Preliminary Bibliography

The assignment from Dr. Logan:  


Using the MLA International Bibliography and America: History and Life databases at the UCF Library, develop a preliminary bibliography of secondary scholarly sources in the discipline of literature (with contextual sources from historians).  Use MLA documentation style.  Include keywords and searches used to develop this bibliography.  Consult a reference librarian if you encounter difficulties. 

[Submitted: 24 September 2010]

I have included a lot of sources which will (probably) end up being discarded during a closer look at each journal article and/or book.  However, I wanted to include them all because, one, I spent a lot of time looking them up, and two, it provides with me a wide range of possibilities for my project.  This preliminary bibliography will serve as a valuable resource for my project, and while I know I’ll end up spending more time on research, this guide should help me narrow and focus my search.

There were no results for female homosocial, and none applicable to my topic for homosocial in MLA, which is unsurprising considering its absence in the Library of Congress Subject Headings book.

Using MMMB in MLA for various options yielded just the modern edition.  Using MMMB as keyword term in America: History & Life yielded two already recorded book reviews of the modern edition, and one article about her published Miscellanies, Moral and Instructive text.

I included book reviews because I want to know how the book/article was received by the scholarly audience, or to quote Dr. Anna Jones, to see if they “bought it.”  I also included dissertations because of their works cited, which could potentially yield a lot of valuable sources.  I especially want to track down Susan Stabile’s dissertation, not just the abstract, which will require an ILL because the full text is not available via ProQuest.  When I included sources listed in the books I have already checked out of the UCF library, I only looked in the introductions due to time constraints.  Sometimes a source would appear in multiple locations (a book’s introduction, MLA and America: History & Life); I merely recorded it the first time I encountered it rather than list unnecessary duplications.

The categories of my preliminary bibliography at a quick glance:

• Recommendations from: Dr. Logan, and Jessica Workman.
• Found on my own
• From my previous research on The Factory Girl

• From Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf, Literature After Feminism, The Madwoman in the Attic, Memory’s Daughters, and Reading Women.

• Using of Marty Beth Norton as author in MLA
• Using Adrienne Rich as the subject term in MLA
• Using Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in America: History & Life
• Using Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in MLA
• Using Susan Stabile as author in MLA
• Using Laurel Thatcher Ulrich as the author in WorldCat

• Using commonplace book in America: History & Life
• Using commonplace book as subject (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using Delaware River Valley (N.Y.-Del. & N.J.) (1700-1799) in America: History & Life
• Using female friendship in literature (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using female-female relations (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using lesbianism in literature (1700-1799) in MLA
• Using literature and revolutions, (subject literature: American) (1700-1799): in MLA
• Using Manuscripts, American in America: History & Life
• Using Manuscripts, American (1700-1799) as subject in MLA
• Using Manuscript studies, American (1700-1799) as subject in MLA
• Using Quaker women (1700-1799) in America: History & Life
• Using Quaker women (1700-1799) in MLA

Key Issues & Keywords

The assignment from Dr. Logan:

Using your reading so far, course notes, and other materials as appropriate, list key issues raised by your selected text that are relevant to the study of representations of unruly women in early American literature. These issues could include genre, sub-genre (i.e. novel, short story, memoir; gothic, seduction tale, biography, etc.), subject matter (character, education, religion, crime, history, curiosity, etc.), and apparent readership.

Make a list of “keywords” for MLA and other database searches.  Make your list as specific as possible, noting page numbers and specific language, metaphors, patterns, etc. (It might be helpful to consult the National Union Catalog Subject Heading list at the UCF Library reference desk.)

[Submitted 19 September 2010] 

This is the list of issues, in alphabetical order, that I came up with prior to searching through the Library of Congress Subject Headings book (the red books behind the reference desk at the UCF Library).

1. Commonplace book studies
2. Delaware Valley, PA (during American Revolutionary War)
3. Female homosocial
4. Female literacy pre-Revolution through post-Revolution
5. Feminist theory
6. Friendship
7. Lesbian continuum
8. Manuscript studies
9. Quaker definitions of partner, soul, bosom friend
10. Quakers
11. Queer theory
12. Reading habits of the eighteenth–century American woman
13. Trans-Atlantic communication, pre-Revolution, Revolution, post-Revolution
14. Use of poetry by Quakers, especially women

While this list isn’t too shabby, it could be better.  I decided to search through the Library of Congress Subject Headings, because after all, these are the headings used by all the database search engines.  You can search through the subject headings online here, but I prefer to look through the book in person, especially since experience has taught me I’ll find so much more than expected if I do so.

