FS-50299-11 | Education Programs: Seminars for Higher Education Faculty | Mizzou | Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries | 10/1/2011 - 6/30/2014 | $119,658.00 | Devoney | K. | Looser | | | | Mizzou | Columbia | MO | 65211-3020 | USA | 2011 | British Literature | Seminars for Higher Education Faculty | Education Programs | 119658 | 0 | 119658 | 0 | A five-week seminar for sixteen college and university faculty members to study the works of Jane Austen and other writers of her time.
This proposed 5-week seminar(June 18–July 20, 2012) sets out to demonstrate that new insights can be realized about Jane Austen when reading her closely alongside the once well-known—writers of her own time. Whether we are seeking to understand Austen’s fictional techniques, political views, religious beliefs, reception in her lifetime, or posthumous reputation, we stand to learn a great deal by reading her in newly emerging contexts. This seminar will have a two-pronged emphasis: 1) undertaking collective close reading and discussion of primary texts by Austen in tandem with those of her once-celebrated contemporaries and 2) providing tools for pursuing advanced study of Austen among the now-understudied authors of this era, using both digital and traditional archival research techniques. Seminar members will have the opportunity to make new discoveries about these writers and to advance their own independent research, editorial, pedagogical,or curatorial projects. |
FT-56628-09 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Devoney K. Looser | Sister Novelists: The Lives and Writings of Jane and Anna Maria Porter | 6/1/2009 - 8/31/2009 | $6,000.00 | Devoney | K. | Looser | | | | Curators of the University of Missouri | Columbia | MO | 65211-1230 | USA | 2009 | British Literature | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 |
Though virtually forgotten today, British sister novelists Jane Porter (bap. 1776-1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1780-1832) were international celebrities. Their bestselling historical fiction was in print for decades, but their innovations in the genre prior to Sir Walter Scott's have only begun to be acknowledged. In what is poised to be the first study of the Misses Porter, my book project sets out to document their important literary contributions, as well as the ways they tried to negotiate the changing market for authors after Scott's success. I will also show how their great literary---but modest---financial achievements presented obstacles on the marriage market. Because thousands of their unpublished letters survive, the Porter sisters provide us with an almost unprecedentedly wide window onto the world of female authorship; rising and waning celebrity; financial struggles and hidden debt; and (for better or worse) failed courtship in the late 18th and early 19th century. |
FZ-261408-18 | Research Programs: Public Scholars | Devoney K. Looser | Biography of Sisters Jane Porter (1775–1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1778–1832), 19th-Century British Novelists | 1/1/2019 - 12/31/2019 | $60,000.00 | Devoney | K. | Looser | | | | Arizona State University | Tempe | AZ | 85281-3670 | USA | 2018 | British Literature | Public Scholars | Research Programs | 60000 | 0 | 60000 | 0 | Research and writing of a book on British sister novelists Jane Porter (1775-1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832), contemporaries of Jane Austen.
Decades before the Brontës, Jane Porter (1775-1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832) burst onto the literary scene. The Porters unabashedly published as sisters, signing their names to dozens of novels, poems, and plays. They were pioneering, single career women at a moment of cultural change, negotiating the literary marketplace with the marriage marketplace. They were widely fêted and admired. But as they reveal in moving, unpublished letters, they paid a steep price. For a woman, Anna Maria concluded, public fame was the death knell of private happiness. To add insult to injury, their fall from popularity was so precipitous that few today have heard of them. My book, Sister Novelists, is poised to be the first biography of the Porter sisters, sharing for the first time stories of their accomplished, lovelorn, and complicated lives. It promises to shift understandings of struggles faced by the first generations of professional women writers in the age of Jane Austen. |