Quinsey, Katherine M.

views updated

Quinsey, Katherine M.

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: Trent University, B.A.; University of London, Ph.D., 1980.

ADDRESSES:

Office—English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing, University of Windsor, Chrysler Hall, North Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, associate professor of English, 1989—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

SHRCC grant, 1993-96; Humanities Research fellowship, University of Windsor, 2006.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Broken Boundaries: Women & Feminism in Restoration Drama, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1996.

(Coeditor) Lumen: Selected Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Academic Printing and Publishing (Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada), 1998.

(Coeditor) Canadian Poetry, 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Katherine M. Quinsey is a writer, historian, and scholar. Her research and teaching interests center on the works of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and include areas such as biblical tradition in the canon of English literature, linguistic philosophy, gender issues from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and seventeenth-century feminism.

With regard to historic views of feminism and literature, Quinsey edited Broken Boundaries: Women & Feminism in Restoration Drama, a "useful and well-organized collection which fills a gap in undergraduate reading lists and offers something more besides," commented David Roberts in Notes and Queries. The editor and contributors consider Restoration drama in three distinct areas, each corresponding to a section of the book: Restoration-era plays by women, dramatic works about women that were written by men; and theory and the history of performance as applied to Restoration drama. Contributor Rebecca Merrens locates antifeminism of both the scientific and tragic types in the works of Congreve and Bacon. Dagny Boebel and Peggy Thompson, in separate essays on Aphra Behn, identify characters who avoided the patriarchal dualism in their portrayal. Jacqueline Pearson looks at the popularity of Shakespeare's Othello as it developed in the years following the Restoration. J. Douglas Canfield explores his view of Restoration comedy as contemporary class warfare, and how rape is used as a weapon in this social arena. Quinsey herself contributes an essay that "demonstrates that it is not only female playwrights who resist dominant representations of female subjectivity, but it is disappointing to have such resistance, as elsewhere in the volume," as questions and potentialities that have gone unanswered, observed Roberts. In the final section of the book, the contributors consider what it meant to Restoration audiences to be a viewer and spectator of the work of actresses on the Restoration stage.

Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, writing in Studies in English Literature, commented that Quinsey's introduction to the volume is "especially good at describing how the "radical uncertainties'" of the Restoration period "helped to shape the expressive field of the drama."