Sarah Fielding promoted rational reading practices through techniques that often differed from those used in the mid-eighteenth-century novel, particularly the contrary techniques employed by Samuel Richardson and her brother, Henry Fielding. Examining Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa and her co-authored “dramatic fable” The Cry, this essay argue…[Read more]

From Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2010.

Draft of pre-publication review of Courtyard Theatre’s 2016 production of Missouri Williams’ King Lear with Sheep. For the published and corrected version, please see: https://shakespearequarterly.folger.edu/web_exclusive/shakespeare-performed-courtyard-theatres-king-lear-with-sheep/

his article examines recent critical approaches to Shakespeare and the senses. Historicizing the senses has posed certain methodological challenges: what is the relationship between subjective sensory perceptions and broader cultural understandings of sensation? Does the sensate have a history? Recent work on each of the five senses demonstrates…[Read more]

Who or what played the baboon on early modern London’s stages? Such a question may seem as obscure as its answer obvious; I ask it, however, to foreground the long history of trained animal performers and their relationship to canonical English drama. The surprising presence of performing baboons in early modern London has been mostly forgotten or…[Read more]

Uniting literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and a deeply archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court freshly examines how literature reflects and constructs the dynamics of emotional life in the Renaissance courtly sphere. Spanning the 16th century — with chapters on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey…[Read more]

Olfaction has not figured largely in scholarly or popular understanding of early English stages; as stage properties, scents have rarely impacted the critical work on late medieval or early modern material histories of the stage, no doubt due to the assumption that olfaction lacks both a history and an archive. Nonetheless, for late medieval and…[Read more]