Women’s Popular Culture? Teaching the Swetnam Controversy

Abstract

T his essay suggests a method of teaching the seventeenth-century gender debates that expands our definition of literature by early modern women. My case study involves a course unit on the Swetnam controversy, taught first to undergraduates and subsequently in a graduate seminar. In both courses, students read works by male authors such as Shakespeare, Sidney, and Jonson together with women’s writings of the period, ending with the Swetnam controversy’s anonymous and pseudonymous works. The successes and pitfalls of teaching early modern women writers together with their more canonical male counterparts have begun to be explored in leading scholarly journals (the winter 1996 volume of Shakespeare Quarterly) and at a number of conferences, namely the 1996 MLA special session “Teaching Judith Shakespeare” and the 1997 Shakespeare Association of America seminar by the same name. The majority of this work considers how to teach the bard alongside aristocratic women writers. Such pedagogical approaches may help to de-center Shakespeare’s authority. But they also run the risk of merely recanonizing elite authors and genres in ways that sidestep the more radical implications of a cultural studies approach to the early modern period. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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