Patricia Pender

‘Kicking Ass is Comfort Food’: Buffy as Third Wave Feminist Icon

What accounts for the extraordinary feminist appeal of the hit television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how has its ex-cheerleading, demon-hunting heroine become the new poster girl for third wave feminist popular culture?1 In this chapter I examine Buffy through the problematic of third wave feminism, situating the series as part of a larger cultural project that seeks to reconcile the political agenda of second wave feminism with the critique of white racial privilege articulated by women of colour and the theoretical insights afforded by poststructural analysis. I suggest that if one of the primary goals of third wave feminism is to question our inherited models of feminist agency and political efficacy, without acceding to the defeatism implicit in the notion of ‘postfeminism,’ then Buffy provides us with modes of oppositional praxis, of resistant femininity and, in its final season, of collective feminist activism that are unparalleled in mainstream television. At the same time, the series’ emphasis on individual empowerment, its celebration of the exceptional woman, and its problematic politics of racial representation remain important concerns for feminist analysis. Focusing primarily on the final season of the series, I argue that season seven of Buffy offers a more straightforward and decisive feminist message than the show has previously attempted, and that in doing so it paints a compelling picture of the promises and predicaments that attend third wave feminism as it negotiates both its second wave antecedents and its traditional patriarchal nemeses.

Kicking Ass Is Comfort Food

What accounts for the extraordinary feminist appeal of the hit television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how has its ex-cheerleading, demon-hunting heroine become the new poster girl for third wave feminist popular culture? In this chapter I examine Buffy through the problematic of third wave feminism, situating the series as part of a larger cultural project that seeks to reconcile the political agenda of second wave feminism with the critique of white racial privilege articulated by women of colour and the theoretical insights afforded by poststructuralism. I suggest that if one of the primary goals of third wave feminism is to question our inherited models of feminist agency and political efficacy, without acceding to the defeatism implicit in the notion of ‘postfeminism’, then Buffy provides us with modes of oppositional praxis, of resistant femininity and, in its final season, of collective feminist activism that are unparalleled in mainstream television. At the same time, the series’ emphasis on individual empowerment, its celebration of the exceptional woman, and its politics of racial representation remain important concerns for feminist analysis. Focusing primarily on the final season of the series, I argue that season seven of Buffy offers a more straightforward and decisive feminist message than the show has previously attempted, and that in doing so it paints a compelling picture of the promises and predicaments that attend third wave feminism as it negotiates both its second wave antecedents and its traditional patriarchal nemeses.

From Paratext to Epitext: Mapping the Authorial Apparatus in Early Modern Women's Writing

Our focus on Early Modern Womens Writing and the Apparatus of Authorship in this special issue of Parergon responds to emerging trends in early modern womens studies that emphasize the importance of the material text to the literary, historical, and political analysis of womens works in the long early modern period. Attention to the material contexts of womens works is not new; it has, for instance, been a staple of the invaluable critical introductions to early modern womens texts that have been produced in the past thirty years. However, it is also the case that, until relatively recently, such scholarship has remained something of a specialist concern, standing in paratexual relationship to the text proper, as an introduction to the work that follows. This relationship has been reinforced in criticism that considers the literary interpretation of early modern womens writing before, or outside of, its material and textual specificity. If there has been something of a time lag in the material turn in early modern womens studies, this might be attributed, as Sarah C. E. Ross suggests in her introduction, to the fields initial focus on the recovery of the historical woman writer and the assumption that gender provides the most pertinent interpretive crux to her text.3 While the past thirty years of scholarship has complicated this focus by incorporating analyses of rank, race, learning, sexuality, geographical location, and political and religious affiliation into the picture, the historical conditions that make a critical focus on gender valid and generative have by no means disappeared. The essays collected here share a continued focus on gender as a crucial feature of early modern womens writing, but they explore this focus in ways that attempt to unhinge it from immutable or essential associations with the body of the woman writer and insist instead on genders shifting, contingent, productive, and performative relationships to the corpus of womens writing as we inherit it.

Introduction: Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration

Women played a variety of roles in the production of early modern literature, many of which remain hidden from view under a model of single, solitary authorship. The contradiction between collaboration—whether literary, material, or both—and the very idea of women’s writing make this an area of investigation prone to conflict, just as it is in canonical studies. By way of introduction to a volume of new essays on gender and early modern literary collaboration, this chapter briefly surveys these conflicts and the development of collaborative authorial models within early modern feminist scholarship. It highlights the advantages of mixed-methods approaches to this topic, arguing that both book history and literary methods have much to offer in the analysis of early modern collaborations.

“A Veray Patronesse”: Margaret Beaufort and the Early English Printers

This chapter considers Margaret Beaufort’s role as patron to the early English printers and asks in what ways and to what extent we might consider these relationships collaborative. In their prologues, epilogues, printer’s marks, and colophons, William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and Richard Pynson provide a record of their working arrangements with Beaufort that bear witness to the multiple roles she played in English book history—as writer, translator, commissioner, purchaser, distributor, and reader. Rhetorically rich and visually emphatic—these paratexts illuminate the ways in which Beaufort’s promotion of textual production could provide a model of royal patronage from which later Tudor women would draw inspiration and authority.

