Transformations 2011-2012

Follow

• 

  Dr. Julie Campbell: WRITING RENAISSANCE EMBLEMS: HEARTS ON FIRE IN THE FIRST PART OF THE COUNTESS OF MONTGOMERY’S URANIA

  Julie Campbell

  “With The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), Lady Mary Wroth transformed the genre of Renaissance romance in ways that her male predecessors would never have imagined. Populating her pages with faithless, fickle heroes and heroines both practical and constant, she embroils them in adventures that push these roman à clef characters toward their dynastic destinies. In particular, her enchantment scenes, based on imagery from emblems and court masques, provide concentrated, dramatic episodes that illustrate the transformative whole of her work.”

  Julie D. Campbell is professor of English and Women’s Studies at Eastern Illinois University. Her areas of teaching and research are Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature with specialization in the works of continental and English women writers. She is the author of Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2006) and the editor and translator of Isabella Andreini’s pastoral, La Mirtilla (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2002). Dr. Campbell’s current work is focused on women and transcultural patronage at the court of Henri IV.

• 

  Linda Hogan: “Women Watching Over the World”

  Lind Hogan

  "Linda Hogan can teach us a generous vision of nature. In her poems, novels, stories, and nonfiction, she shows a love of the created order that exists not at the expense of love of humanity, but as a fuller expression of that love. To be human, according to her vision, is to be situated on the planet, and to be sensitive to its moods, its angles, its secrets, and its kinds of life—animal, vegetable, and even mineral. Hogan possesses the skill of standing in awe of the earth’s mysteries, a sensitivity to the grace present in nature. Her language—careful, polished, serene, and strange—shocks us awake to the grandeur around us, and reminds us of our part in it. Hogan shows us our smallness, yes, but also our giftedness, our blessedness. This is not a fearful smallness, but the smallness of humility before something wildly, mightily alive." – Image Journal

• 

  James R. Barrett: THE IRISH & THE MAKING OF MULTI-ETHNIC CHICAGO

  James R. Barrett

  A lively, street-level history of turn of- the-century urban life explores the Americanizing influence of the Irish on successive waves of immigrants in the American city.

  Taking Chicago as a particularly striking case, Jim Barrett describes how a new American identity was forged in the interactions between immigrants in the streets, saloons, churches and workplaces of the American city. This process of "Americanization" was led largely by the Irish. On Chicago's South Side and in other urban communities between the end of the nineteenth century and the Great Depression, waves of immigrants and migrants of color found it nearly impossible to avoid the entrenched Irish. While historians have long emphasized the role of settlement houses and other mainstream institutions in Americanizing immigrants, Barrett makes the case that the most important acts in this drama occurred in city streets and that the vibrant hybrid working class culture absorbed by newcomers had a distinctly Hibernian cast.