Hope Howell Hodgkins
I grew up in small-town Missouri, earned my PhD from the University of Chicago, and taught literature at UNC-Greensboro for a dozen years. I remain a Fellow of UNCG's Lloyd International Honors College, where I still teach occasional classes on topics such as frontier literature or literary London. My published essays discuss writers ranging from James Joyce to Muriel Spark, and topics including high-modern poetics, religious rhetoric, children’s literature, dress styles, and Daniel Boone.
My book STYLE AND THE SINGLE GIRL: HOW MODERN WOMEN RE-DRESSED THE NOVEL, 1922-1977, a study of modern British women novelists’ use of dress style, was published in 2016 by Ohio State University Press. It's won praise for its "engaging, elegant, and fluid" prose style (Vike Martina Plock), and for a methodology that's "both sophisticated and eclectic" (Jessica Feldman).
Eclectic could be my middle name. I've received research fellowships from the Kentucky Historical Society, the Filson Society, and the Southern Historical Collection of UNC's Wilson Library. In each manuscript collection I read groups of family letters, significant to both my scholarly work on early American literacies and my new mystery novel DECENTLY.
In fiction, I have stories appearing in 2024, in ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE; Crimeucopia's THROUGH THE PAST DARKLY; Malice Domestic's anthology MURDER MOST DEVIOUS; and the Barbara Pym Society collection ALL THIS RICHNESS.
My brilliant, witty husband Chris Hodgkins is well-known for his scholarship on seventeenth-century poet George Herbert. Our excellent children follow callings that include fiction-writing, teaching, engineering, ministry, and good works. Our vegetable garden may be the largest in the city of Greensboro.
Supervisors: Wayne C. Booth
Phone: 13364042571
Address: Department of English, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Room 3143 Moore Humanities Bldg.
1111 Spring Garden St.
Greensboro, NC 27412
My book STYLE AND THE SINGLE GIRL: HOW MODERN WOMEN RE-DRESSED THE NOVEL, 1922-1977, a study of modern British women novelists’ use of dress style, was published in 2016 by Ohio State University Press. It's won praise for its "engaging, elegant, and fluid" prose style (Vike Martina Plock), and for a methodology that's "both sophisticated and eclectic" (Jessica Feldman).
Eclectic could be my middle name. I've received research fellowships from the Kentucky Historical Society, the Filson Society, and the Southern Historical Collection of UNC's Wilson Library. In each manuscript collection I read groups of family letters, significant to both my scholarly work on early American literacies and my new mystery novel DECENTLY.
In fiction, I have stories appearing in 2024, in ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE; Crimeucopia's THROUGH THE PAST DARKLY; Malice Domestic's anthology MURDER MOST DEVIOUS; and the Barbara Pym Society collection ALL THIS RICHNESS.
My brilliant, witty husband Chris Hodgkins is well-known for his scholarship on seventeenth-century poet George Herbert. Our excellent children follow callings that include fiction-writing, teaching, engineering, ministry, and good works. Our vegetable garden may be the largest in the city of Greensboro.
Supervisors: Wayne C. Booth
Phone: 13364042571
Address: Department of English, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Room 3143 Moore Humanities Bldg.
1111 Spring Garden St.
Greensboro, NC 27412
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Conference Presentations by Hope Howell Hodgkins
Published Essays by Hope Howell Hodgkins
[Reprinted from The CEA Critic 65:1 (Fall 2002): 41-49.]
Books by Hope Howell Hodgkins
Hodgkins delineates how, in the 1920s and 1930s, popular novels by Dorothy Sayers and high-art fiction by Jean Rhys used dress to comment wittily and bitterly on gender relations. During World War II, changes in British Vogue and compromises made by the literary journal Horizon signaled the death of modernist styles, as Elizabeth Bowen’s gender-bent wartime stories show. Then demure and reserved postwar styles—Dior’s curvy New Look, the Movement’s understated literary irony—were intertwined in the fictions of Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark, who re-dressed the novel with a vengeance. Whether fashioning detective fiction, literary impressionism, or postwar comedy, these novelists used style in every sense to redefine that famous question, “What do women want?”
[Reprinted from The CEA Critic 65:1 (Fall 2002): 41-49.]
Hodgkins delineates how, in the 1920s and 1930s, popular novels by Dorothy Sayers and high-art fiction by Jean Rhys used dress to comment wittily and bitterly on gender relations. During World War II, changes in British Vogue and compromises made by the literary journal Horizon signaled the death of modernist styles, as Elizabeth Bowen’s gender-bent wartime stories show. Then demure and reserved postwar styles—Dior’s curvy New Look, the Movement’s understated literary irony—were intertwined in the fictions of Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark, who re-dressed the novel with a vengeance. Whether fashioning detective fiction, literary impressionism, or postwar comedy, these novelists used style in every sense to redefine that famous question, “What do women want?”