Constructing a Canonical Colonial Poet: Abram E. Cutter’s Bradstreetiana and the 1867 Works

T he works of anne bradsTreeT in prose and verse was edited by John Harvard Ellis and published by Abram E. Cutter in 1867.1 The book-as-object is a handsome affair, running 434 royal-octavo pages, including a colored title page (in red and black) and two mezzotintstipple engravings, one of which was specially commissioned for the book. Its scholarly apparatus features facsimile reproductions of the title pages from Bradstreet’s three previous editions (1650, 1678, and 1758), a six-page preface followed by a sixty-page introduction complete with footnotes (both by the editor), and a substantial index of seventeen pages. The poems themselves are lightly annotated; the book contains a liberal quantity of type embellishments; and one of the distinctions of its typo graphy is the use of the by-then archaic long s. What was this deluxe edition—the first edition of Bradstreet in over 100 years—designed to do? How does the book as physical object encode, or allude to, the aspirations of its makers? Ellis’s wide-ranging introduction gives ample insight into his editorial strategy, but Cutter’s motivations in publishing

Introduction: Early Modern Women’s Material Texts: Production, Transmission and Reception

The material conditions that influenced early modern women’s writing are crucial to understanding what women wrote and how their work can be read. Like all material artefacts, early modern women’s texts do not reach readers in isolation, but emerge through complex systems of production, transmission and reception. Criticism of early modern women’s writing in the last decade has increasingly emphasised their engagement with different generic forms and modes of circulation, expanding the parameters of the field beyond literary interpretation of the texts themselves to an engagement with their intricate textual histories. The current volume builds upon this work to produce a wide- ranging account of the rich and diverse material cultures through which early modern women’s writing was produced, transmitted and received. It focuses on the ways in which this writing was culturally mediated: how it was originally packaged and promoted, how it circulated in its contemporary contexts, and how it was read and received in later revisions and redactions. In doing so, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing aims to illuminate not only the ways in which we read, analyse and value early modern women’s writing, but also to expand our understanding of the production, transmission and reception of early modern literature more broadly.

Dispensing Quails, Mincemeat, Leaven: Katherine Parr’s Patronage of the Paraphrases of Erasmus

As a prominent patron of humanist scholarship and Reformed religion, and the author of several devotional works in her own right, Katherine Parr exerted a significant influence on the English Reformation — as several scholars have begun to explore.1 Yet to date, it is the texts that most legibly bear her authorial signature that have attracted critical attention.2 Parr’s patronage, by contrast, has long been widely celebrated as historical fact and at the same time surprisingly ignored as a social, literary and mechanical process. In the Acts and Monuments (1563), for instance, John Foxe paints a triumphal Protestant portrait of the queen as the period’s ‘only patroness of the professors of the truth’.3 And Parr’s recent biographer Susan James goes so far as to say that Katherine was ‘by conviction, by influence and by actions the first true queen of the English Reformation’.4 According to James Kelsey McConica’s 1965 portrayal of the period, Parr’s generation found appropriate patronage, not in a Machiavellian Secretary of State, but in a noble lady of irenic temperament and sincere attachment to humanist learning. … It is in her circle, which revives the traditions of her royal predecessors Margaret Beaufort and Catherine of Aragon, that the Erasmian spirit finds new shelter and influential support.5

‘A worme most abjecte’: Sermo Humilis as Reformation Strategy in Katherine Parr’s Prayers or Medytacions

Katherine Parr’s reputation as the wife who ‘survived’ Henry VIII was secured, in part, by the spectacular performance of obedience and submission she staged before the king and his councilors when, in 1545, she was targeted with accusations of conspiracy and treason by the conservative Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. Pleading that as a wife and woman, she submitted absolutely to her husband and king, Parr put into physical practice the sermo humilis, or humble style, which also characterized her publication in the same year of Prayers stirring the mynd vnto heauenlye medytacions, usually referred to by its 1547 title, Prayers or Medytacions. Translating the third book of Thomas a Kempis’s Imitatio Christi (c. 1441), Parr presented the monologue of a generic ‘creature’ in place of her source text’s dialogue between man and God, establishing in that process a unique space for private feminine devotion in the emerging vernacular literature of the English Reformation Church. By employing humility topoi which referred obliquely to contemporary cultural discourses of women’s weakness, she moreover presented the devout woman’s relationship to God as the most humble, and therefore the most appropriate approach to ‘heauenlye medytacion.’

From Self-Effacement to Sprezzatura: Modesty and Manipulation

In the fourth book of the anonymous Rhetorica Ad Herennium (90s BC) — formerly attributed to Cicero and the most popular Latin rhetorical treatise of the early modern period — the author attempts to justify the unusual procedure of including excerpts of his own poetry as exempla of the rhetorical stratagems he describes. Unlike George Puttenham, who was to use this technique unabashedly in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), he must defend this decision because the authors of the Greek rhetorical handbooks that precede him typically employed conventional literary examples rather than proffering their own creative efforts: ‘And their first ground is that in doing so they are prompted by modesty, because it seems a kind of ostentation not to be content to teach the art, but to appear desirous themselves of creating examples artificially.’1 To this argument the author of the Ad Herennium provides a complex and vigorous rejoinder: First, then, let us beware lest the Greeks offer us too childish an argument in their talk about modesty. For if modesty consists in saying nothing or writing nothing, why do they write or speak at all?… It is as if some one should come to the Olympic games to run, and having taken a position for the start, should accuse of impudence those who have begun the race — should himself stand within the barrier and recount to others how Ladas used to run, or Boiscus in the Isthmian games. These Greek rhetoricians do likewise. When they have descended into the race-course of our art, they accuse of immodesty those who put in practice the essence of the art; they praise some ancient orator, poet, or literary work, but without themselves daring to come forth into the stadium of rhetoric. I should not venture to say so, yet I fear that in their very pursuit of praise for modesty they are impudent. (IV.ii.3)