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Jennifer Phegley
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Graduate & Doctoral Faculty
16F Cockefair Hall
816.235.5973
phegleyj@umkc.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays 12:30-2:30 and 5:00-6:00; By Appointment |
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I am currently working on Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (Praeger Press 2011). This book uses a wide variety of neglected primary sources as evidence, including conduct books, letter-writing manuals, domestic guidebooks, periodical articles, law treatises, letters, memoirs, and novels to explore amorous relationships among the working, middle, and upper classes from the 1830s to the 1910s. It explores a wide variety of topics, including finding a spouse, planning a wedding, taking a honeymoon trip, and establishing a household. The book examines the transformation of marriage laws throughout the century, attending to the effects these laws had on ordinary people. In addition, it investigates topics often characterized as forbidden among Victorians themselves, including sexuality, birth control, and prostitution. Finally, the book provides a deeper understanding of how and why marriage norms were defined and maintained by considering the many people who lived outside the boundaries of traditional matrimony.
I am also co-editing two essay collections: Transatlantic Sensations (with John Barton), which redefines sensationalism by mapping its transatlantic production and reception in the nineteenth century, and Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction (with Andrew Maunder), which explores new pedagogical approaches to Victorian fictional forms.
My previous books focus on the role of women readers in nineteenth-century culture. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Ohio State University Press 2004) reevaluates prevailing assumptions about the vexed relationship between women readers and literary critics by exploring representations of what, how, and why women read in middle-class Victorian literary magazines. While many scholars have explored the ways nineteenth-century critics expressed their anxiety about the dangers of women’s unregulated and implicitly uncritical reading practices, which were believed to threaten the sanctity of the home and the cultural status of the nation, I argue that family literary magazines revolutionized the position of women as consumers of print by characterizing them as educated readers and able critics.
Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present (co-edited with Janet Badia; University of Toronto Press 2005; Paperback reprint edition 2006) features essays that provide a close study of the evolution of the woman reader by examining a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including Antebellum scientific treatises, Victorian paintings, and Oprah Winfrey’s televised book club, as well as the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Other recent projects include an annotated series of letters about authorship written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by Women Authors, 1860-1920 (Eds. Jennifer Cognard-Black and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls; University of Iowa Press 2006) and several articles on teaching the Victorian novel in its original serial form and in a transatlantic publication context.
Degrees:
- Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 1999
- M.A., The Ohio State University, 1995
- B.A., Texas State University, 1992
Areas of Specialization:
- Nineteenth-Century British Literature
- Victorian Periodicals and Novel Serialization
- Sensation Fiction
- Women Writers
- Transatlantic Literary Relationships
Courses:
- 311: American Literature I
- 321: American Literature II
- 327: British Literature II
- 365: Contemporary Novel
- 416/5516: The Romantic Period
- 426/5526: The Victorian Period
- 433/5533: Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing
- 455/5556: Studies in the Novel, 1740-1900
- Graduate Seminars on Victorian Women Writers; Victorian Authorship and Publishing; The Neo-Victorian Novel; Victorian Science, Technology, and Media; The Transatlantic Literary Marketplace; and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England
Other:
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