Texas Tech University

Marjean Purinton

Author of Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie, and the forthcoming Staging Grotesques and Ghosts: British Romantic Techno-gothic Drama, as well as articles on Romantic drama, early 19th-century women writers, feminist theory and pedagogy.  A member of the Teaching Academy and a recipient of a President's Excellence in Teaching Award, she teaches in the Women's Studies Program and is the Teaching Section Editor for the online project British Women Playwrights Around 1800.  She is past President of the International Conference on Romanticism.

Ph.D. Texas A&M

Book

Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.

Articles and Essays

“Ethics and Electricity: Mary Shelley.”  Keynote Address for the Western Heritage Museum Exhibit Discover Steampunk.  Hobbs, NM, February 2022. This presentation is  available on YouTube. 

“The British Reception of Frankenstein (1818) and the Culture of Early Nineteenth-Century  Science.”  Mary Shelley and Europe.  Ed Antonella Braida.  Cambridge: Legenda:  Studies in Comparative Literature, 2020. 105-117. 

Nance Oldfield: The Tragedy Queen: What a Prompt Manuscript Reveals about Women's Theatre Theory.”  Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism.  Ed. Catherine  Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor.  London: Routledge, forthcoming. 

“Romantic Women's Playwrights of Comedy.”  The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing.  Ed. Natasha Duquette.  London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.

"The New Science and Women's Literary Discourse: Prefiguring 'Frankenstein." The New Science and Female Madness. Ed. Judy A. Hayden. New York, New York/Palgrave, 2011. 183-200.

"Teaching British Romantic Drama: A Senior Seminar in Studies in Drama."Teaching Romantic Drama: Special Issue of the Romantic Pedagogy.  Commons of Romantic Circles. Ed. Thomas C. Crochunis. 2011.

"Teaching Frances Burney's Comedy the Witlings (1779)." Approaches to Teaching British Women Playwrights Of The Restoration And Eighteenth Century. Ed. Catherine Burroughs and Bonnie Nelson. New York: MLA, 2010. 390-397.

"Sophia Lee: The New Sciences and Female Madness." Foreshadowing 'Frankenstein': Women, Literature, and Scientific Discourse. Ed. Judy A. Hayden. New York: Palgrave, 2010. 316-349.

"Shakespeare Shadows' Parodic Haunting of Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey." (with Marliss Desens). Shakespearean Gothic. Ed. Christy Desmet and Ann Williams. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009. 87-110.

“Teaching Orientalism through British Romantic Drama: Representations of Arabia.” Romantic Border Crossings. Ed. Jeffrey Cass and Larry Peer. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 135-146.

“Feminist Utopianism and Female Sexuality in Joanna Baillie's Comedies.” Romantic Circles: Praxis Series. September 2008. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/utopia/purinton/purinton.html

“Watches and Watching Time in British Romantic Comedy.” The Wordsworth Circle 39.1-2 (Winter/Spring 2008): 46-49.

“Romantic Praxis: Teaching British Romanticism with Drama.” Engaged Romanticism. Ed. Mark Lussier and Bruce Matsunaga. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. 228-241.

“Cross-Dressing and the Performance of Gender in Romantic-Period Comic Plays by Women.” Spheres of Action. Ed. Alex Dick and Angela Esterhammer. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2008. 178-193.

“George Colman's The Iron Chest and Blue-Beard and the Pseudosciences of Curiosity Cabinets.” Victorian Studies 49.2 (Winter 2007): 250-258.

“Three of Thomas Lovell Beddoes's Dramatic Fragments: Fractured Techno-Gothic Appendages and Thomas Beddoes's Hygëia.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Eds. Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 177-92.

“Eighteenth-Century British Drama.” Year's Work in English Studies, 86 (2007).

“On Teaching A Bold Stroke for a Husband and Other Comedies by Romantic Women Playwrights.” European Romantic Review 17.3 (July 2006): 351-60.

“Romantic Drama and the Discourse of Criminality.” Romanticism: Comparative Discourses. Eds. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 73-83.

