Mary Poovey

Mary Louise Poovey[1] is an American cultural historian and literary critic whose work focuses on the Victorian Era. She is currently Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University, and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge. Poovey has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Swarthmore College, and Yale University.[2]

"Poovey" redirects here. For the rockabilly performer, see Joe Poovey.
Mary Poovey
Born
Mary Louise Poovey
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Virginia
ThesisThe novel as imaginative order (1976)
Academic work
InstitutionsNew York University
Main interestsCultural historian and literary critic
Notable worksThe Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen
Notable ideasVictorian era

Education

Poovey gained her PhD from the University of Virginia in 1976.[1]

Proper women

In 1984 Poovey published The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Her book is based around the idea of a "Proper Lady" and she looks at the difficulties that these three important authors had in breaking free from this mould.[3]

Feminist readings

Poovey has been recognised as important in the work that she has done in feminist reading. She has looked at how the growth of women writing was a device for seeing their voices emerge.[4]

Poovey conducted a public re-evaluation in 1999 at the British Women Writers Conference as a theoretical exercise of a writer's work. Poovey re-read the works of Ellen Pickering and decided that they were not worth reviving. This novelist's works had been popular in the 19th century but she considered the books to be over-complicated and lacking in innovation. She concluded that the only reason to re-read works like this was to confirm that the books that we had chosen to remember, like Jane Eyre and Mary Barton, are the best of their type.[5] Poovey used her re-reading of Pickering's novels to argue that not all writers need to be revived into the literary canon. Tamara Wagner went on to argue that this shows that we need to debunk our "history of reading these texts back from reality"?[5]

Honors

On January 30, 2015 Poovey received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden.[6]

Works
PhD Thesis
  • Poovey, Mary (1976). The novel as imaginative order (Ph.D. thesis). University of Virginia. OCLC 2812233.

Her books include:

References
  1. Poovey, Mary (1976). The novel as imaginative order (Ph.D. thesis). University of Virginia. OCLC 2812233.
  2. "Mary Poovey". english.fas.nyu.edu. New York University.
  3. Poovey, Mary (1985). The proper lady and the woman writer: ideology as style in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226675282. Preview.
  4. Handler, Richard; Segal, Daniel (1999). Jane Austen and the fiction of culture : an essay on the narration of social realities (Updated ed.). Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 14. ISBN 0847690482.
  5. Wagner, Tamara. Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel. p. 25. ISBN 1621969797.
  6. "Two new honorary doctors at Uppsala University's Faculty of Social Sciences - Uppsala University, Sweden". www.uu.se. Retrieved 2016-02-02.
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