Dr. Melanie Holm is an Associate Professor of English at IUP. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and her BS in Mathematics and in Literature from MIT. Her areas of academic interest are the British Long Eighteenth Century, the European Enlightenment, Satire, Skepticism, Women's Writing, Literature of Conquest and Humanist Pedagogy. She is co-editor of Mocking Bird Technologies (Fordham 2018). She is also a senior editor at The Scriblerian and it is a labor of love
This chapter examines the use of avian figures in eighteenth-century British literature, focusi... more This chapter examines the use of avian figures in eighteenth-century British literature, focusing on their role as interrogators of sympathy. Taking Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy as exemplary though opposing approaches, the chapter explores how the speech of each novel’s respective “mocking bird”—the parrot, Poll, and Yorick’s starling—raises questions about the imaginative and mimetic nature of sympathy, particularly as it is given expression by Adam Smith. Both birds, it is argued, unmask the subjectivity as well as the aesthetic and affective dimensions of sympathy for their listeners. However, the novels place an usually high value on these categories, proposing that that there are two ways to respond productively to the artifices of sympathy: the parrot’s way and the starling’s way.
Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 2017
Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree o... more Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree of self-satisfaction in her writing and an unprecedented disregard for her readers’ opinions. While her authorial self-fashioning is often dismissed as self-involved, aristocratic snobbery, I propose an alternative reading that understands Cavendish’s claims of self-sufficiency and self-pleasure as endeavoring to craft a feminist practice of writing that redefines the boundaries of authority. My construction of a skeptical Cavendish investigates a crucial distinction in her work between the pleasures of invention and the promise of pleasure through imitation. This affective distinction gives rise to analogies in her writing among texts, women writers, and colonial subjects, encouraging reflection on how we read texts and how we read one another. With an emphasis on textual sovereignty, Cavendish depicts two socialities of reading: imperial conquest and witty conversation. By using satiric indirection to destabilize authorized categories of interpretation, Cavendish, I suggest, not only re-imagines the affective agency of readers and authors, but also conceives of a sociability that privileges the pleasures of writing and the imaginative potential of individual creators and what Cavendish calls “creatoresses.”
The narrator's uncharacteristically emphatic apostrophe to vanity in Joseph Andrews suggests ... more The narrator's uncharacteristically emphatic apostrophe to vanity in Joseph Andrews suggests that Fielding is worried--worried about how vanity affects his readers and worried about what they, like his characters, may unknowingly do in its service: O Vanity! How little is thy Force acknowledged, or thy Operations discerned? How wantonly dost thou deceive Mankind under different Disguises? Sometimes thou dost wear the Face of Pity, sometimes of Generosity: nay, thou hast the Assurance even to put on those glorious Ornaments which belong only to heroick Virtue. Thou odious, deformed Monster ... The greatest Villanies are daily practised to please thee ... All our Passions are thy Slaves. (1) Readers familiar with Joseph Andrews may recall that Henry Fielding begins his novel with a meditation on affectation, carefully separating vanity from hypocrisy as two causes of affectation, and emphasizing hypocrisy's "violent Repugnancy." Joseph Andrews presents hypocrisy as &...
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jo... more In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire, and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation, the multiple narrative-making experience of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and why Swift’s poem seemed an appropriate site for such experimentation. Crucial to game construction is a commitment to theories feminist game design that complement the poem’s own indictment of sexist determinism. With meditations on the affinity between poems and games, an examination of preceding experiments of literary translation ...
Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree o... more Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree of self-satisfaction in her writing and an unprecedented disregard for her readers’ opinions. While her authorial self-fashioning is often dismissed as self-involved, aristocratic snobbery, I propose an alternative reading that understands Cavendish’s claims of self-sufficiency and self-pleasure as endeavoring to craft a feminist practice of writing that redefines the boundaries of authority. My construction of a skeptical Cavendish investigates a crucial distinction in her work between the pleasures of invention and the promise of pleasure through imitation. This affective distinction gives rise to analogies in her writing among texts, women writers, and colonial subjects, encouraging reflection on how we read texts and how we read one another. With an emphasis on textual sovereignty, Cavendish depicts two socialities of reading: imperial conquest and witty conversation. By using satiric indirection to destabilize authorized categories of interpretation, Cavendish, I suggest, not only re-imagines the affective agency of readers and authors, but also conceives of a sociability that privileges the pleasures of writing and the imaginative potential of individual creators and what Cavendish calls “creatoresses.”
This essay investigates the role of laughter as a force of sociability among ineluctably differen... more This essay investigates the role of laughter as a force of sociability among ineluctably different epistemological selves in Sterne's novel. Drawing from Hobbes's alternative theory of laughter, "Laughing without offence [that] must be at Absurdities and Infirmities abstracted from Persons and when all the Company may laugh together,” I argue that Sterne's novel suggest we not only tolerate Hobby-Horses and the misunderstandings they generate, but that with a self-reflective, skeptical stance towards our own understandings, we can draw from them those social pleasures and joys that add something to this, our "Fragment of a life."