“Eighteenth-Century British Drama.” Year's Work in English Studies 85 (2006):566-80.

“Gender, Nationalism, and Science in Hannah More's Pedagogical Plays for Children.” Culturing the Child 1690-1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers. Ed. Donelle Ruwe. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. 113-136.

“Eighteenth-Century British Drama.” Year's Work in English Studies 84 (2005): 37-48.

“Shakespeare's Ghost and Felicia Hemans's The Vespers of Palermo: Nineteenth-Century Readings of the Page and Feminist Meanings for the Stage.” Intertexts 8.2 (Fall 2004): 135-64.

“Pedagogy and Passions: Teaching Joanna Baillie's Dramas.” Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays. Ed. Thomas Crochunis. New York: Routledge, 2004. 315-47.

“The Pedagogical Plays of Hannah More, Jane Austen, and Joanna Baillie: Ways of Teaching Children's Drama.” British Women Playwrights around 1800. “Teaching Section.” Ed. Marjean D. Purinton. November 2004. http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/essays/purinton_plays.html

“Eighteenth-Century British Drama.” Year's Work in English Studies 83 (2004): 32-50.

“Staging the Physical: Romantic Science Theatricalized in T.L. Beddoes's The Brides' Tragedy.” European Romantic Review 14.1 (2003): 81-95. Rpt. In Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 154. New York: Gale, August 2005.

“Teaching the Gothic Novel and Dramatic Adaptations.” Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions. Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller. New York: Modern Language Association, 2003. 326-42.

“Reading Marital Relationships: ‘The Wallpaper' in A Room of One's Own.” The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-paper.” Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. 94-111.

“'The Laugh of the Medusa' and Laughing Anne.” Conradiana 34:1-2 (2002): 77-94.

“Byron's Disability and the Techno-Gothic Grotesque in The Deformed Transformed.” European Romantic Review 12.3 (Summer 2001): 301-20.

“Theatricalized Bodies and Spirits: Gothic as Performance in Romantic Drama.” Gothic Studies: An International Journal of Criticism, Theory, History, and Cultural Studies 3/2 (August 2001): 134-55.

“Mary Shelley's Science Fiction Short Stories and the Legacy of Wollstonecraft's Feminism.” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30 (2001): 147-74.

“Dancing and Dueling in Mariana Starke's Comedy.” British Women Playwrights around 1800 (September 2001). http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/essays/purinton_sword.html

“Socialized and Medicalized Hysteria in Joanna Baillie's Witchcraft.” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 9.2 (2001): 137-53. Rpt. in Recent Perspectives on European Romanticism. Ed. Larry H. Peer. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. 47-67.

“Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic Drama: Romantic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott.” Romanticism on the Net 21 (February 2001). http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n21/005968ar.html

“Preface.” Contemporary Studies on Lord Byron. Ed. William D. Brewer. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. 1-4.

“Women's Sovereignty on Trial: Joanna Baillie's Comedy The Tryal as Metatheatrics.” Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840. Ed. Catherine B. Burroughs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 132-57.

“Teaching Romantic-Period Women Poets.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Literature, Language, and Composition 1.1 (2000): 91-115. Contributor to this collaborative essay, edited by Harriet Kramer Linkin.

“The De-Gendered Self in William Blake's Poetry.” Essays on the Modern Identity. Ed. William D. Brewer and Carole J. Lambert. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 115-37.

“Polysexualities and Romantic Generations in Mary Shelley's Mythological Dramas Midas and Proserpine.” Women's Writing 6.3 (1999): 387-413.

“Representations of the Irish in Romantic Drama.” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 7 (1999): 127-42.

“The English Pamphlet War of the 1790's and Coleridge's Osorio.” English Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays. Ed. Terence Allan Hoagwood and Daniel P. Watkins. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. 159-81.

“Postmodern Romanticism: The Recuperation of Conceptual Romanticism in Jeanette Winterson's Postmodern Novel The Passion.” Romanticism Across the Disciplines. Ed. Larry H. Peer. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998. 67-98.

“The Sexual Politics of The Election: French Feminism and the Scottish Playwright Joanna Baillie.” Intertexts 2.2 (1998): 119-30.

