Orr's dissertation aims to approach the Lister documentary material from previously unexplored angles. So the first step is to map out the existing landscape. (To be honest, it sometimes feels like Orr is criticizing previous work for not having studied aspects it didn't set out to study. But I guess a dissertation needs to justify its existence.)
LHMP
Blog entry
In order to make this dissertation manageable, I will be posting it in smaller segments--portions of the fairly lengthy chapters.
When I pulled together the journal articles in my folders on biographical topics for this cluster I also added a couple other publications that I had in electronic form on the topic of Anne Lister. As one of those items is a doctoral dissertation and another is a collection of articles, these materials are likely to see me through pretty much the rest of June. There is, as I sometimes comment humorously, an entire academic industry of Anne Lister studies.
When it comes down to it, the Codrington divorce trial is not a shining example of much of anything. Maybe Helen Codrington and Emily Faithful had a lesbian affair? But the divorce trial was about Helen's heterosexual extra-marital relations. The hint of the threat of a revelation of Emily's sexual orientation comes into play only to prevent her from testifying on Helen's behalf. And it's quite possible that the testimony Helen wanted her to give would have been false in the first place.
There are many angles to be had on the ladies of Llangollen. This article looks specifically at the aesthetics of the rural cottage retreat as an element both for romantic friendship and Romanticism in general.
Sometimes, what looks like a fascinating article simply turns out to be a view into an academic slap-fight. Still interesting but not particularly relevant.
Although cross-dressing is one of the motifs that I trace within the Project, not all instances of cross-dressing reflect gender identity or sexuality. At least, not in the most overt sense of gender identity. Madame de Saint Balmon took a "masculine" role in protecting her lands during war, in part because she ended up on the opposite side of the war from her husband. This study of two portraits that reflect subtly different presentations of her life and activities shows the balance between admiration and normalization that such transgressive actions can inspire.
Having finished up a series of articles on general sexuality topics, I'm now embarking on an extended series of biographical articles. Initially this will be several short articles scattered across time periods, then finishing up with two much more extensive books about Anne Lister. The Lister material may easily tide me over for most of the month, if I break it up into manageable bite-size pieces.
This article makes a useful contrast to yesterday's, as it illustrates that people working on the same time and place can interpret the data differently.
When I work on the chapter for the book version of the Project that explains the various models of sex and gender, one of the hard parts is sorting out the chronology. Every author who works on this subject appears to have their own notion of when the changes happened and how they were promulgated in society. The simple fact is that social theories overlap each other, with multiple contradictory ideas of how human beings function occurring in parallel, even believed by the same people.
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