Papers by Emma Winsor Wood
Assay Journal, 2022
A paper examining the role of the monster in, and the monstrous nature of, Montaigne's essays.
Thesis Chapters by Emma Winsor Wood
Harvard College, 2012
In the first chapter, I engage in a close reading of several poems from Shvarts's longest poetic ... more In the first chapter, I engage in a close reading of several poems from Shvarts's longest poetic cycle The Works and Days of Lavinia, focusing specifically on Shvarts’s use of space and place in the text in order to explore questions of marginality and the divided self. In the second chapter, I identify two female writers who I argue served as direct models for Works and Days as well as for Shvarts’s construction of an authorial identity: the medieval devotional writer Mechthild of Magdeburg and the early modern Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Although the lives and works of these women definitely inspired Shvarts, I contend that she found them to be inadequate as models and explore the reasons why. In the third and final chapter, I turn to the figure of St. Ksenia of St. Petersburg, the sole canonized female holy fool, as an alternate model for the character of Lavinia and for Shvarts’s self-construction. In this chapter, I argue that Ksenia represents Shvarts’s ideal model, and thus the precursor whom she ultimately hopes to supplant.
Uploads
Papers by Emma Winsor Wood
Thesis Chapters by Emma Winsor Wood