“Revising Romanticism by Inscripting Women Playwrights.” Romanticism on the Net 12 (1998). http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1998/v/n12/005822ar.html

“Ideologiccal Revision: Cross-Gender Characterizations in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.” The CEA Critic 56.1 (Fall 1993): 53-64.

“An Act of Theological Revisioning: William Blake's Pictorial Prophecy.” Colby Quarterly 29.1 (March 1993): 33-42.

“Wordsworth's The Borderers and the Ideology of Revolution.” The Wordsworth Circle 32.2 (Spring 1992): 97-108.

“William Blake” (316-21), “Mary Wollstonecraft” (322-27), “William Godwin” (310-15), and “Thomas Paine” (286-91). Great Thinkers of the Western World. Ed. Ian P. McGreal. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Book Reviews

Review of Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism by Susan J. Wolfson. European Romantic Review, forthcoming.

Review of Contemporary Gothic by Catherine Spooner. South Central Review, forthcoming.

Review of Symbolic Interactions: Social Problems and Literary Interventions in the Works of Baillie, Scott, and Landor by Regina Hewitt. European Romantic Review, 18.4 (October 2007): 561-565.

Review of Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism by Ellen Brinks. Studies in Romanticism 44.4 (Winter 2005): 654-57.

Review of The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama edited by Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer. Gothic Studies, forthcoming.

Review of Lessons of the Masters by George Steiner. Intertexts, forthcoming.

Review of Jane Austen and the Theatre by Paula Byrne and Jane Austen and the Theatre by Penny Gay. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 3.1 (Summer 2004): 305-309.

Review of Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic by Julie Kipp and Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution by Lisa Wood. European Romantic Review 16.3 (July 2005): 390-84.

Review of Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English: Positions, Pedagogies, and Cultural Politics edited by William J. Spurlin. Intertexts 9.2 (Fall 2005): 176-80.

Review of Horizons Theatre Production of Joanna Baillie's Count Basil, New York City, August 2003. European Romantic Review 15.2 (June 2004): 379-81.

Review of Character's Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century Stage by Lisa A. Freeman. Criticism: A Quarterly for the Literature and the Arts 46.3 (2004): 305-309.

Review of The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley by William D. Brewer, and Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman edited by Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker. The Wordsworth Circle 32.4 (Autumn 2001): 217-18.

Review of Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers by Catherine B. Burroughs. South Central Review 15.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1998): 68-70.

Review of An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body by Rosemary Betterton. Southern Humanities Review 32.3 (1998): 297-300.

Review of Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Maria J. Falco; Ahead of Her Time: A Sampler of the Life and Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, selected by Ella Mazel; A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Sylvana Tomaselli. National Women's Studies Association Journal 9.2 (1997): 175-79.

Review of Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. South Central Review 14.1 (1997): 80-82.

Review of The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake by Morris Eaves. South Central Review 13.1 (1996): 53-54.

Review of A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama by Daniel P. Watkins. Southern Humanities Review 30.3 (1996): 290-93.

Review of The Man of Reason: "Male" & "Female" in Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. by Genevieve Lloyd. Southern Humanities Review 29.2 (1995): 185-87.

Review of Rethinking Blake's Textuality by Molly Anne Rothenberg. Southern Humanities Review 29.4 (1995): 389-92.

Review of Virtual Theater: From Diderot to Mallarmé by Evlyn Gould. Theatre Journal 42.4 (Dec. 1990): 518-19.

Under Review

“Subtle Discriminations Against Women in Academic Settings: What Faculty Exit Interviews over the Last Decade Reveal about Retention at Texas Tech University.” At Women in Higher Education.

Awards

Teaching Academy, Member

In Progress

“The State of Scholarship on Romantic Gothic Drama.”For The Literary Compass.

“Elizabeth Inchbald and Sara Pogson: Transatlantic Representation of the French Revolution and the Body-Politic.” [With Christina Ashby-Martin]

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Professor
British Romantic Literature

Email: marjean.purinton@ttu.edu