This chapter examines the use of avian figures in eighteenth-century British literature, focusi... more This chapter examines the use of avian figures in eighteenth-century British literature, focusing on their role as interrogators of sympathy. Taking Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy as exemplary though opposing approaches, the chapter explores how the speech of each novel’s respective “mocking bird”—the parrot, Poll, and Yorick’s starling—raises questions about the imaginative and mimetic nature of sympathy, particularly as it is given expression by Adam Smith. Both birds, it is argued, unmask the subjectivity as well as the aesthetic and affective dimensions of sympathy for their listeners. However, the novels place an usually high value on these categories, proposing that that there are two ways to respond productively to the artifices of sympathy: the parrot’s way and the starling’s way.
Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 2017
Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree o... more Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree of self-satisfaction in her writing and an unprecedented disregard for her readers’ opinions. While her authorial self-fashioning is often dismissed as self-involved, aristocratic snobbery, I propose an alternative reading that understands Cavendish’s claims of self-sufficiency and self-pleasure as endeavoring to craft a feminist practice of writing that redefines the boundaries of authority. My construction of a skeptical Cavendish investigates a crucial distinction in her work between the pleasures of invention and the promise of pleasure through imitation. This affective distinction gives rise to analogies in her writing among texts, women writers, and colonial subjects, encouraging reflection on how we read texts and how we read one another. With an emphasis on textual sovereignty, Cavendish depicts two socialities of reading: imperial conquest and witty conversation. By using satiric indirection to destabilize authorized categories of interpretation, Cavendish, I suggest, not only re-imagines the affective agency of readers and authors, but also conceives of a sociability that privileges the pleasures of writing and the imaginative potential of individual creators and what Cavendish calls “creatoresses.”
The narrator's uncharacteristically emphatic apostrophe to vanity in Joseph Andrews suggests ... more The narrator's uncharacteristically emphatic apostrophe to vanity in Joseph Andrews suggests that Fielding is worried--worried about how vanity affects his readers and worried about what they, like his characters, may unknowingly do in its service: O Vanity! How little is thy Force acknowledged, or thy Operations discerned? How wantonly dost thou deceive Mankind under different Disguises? Sometimes thou dost wear the Face of Pity, sometimes of Generosity: nay, thou hast the Assurance even to put on those glorious Ornaments which belong only to heroick Virtue. Thou odious, deformed Monster ... The greatest Villanies are daily practised to please thee ... All our Passions are thy Slaves. (1) Readers familiar with Joseph Andrews may recall that Henry Fielding begins his novel with a meditation on affectation, carefully separating vanity from hypocrisy as two causes of affectation, and emphasizing hypocrisy's "violent Repugnancy." Joseph Andrews presents hypocrisy as &...
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jo... more In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire, and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation, the multiple narrative-making experience of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and why Swift’s poem seemed an appropriate site for such experimentation. Crucial to game construction is a commitment to theories feminist game design that complement the poem’s own indictment of sexist determinism. With meditations on the affinity between poems and games, an examination of preceding experiments of literary translation ...
Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree o... more Throughout her famously idiosyncratic works, Margaret Cavendish communicates both a high degree of self-satisfaction in her writing and an unprecedented disregard for her readers’ opinions. While her authorial self-fashioning is often dismissed as self-involved, aristocratic snobbery, I propose an alternative reading that understands Cavendish’s claims of self-sufficiency and self-pleasure as endeavoring to craft a feminist practice of writing that redefines the boundaries of authority. My construction of a skeptical Cavendish investigates a crucial distinction in her work between the pleasures of invention and the promise of pleasure through imitation. This affective distinction gives rise to analogies in her writing among texts, women writers, and colonial subjects, encouraging reflection on how we read texts and how we read one another. With an emphasis on textual sovereignty, Cavendish depicts two socialities of reading: imperial conquest and witty conversation. By using satiric indirection to destabilize authorized categories of interpretation, Cavendish, I suggest, not only re-imagines the affective agency of readers and authors, but also conceives of a sociability that privileges the pleasures of writing and the imaginative potential of individual creators and what Cavendish calls “creatoresses.”
This essay investigates the role of laughter as a force of sociability among ineluctably differen... more This essay investigates the role of laughter as a force of sociability among ineluctably different epistemological selves in Sterne's novel. Drawing from Hobbes's alternative theory of laughter, "Laughing without offence [that] must be at Absurdities and Infirmities abstracted from Persons and when all the Company may laugh together,” I argue that Sterne's novel suggest we not only tolerate Hobby-Horses and the misunderstandings they generate, but that with a self-reflective, skeptical stance towards our own understandings, we can draw from them those social pleasures and joys that add something to this, our "Fragment of a life."
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