Using literary examples of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century representations of women as well as graphic images from the exhibition “Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women”, this workshop will explore the interactions between two meanings of the word “body”: the physical structure or substance of a person, and an organized group of individuals. Jane Austen plays across these two senses in Northanger Abbey when she complains that women novelists, so routinely derided and abused by reviewers and readers, are “an injured body.” Her phrase evokes the vulnerability of an individual physical body while the passage it appears in implies that the fervor of attacks on women novelists may arise partly from their corporate prominence and force. Austen stirringly calls on her sister novelists to take pride in their collective achievements, and not to “desert one another.”
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While priority is given to Yale graduate students, the Library also welcomes graduate students from other universities to apply. To apply, please send a brief statement of interest, c.v., and letter of academic reference to Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings, Lewis Walpole Library: cynthia.roman@yale.edu.