Katherine Philips has experienced something of a Renaissance. Lauded in her own time as “the matchless Orinda,” she was dismissed for several centuries as a minor poet. In the past twenty-five years this has begun to change, as feminist and queer scholars especially have turned to Philips to reexamine and reimagine woman’s place in the cultural landscape of late-seventeenth-century England. While interest in Philips has continued to grow exponentially, helping to transform the way we do literary history and theory, there is yet to be a collection of essays that demonstrates the vast import of the author’s life and works. The editors of _The Matchless Orinda: Essays on the Life and Works of Katherine Philips_ invite submissions that will help fill this scholarly lacuna.
Our aim with this collection is to show Philips’s wide-ranging influence in her own milieu and in current approaches to literature and culture. To this end, we welcome submissions from a variety of theoretical and methodological viewpoints. We are especially interested in essays on the following:
• Philips and seventeenth-century technologies of production
• Philips in Wales and Ireland
• Discourses of gender and sexuality in Philips’s works and literary circle
• Rhetorics of friendship
• Philips and the cultural politics of domesticity
• Philips’s literary heritage, especially her relation to earlier writers and forms
• Philips and her contemporaries
• Post-seventeenth-century receptions of Philips
• Philips’s influence beyond the British Isles
• Philips and the English Revolution and Restoration
• Philips’s less-studied works
• Philips’s works vis-à-vis other art forms (e.g., the visual arts and music)
• Philips and theory
Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words by December 1, 2010 to David L. Orvis (orvisdl@appstate.edu) and Ryan Singh Paul (rpaul@allegheny.edu). Contributors will be notified of acceptance by January 1, 2011. Completed essays of 5000-7000 words will be due by June 1, 2011.
