Abstract: This article considers the pronounced fictional bent of Frances Brooke's periodical, The Old Maid (1755–56), paying particular attention to the sentimental frame narrative. It demonstrates that themes from the sentimental frame are repeated with variation in surrounding narratives. Ultimately, the essay posits that the repetitive aspect of Brooke's narratives encourages readers to make comparisons, along with cultivating a critical, tasteful "affection for books." Instead of simply indulging sentimental readers, therefore, Brooke supercharges the fragmentary nature of her medium to promote responsible reading habits, making virtue of necessity while lending credibility to the humble single-essay journal.
Abstract: This " SEL : The Roundtable" features papers from the 2025 Modern Language Association roundtable "Gender and Embodiment: Trans Studies Approaches," organized by Sal Nicolazzo and Kathleen Lubey. The introductory essay recognizes the cluster's internal disagreements over trans-studies scholarly methods as a model for coalitional work more broadly. In the contributions' solidarity across difference, we see a framework for imagining the unlikely collaborations that might strengthen the collective actions of university workers.
Abstract: This paper seeks to identify the historical, disciplinary, and methodological distinctions between early modern trans studies and early modern critical intersex studies. Beginning with a survey of how scholars of early modern literature have taken up "hermaphrodites" and other intersex figures, this paper then turns to a little-known seventeenth-century text called The London Jilt to explore the affordances of critical intersex methods for the study of early modern literature. The paper ends with a reflection upon Hil Malatino's theorization of a trans and intersex coalitional politic and hopes for a similar disciplinary coalition in early modern studies.
Abstract: In this response to M. A. Miller's and Madison R. Wolfert's " SEL : The Roundtable" papers, Colby Gordon considers how trans and intersex studies benefit from the insights and methodologies of early modern studies. Gordon argues that the early literature and history of trans life, such as the poetry and prose analyzed by Miller and Wolfert, and the methods of early modern studies can productively diverge from the pathologizing effects of sexological discourse inherited by more modern historicizing practices. Through a reading of Anniseed-water Robin in The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith (1662), Gordon suggests scholars avoid the temptation of a diagnosis, not to evade differences but to make visible alternative archives of trans possibility.
Abstract: In this thematic review essay, Stephanie Insley Hershinow offers an assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it relates to love, gender, and sexuality. A full Bibliography of Recent Studies and price list of works for consideration can be found in the same issue.
Abstract: In this thematic review essay, Elisha Cohn offers an assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it relates to ecology and environment. A full Bibliography of Recent Studies and a price list of works for consideration can be found in the same issue.
Abstract: This paper reconsiders the fakir to intervene in trans-studies debates on temporality, embodiment, and relationality. Turning to the sixteenth-century Punjabi Sufi poet Shah Hussein (1538–99), I argue that Hussein's Kafi poetry voices a "divine meanwhile"—a sacred interval during which love undoes the self, drawing it toward God while dissolving the borders of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human life. His feminized speech enacts abasement and risk, the willingness to be undone at the threshold of love. Read beside representations in eighteenth-century colonial Anglophone archives, the fakir emerges as sanctified and derided. This comparative framework unsettles trans ahistoricity and instead traces transness as an enduring inheritance forged through contact, mistranslation, and devotion.
Abstract: Although more known for its representation of Henry V as a charismatic king with a common touch, Shakespeare's Henry V juxtaposes the feudal order with early capitalist relations secured by payment and exchange. Allusions to money and acknowledgment of the theater as a commercial space call into question the primacy of a mystical economy flowing from the king's body. This essay draws on affect theory, alchemical discourse, and new economic criticism to argue that Henry V offers the playhouse as an alternative model of affective economy. History produced in the playhouse writes the commons into popular memory, contesting the elite biases of prose historiography, supplementing the losses of pre-Reformation communal experience, and insisting on the economic, affective, and political significance of common lives.
Abstract: This essay argues that early modern Ovidianism offers a rich discourse for tracing the history of emotions and focuses on the ways Ovid's Metamorphoses represents Hecuba's revenge and metamorphosis as a narrative of maternal anger reflecting individual and collective suffering. Utilizing Sara Ahmed's approach to reading literary history as a key to understanding biocultural emotional formations, this essay suggests that references to and adaptations of this particular myth can be considered entries in an archive of maternal anger and its political consequences that extends from Ovid's Metamorphoses to the present.
Abstract: This " SEL : The Roundtable" features papers from the 2025 Modern Language Association roundtable "Rage: Early Modern Women, Gender, and Anger." The introductory essay situates the cluster within contemporary attacks on women's and gender studies programs, emphasizing why anger, long policed as an emotion unbecoming of women, has renewed critical urgency. Across case studies ranging from Ming dynasty China to early modern England and eighteenth-century France, contributors explore how female anger was theorized, constrained, pathologized, or weaponized, and how early modern women articulated protest through forms both expressive and suppressed. Drawing on thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ahmed, and Elizabeth V. Spelman, the essays model what Cora Fox terms "strategic anachronism" to illuminate transhistorical structures of gendered emotion and injustice. Together, they create a collective feminist inquiry into how anger clarifies, resists, and transforms.
Abstract: This paper examines Charlotte Corday's assassination of Jean-Paul Marat through eighteenth-century ideas of anger, gender, and political agency. It analyzes trial records and her writings to foreground Corday as a politically engaged and articulate actor. These archival sources reveal her deliberate assumption of responsibility and her self-presentation as rational and composed, challenging dominant constructions of female emotional excess. By assessing both Corday's intellectual agency and the public responses to her act, the paper interrogates the gendered meanings of women's participation in political violence.
Abstract: This essay explores how The Comedy of Errors dramatizes the destabilizing effects of the market economy on domestic life and gender roles. It argues that the play presents market-driven spontaneity as a disruptive force that threatens the routines and rituals essential to both familial and communal stability. Rather than merely curbing male autonomy, the play reshapes female identity by subtly coercing women into an idealized gender role that suppresses their personal desires and interests. Ultimately, this transformation culminates in the gossips' feast, which restores familial and social unity by reconciling the regularity of domestic life with the spontaneity of the marketplace.
Abstract: Although lyric poetry has long been regarded as a genre of self-writing in dynastic China, not all emotions are deemed suitable. Anger is one of them. Few poems describe anger, especially poems by women. In this essay, I will first explore the concept of anger, followed by the role of anger regulation in constructing gender norms in dynastic China. The third part discusses the literary and aesthetic traditions that led to the invisibility of anger in women's poetry. In the fourth section, I examine the representations of anger in women's poetry in the late Ming period (mid-sixteenth century to mid-seventeenth century) when social discourses on emotion underwent a radical change, and I investigate how women's portrayals of their anger contribute to reconstructing femininity.
Abstract: In this thematic review essay, Julia Reinhard Lupton offers an assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of Tudor and Stuart drama as it relates to space and place. A full Bibliography of Recent Studies and price list of works for consideration can be found in the same issue.
