School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies

Profile

My main area of research is in seventeenth-century literature and culture. I have particular interests in early modern women’s writing, discourses of natural philosophy, poetry of the Civil War and Republican periods and seventeenth-century concepts of retreat and friendship. I have published articles and essays on a wide range of writers, such as Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Richard Lovelace, An Collins, Mary Chudleigh, Robert Herrick and Aphra Behn, as well as an edited collection on Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. 

In September 2009 my colleague Paraic Finnerty and I organised the Annual English Literature Symposium at Portsmouth on Amity in Early Modern Literature and Culture, the result of which will be a Special Issue on this topic for the journal Literature and History, forthcoming Spring 2011, and will include contributions from Lorna Hutson, Thomas MacFaul and Wendy Trevor.

Research Areas 

Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture, Early Modern Women’s Writing, poetry of the Civil War and Republican periods 

Publications 

• ‘Verse, Voice, and Body: the Retirement Mode and Women’s Poetry 1680-1723’. Early Modern Literary Studies 12.3 (Jan 2007): 5.1-44.
• ‘”The image of her mind”: the self, dissent and femininity in An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions’. Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 249-65.
• Ed. and Introduction to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
• ‘Women’s Poetry 1550-1700: “Not Unfit  to be Read”’. In  A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Ed. A. Pacheco (pp. 282-302) Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
• ‘A Rhetoric of Innocence: the Poetry of Katherine Philips, “the Matcheless Orinda”’. In Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. B.Smith and U. Appelt. (pp. 223-46). Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001.
• ‘Journeys beyond Frontiers: Knowledge, Subjectivity and Outer Space in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World’. Literature and History, 7.2 (Autumn 1998): 21-50.
• (A revised version of  the above article appeared in The Arts of Seventeenth-Century Science. Ed. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt. (pp.127-45). Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002.
• ‘Feminine Modes of Knowing and Scientific Enquiry: Cavendish’s Poetry as a Case Study’. In Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700. Ed. Helen Wilcox. (pp.117-42) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996.
• ‘Playing the “Masculine Part”: Finding a Difference within Behn’s Poetry’. In Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing. Ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill. (pp.117-42). Keele: Keele University Press, 1996, pp. 129-52. Reprinted Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
• ‘”Th’inwards of th’Abysse”: Questions of the Subject in Lovelace’s Poetry’. English, 43 (Summer 1994): 117-37.
• ‘The Fractured Body: Censorship and Desire in Herrick’s poetry’. Literature and History 2.1 (Spring 1993): 23-41.