Fletcher and 'the Nature of Women'

Northeast Modern Language Association, Pittsburgh, 16-17 April 1999

This panel seeks to bring together current studies being done on the playwright John Fletcher, one of the triumvirate, along with Shakespeare and Jonson, of the most important early modern playwrights in his own
time, and, perhaps more importantly, Shakespeare's successor as chief dramatist for the King's Men. Its title, with its distinct and deliberate Dusinberrean echo, invokes the sense that individual dramatists other than Shakespeare still need to be mined in materialist and/or feminist veins, as well as in their relationship to Shakespeare. This panel is an attempt, therefore, to continue filling in the gaps that exist in our understanding of Fletcher and gender, and, by foregrounding the work of an individual playwright, to continue exploring the ways in which approaches to major and/or marginally canonical figures might be reorganized.

Recent scholarship has begun to redress these issues with regard to the Fletcher canon, tending to focus on the relationship between gender and genre, collaboration and authorship, performance history, patronage and
politics. These studies locate themselves in both the historical conditions of Stuart England under which Fletcher was writing and producing, and our own historical present which takes as its starting point the notion that gender is a socially-constructed category. This panel seeks work that begins in that same space, but is specifically
concerned with the ways in which social practices and culturally prescribed roles for women inflect Fletcherian constructions of femininity, especially in terms of his flatly Protestant politics, his use of Italian and Spenserian models, that particularly Fletcherian genre that we call the "chastity play," court productions, the public
stage, and the solo and/or post-Beaumont plays.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

--Fletcher, gender and the public sphere: performance, politics, religion(s), nationalism(s), print culture;

--Fletcher, gender and the private sphere: performance, property, domesticities, sexualities;

--Fletcher, gender and the canon;

--The Woman's Prize as an emerging benchmark for revisionist readings;

--Fletcher, gender and the syllabus.

Email queries and submissions are welcome; snailmail is also fine.

Please send 1-2 page abstracts or completed papers (8-10 pages) by September 15th to:

Sheila Walsh
35 Standish Road
Milton, MA 02186
(617) 698-0510
shwalsh@lynx.neu.edu

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© 1997-, R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS).
(PD 15 June 1998)