These are what the "red books" look like, by the way:

 

Rhetorical Analysis

The assignment from Dr. Logan:

Please write a brief (500-750 words) essay that performs a rhetorical analysis of the front materials and first chapter of the novel you have selected for your research project.  You will then use this rhetorical analysis to consider the novel as a whole.

See Trish Roberts-Miller’s “Understanding Misunderstandings: How to do a rhetorical analysis” for more information about rhetorical analysis.

[Submitted: 17 September 2010]


In approaching Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, certain facts have to be taken into consideration.  Milcah Martha Moore was the only transcriber of the text, yet she did not contribute any prose or poetry pieces to the work.  Moore functioned as the editor and compiler, and the entries include both original creations and transcriptions of popular prose and/or poetry by various authors.  How does one then speak about the intentions of the implied author when there are sixteen distinct authors plus thirteen unidentified authors?  Do I choose to focus on the implied editor/compiler because, as Catherine L. Blecki states, “…organizing transcriptions in a commonplace book reveals a transcriber’s habits of mind and emotion” (MMMB 62)?  Or look at themes or the purpose of the text from the viewpoint of the implied audience, whom I already know to be “…a relatively small audience of family and friends who were affectionate, literature, and tolerant of many points of view” (MMMB 60)?  The answer, I believe, lies within the text itself; this rhetorical analysis will focus on the themes presented on the title page and within the first informal section of the commonplace book, as defined by Blecki and Kari A. Wulf (entries 1-29).   

MMMB is not a published text; rather, it is a handwritten manuscript originally bound in calfskin and transcribed during the middle years of the American Revolution.  Mimicking a published book, there is a title page that precedes the 126 entries; this title page provides a brief glimpse into what a reader will encounter within the book.  The actual title of the text, Martha Moore’s Book, is centered vertically and horizontally on the page, and is accompanied by a horizontal flourish.  It is also the largest script on the title page.  The title is written in cursive, whereas the rest of the text is a mixture of print and cursive.  Below the title is information concerning the author of this work: “Milcah Martha Hill / born Madeira / Married / Charles Moore.”  Moore identifies herself as the editor of the book, without the apologies often present in women’s published works in early American literature.

The commonplace book served multiple functions for the contemporary reader – it was meant to invoke discussion, record relationships between the audience and authors, and even perhaps, induce them to scribble their notes in the margin, or title page, of the book.  Relationships, whether through marriage or religious affinity (Quakers), are a focus and theme of the text.  From the title page: “Fidelia’s sisTer was Sarah griffitts .d July 19, 176 [cut off]” and “Married / Charles Moore,” “{her MoT [cut off] / Deborah d? / -dT Richard [cut off] / Sept. 29. 1 [cut off].”  It appears that all the handwriting on the title page is Moore’s; if so, the scribbles on the title page could indicate additions Moore wished to incorporate to the text, or poetry and/or verse she wanted to read.  For example, “HSP – Has Poem To Exiles in Virginia by H. Grif [cut off]” is located near the top of the page, above the title of the book.  Thus another theme presents itself – the preservation of creative works by friends and family (Griffitts was Moore’s cousin).

The modern edition includes a table of contents, but it is not clear whether or not this was present in the original commonplace book.  The first informal section is comprised of twenty-nine entries, all composed by Susannah Wright except two entries from Hannah Griffitts, one “by a female,” one by “Samuel Clarke Jr.” and closing out the section, an entry by “Eugenio.”  Except the entry by Samuel Clarke Jr., all others are poetry, a “medium that brought women together in mutual support for writing” (MMMB 79).

