Feminist Literary History and Digital Humanities
orladmin Orlando features not only British women writers but rather a wide range of male and female writers in some way related to literature associated with the British Isles. As a modernist, I welcomed entries on American writers H. D., Djuna Barnes, and Marianne Moore (Hickman 181). It is inspiring to see such richly collaborative work … Read more
Because of the ways in which the extensive data can be mined or formulated, Orlando offers the best access to information on British women writers and serves as a model for similar databases that will supplant printed literary dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks (187). James L. Harner. Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources … Read more
Opening up Orlando reminds me of first seeing Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (a work likewise remarkable in form as much as content)—three decades later, it is still thrilling and affirming to have women’s countless contributions to Western culture and society made visible. What is new in the twenty-first century, however, is that now … Read more
[H]igh standard of biographical and historiographical interpretation and writing . . . an irrefutable confirmation that any one life (and life writing) is always a network of relations, locations, events, and categories (Booth 728). Orlando isn’t just all about any woman writer who ever had anything to do with the British Isles, and some affiliated … Read more
[T]he possibilities offered by “interpretive tagging,”… enable the information about an individual writer’s life and work to be searched by time, place, genre and occupation. One can look at all the authors who were nuns or librarians; who wrote agit-prop, anthems or art criticism, who had links with Scarborough or South Africa. The biographers can … Read more
… each Orlando Project entry serves the beginning student and advanced researcher alike; it provides an introductory survey of a particular author, but can also function as a source of the latest critical understandings of the author and an encouragement for further advanced research on the themes, influences, and cultural contexts radiating out from that … Read more
The Orlando textbase is one of those online resources that can swallow hours of your life in pleasurable, work-related browsing. This seductive capacity to devour time may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you should actually be planning a lecture or marking essays, but it is certainly enjoyable and, joking apart, … Read more
New Author Entries Elizabeth Oxenbridge, Lady Tyrwhit, c. 1510-78, early Protestant compiler of a book of private prayers (including hymns, prayers, and metrical psalms), some perhaps of her own writing. Elizabeth Postuma Simcoe, 1762-1850, diarist and letter-writer whose place in history is owed to her meticulously sketched and vividly described accounts of the colony of … Read more
New Author Entries Ann Fisher, 1719-78, grammarian (uniquely for a woman at this date) and educational writer. Margaret Holford the elder, ?1757-1834, novelist and playwright: mother of a poet of the same name, one of whose works is still often wrongly ascribed to her. Margaret Holford the younger (later Holford), 1778-1852, poet whose first romance … Read more
The Orlando Project is experimenting with new ways of supporting research online. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present provides information about more than 1200 writers, their texts, and the times in which they lived and wrote. It is designed to offer new ways of approaching literary research online. … Read more