Megan Matchinske

My first book, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject, was published in 1998 with Cambridge University Press in Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, volume 26. A second book project, growing out of my interest in history and historical trajectory, is nearing completion. Strategies for Survival: Gender, Ethics and History in Early Modern England considers what it means for early modern women writers and postmodern women critics to engage history as a strategy, to make the past mean something. In this study, I argue that historical narrative becomes for us a way to investigate how human action functions in time, how the various pasts that we know impel us to be responsible citizens. Historical writers need history not because it corrects misconceptions or proclaims truths; rather, history tests our ability to endow lived processes with significance, to turn material events into ethical opportunities. In the literary-historical-philosophical project that I am describing here, I draw on early modern England's loosly configured notions of genre and discipline to readmit into historical writinga wide range of alternate histories and to interrogate the formal and pedagogical nature of these imaginings. To this end, I address a variety of women's literary-historical "end-narratives," including in my investigation mother's legacy, religious verse history, diary writing, closet drama, tabloid news, and literary criticism.  

Recent Articles Include:

"Serial Identity: History, Gender and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford," in Forms of Selfhood: Rhetoric and Genre in the Life Writings of Early Modern Englishwomen, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006)

"Truth in the Telling: Moral, Method and History in Anne Dowriche's The French History," English Literary Renaissance 34 (2004): 176-200.

"Putting Bottom on Top:Gender and the Married Man in Michael Hoffman's Dream," Shakespeare Bulletin 21.4 (2003): 40-56.

"Gendering Catholic Conformity: The Politics of Equivocation in Elizabeth Grymeston's Miscelanea" Journal of English and German Philology 101.3 (2002): 329-57.