Hilary Emmett

The ‘Willful’ Girl in the Anglo-World: Sentimental Heroines and Wild Colonial Girls, 1872–1923

Taking its cue from Sara Ahmed’s recent (2014) exploration of the ‘willful’ subject in literature, political philosophy and cultural history, this chapter applies this concept to literary constructions of childhood in the British world and beyond. Tellingly, Ahmed writes, it was the character of Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss that sparked her interest in willfullness. Her investigation thus begins with an evocation of the ‘many willful girls that haunt literature’1 — a haunting that I take up here in part to resuscitate these girls and answer Ahmed’s call for their existence to be recorded in an ‘archive’ of willfulness, but equally to explore the ways in which literature itself (and sentimental domestic literature aimed at girls in particular) is a complex disciplinary agent that simultaneously documents expressions of willfulness even as it offers blueprints for its eradication. Literature for girls in the latter half of the nineteenth century has been critically acknowledged as a mechanism for ‘straightening out’ wayward children,2 and the sentimental domestic novel, as it evolved into a genre specifically aimed at young women, was one of the primary agents in naturalizing certain behaviours as girls matured into womanhood. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) stands as the foundational example of this genre, in which a family of girls are shaped into ‘good wives’.3

Prophetic Reading: Sisterhood and Psychoanalysis in H.D.’s HERmione

Abstract This article offers a comparative reading of H.D.’s 1927 kunstlerroman à clef, HERmione and Freud’s Dora alongside an intertextual close reading of its dense web of literary allusions in order to argue that it offers a sustained critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and an alternative origin story for the condition of hysteria. Drawing on the notion of prophecy as it is thematised in the novel, the article demonstrates H.D.’s prefiguring of Juliet Mitchell’s recent reconfiguration of hysteria as a response to, replacement by, or failure of identification with a sibling.

Brownian Motion: Directions in Charles Brockden Brown Scholarship

Jeffrey Weinstock’s Gothic Authors, Critical Revisions: Charles Brockden Brown presents a synthesis of fiftyodd years of criticism on Brown’s contribution to the genre of gothic literature that seeks to introduce students and beginning scholars to his life and work. Mark Kamrath’s The Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown: Radical History and the Early Republic offers a dense critical account of Brown’s historical writings and theory of history, and Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Kamrath’s first volume of the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown brings together his epistolary writings—personal correspondence as well as epistolary fictions. Beyond the author in question, there is little immediate common ground on which to find purchase here, either theoretical or thematic. Yet hilary emmett University of East Anglia