading, childbirth, war, servants, clothing, or the environment—as an entry point into the WWO collection. The essays in the series, published on our open-access Women Writers in Context platform, are aimed at kindling excitement in readers and helping them to discover new texts by early women writers. To launch the series, we’re delighted to share the first two entries.
“Reading Race in Women Writers Online: Thirty Years On,” by Joyce MacDonald explores the presence of race throughout four early modern texts: Mary Wroth’s The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania, Katherine Philips’ Pompey, Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, the Faire Queene of Jewry, and Mary Sidney’s Antonius. Considering representations of race in works by early women writers, MacDonald’s essay reveals the various ways: “women wrote about race in sophisticated structural and imaginative terms that ranged far beyond just including people who were not white in their poems and plays.”
Michelle M. Dowd’s “Thirty Years, Thirty Ideas: Eve” examines the biblical Eve as she is represented throughout several seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts. Dowd traces textual representations of Eve in order to show that “Eve provided women writers a compelling focal point for their creative engagements with early modern religious, intellectual, and political culture.” This exhibit offers a feminist case study of Eve, considering the many ways that early women writers utilized Eve to make their various rhetorical, explanatory, and figurative points.
We will continue to publish new entries to “Thirty Years, Thirty Ideas” through Women Writers in Context and announce them on this blog. If you are interested in authoring an entry for this ongoing series—or if you want to suggest an idea and some accompanying texts—please see this page or contact us at wwp[at]northeastern[dot]edu.
