Bowden, Martha F.

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Toronto, B.A., 1975, M.A., 1976, Ph.D., 1981.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Kennesaw State University, 1000 Chastain Rd., Bldg. 27, Kennesaw, GA 30144. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and educator. Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, associate professor of English, 1992—, member of honors faculty.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Mary Davys, The Reform'd Coquet; or, Memoirs of Amoranda; Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady; and, the Accomplish'd Rake, or, Modern Fine Gentleman, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1999.

Yorick's Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne, University of Delaware Press (Newark, DE), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Martha F. Bowden is a writer and educator based at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. An associate professor of English, Bowden frequently teaches freshman composition, a class which she describes as one of her favorites, according to a biographer on the Kennesaw State University Joint Enrollment Honors Program Web site. Bowden also carries out duties within the school's honors program, where she serves as an Honors Faculty member with both teaching and advising responsibilities.

In Yorick's Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne, Bowden combines literary study and church history as she explores what she feels are incorrect assumptions about the Anglican Church in the eighteenth century. Both these assumptions and the Book of Common Prayer are "quite wrong" in their characterization of the Church of England, noted a reviewer in Reference & Research Book News. These erroneous assumptions cause readers of Sterne's classic novel Tristram Shandy to overlook or misunderstand the many references to religion within the text of Sterne's book. Bowden also examines the historical role and function of the Anglican church, considering topics such as the church as a family business, roles for women within the church, manifestations of anti-Catholicism, the company of preachers, and other related elements of life in and around the Church of England.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2007, review of Yorick's Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne.

ONLINE

Kennesaw State University Joint Enrollment Honors Program Web site,http://www.kennesaw.edu/university_studies/jehp/ (February 4, 2008), biography of Martha F. Bowden.