The initial, and obvious, theme is the poetry of Wright.  A simple and swift perusal of the entry titles yields other obvious themes, those of friendship (“An Essay on Friendship,” “To a Friend.—On some Misunderstanding,” and “On Friendship”) and death (“On the Death of an Infant,” “On the Death of a little Girl,” “On Death,” “On the Death of two infant Nephews,” “To the Memory of Charles Norris,” and “Verses to the Memory of Rebecca Chapman”).  Taking a closer look at the entries reveals more complex allusions to struggles in faith, women’s relationship with God, the right of women to speak, the inevitability of Death, apocalyptic predictions, the unknowable future, womanly interpretations of the Bible, and issues of faith.

Though so many different themes appear throughout the first section, one does not feel overwhelmed and confused.  Despite five distinct authors, Wright’s contributions dominate and anchor the section.  Most of the themes appear to be instances within Wright’s life that prompted or compelled her to commit the memory or happenstance to writing.  These experiences, such as death of a loved one or interpretation of Biblical passages, would serve as a shared experience for the implied audience – Moore’s (and Wright’s) friends and family.  I expect to find, in the rest of MMMB, an expansion upon the already mentioned themes through the medium of shared experiences, expressed through poetry and prose.




Works Cited:

Blecki, Catherine L., and Karin A. Wulf, eds. Milcah Martha Moore's Book: a Commonplace
Book from Revolutionary America. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. Print.

Welcome

Welcome to my research blog, Bonds of Intimacy.  This is my second experience using Blogger to record and make public the process of a semester long research project that culminates in a conference paper and presentation.  My first experience is visible here, at my blog Conduct Yourself.  Feel free to explore my previous work, both Conduct Yourself and the wiki-styled page I created with three other classmates, Geography of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  See my bio for more details about the classes and professors. 

Because this project encourages us to record the process, this blog will not be perfect.  The components of the research project posted will be the copies I submitted to Dr. Logan for a grade – not corrected copies.  Sometimes I will be right, but more often (probably) I will be wrong.  But that’s okay.  What is important is that I learn with each assignment, expanding my base of knowledge.  It will be messy, even chaotic at times.  You will learn how nerdy I am, that my social life (what little there is to begin with) will take a backseat to this project because I get severe tunnel vision, and that if I forget to bring a sweatshirt to the fourth floor of the UCF Library, I will complain about the cold and how it makes my nose drip.  In short, the life of an English literature graduate student is decidedly unsexy.  But that’s okay too.

This blog, by its very nature, will be a strange, and perhaps uneasy, combination of academic product and personal reflections.  I am in a way, taking my cue from Anne G. Myles, whose article "From Monster to Martyr: Re-Presenting Mary Dyer" we read for our second class.  In her article, she states, “My approach to, and need for, this material is obviously informed by the fact that I encounter it as both a Quaker and lesbian reader looking for a usable past; however, these seem to me powerful, challenging dimensions in any context” (18).  The material she references is the relationship between Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, and it is Myles’s hope that it can be categorized as a “’lesbian’ scene in seventeenth-century America” (18) – as based on the idea of the lesbian continuum¹.  

It is this article, and specifically the class discussion we had concerning this claim of a lesbian scene, that birthed (pun intended) my thesis: that the commonplace book Milcah Martha Moore created is a physical representation of her love for her friends, and their love for her.  That these women belong somewhere on the lesbian continuum, I am sure.  I am risking my entire research project on this claim because in a way, despite being neither a Quaker nor a lesbian such as Myles, I too am looking for a usable past.  I want to believe that despite the political, social, economical, religious, and legal restrictions women faced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, they could in fact, rely on each other.  It is important to me to believe they could turn to each other for love (sexual or non-sexual), comfort, support, affection, advice, and friendship to form intimate bonds, both in spite of and despite the men involved in their lives.     

Feel free to explore my blog, and especially feel free to comment on its design and content (what little there is so far).  I hope my enthusiasm for this project is contagious, and that you, my readers, stick around until the conclusion.

¹The lesbian continuum, as Dr. Logan explained in class, is like a sliding scale.  On the one end, you have women who are friends with women, and at the other, women who have sex with other women.  I must admit that is the extent of my knowledge on this theory, so of course, I have more research to do.



Works Cited:
Myles, Anne G.  “From Monster to Martyr.”  Early American Literature 36.1 (2001):  1-30. JSTOR.  Web. 24 August 2010.