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{{StoryTemplate |name = Heather Meek |email = heather.meek@uregina.ca |role = Assistant Professor |inst = University of Regina |field = English |selfDescription = I am a literary scholar and teacher specializing in eighteenth-century literature and women’s writing. My most recent work focuses on cultural, literary, and medical representations of hysteria in the Age of Reason, and I am currently exploring the relationship between illness and creativity in a group of women writers. Though I rely heavily on print texts not yet digitized, I use various databases (including Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, Google Books, JSTOR, and MLA bibliography) frequently in my research and teaching. |project = Most of my work to date has focused on recovering and analyzing materials on eighteenth-century hysteria (a condition akin to modern depression). I have looked at the ways a select group of women writers engage with contemporaneous medical writing on the condition. More specifically, I have considered how the women's versions of hysteria both intersect and collide with received medical wisdom that described the condition as rooted in wandering wombs, weak nerves, and inherently disordered female bodies. Though I have used online materials to analyze medical treatises, my study of women authors has happened in the stacks. Much of the women’s writing on hysteria is scattered throughout letters, journals, and diaries absent from databases, and my work has been constrained by the limited number of print texts available to me. |story = I hope both to narrow and to expand the scope of my earlier work by scaling back on my exploration of male doctors’ accounts of hysteria and focusing instead on a larger, more comprehensive selection of texts by women authors. A considerable task will involve searching for relevant primary material. This search will reflect the ‘protean’ nature of eighteenth-century hysteria as I seek out accounts in various forms, including fictional works, confessional poems, diaries, letters, and political tracts. I expect to complement works I have already explored – by Elizabeth Freke, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Elizabeth Carter, and Mary Wollstonecraft – with relatively obscure texts by women discovered through the Orlando textbase.
Two connected projects will emerge from this work. First, I plan to put together an anthology of primary materials by women on eighteenth-century hysteria. Second, I will produce a complementary critical study that establishes a link between hysteria and creativity in some women writers – a relationship critics have already explored widely in the works of many male authors (consider research on the ways Jonathan Swift’s fears of madness, Samuel Johnson’s dark thoughts, James Boswell’s painful self-analysis, William Cowper’s terrors of damnation, or Christopher Smart’s religious mania spark their creativity and enrich their art).
Because of the vast number of texts I am dealing with, I will have to sift through large amounts of information and select relevant texts before moving on to a more detailed study of primary sources. The Orlando textbase will be central in this initial exploration. I expect that the British Library, the Wellcome Collection, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) will house most of the works I will use in the later stages of my work.
RESEARCH STEPS AND TOOLS:
Discovery: The first phase of this project is exploratory. I hope to unearth women’s texts on hysteria that have been hitherto neglected. Various searches on the Orlando textbase will aid me in this process. If funding allows, I will hire a student assistant to work with me in this early stage.
Selection I: I will use Orlando summaries of works and authors to narrow down primary texts and create a working bibliography.
Selection II: Consulting ECCO and library print sources (in Canada and abroad), I will pare down my bibliography of primary materials. At this stage, I will also isolate selections from individual works for the anthology.
Dialogues: Both through my primary readings, and through connections discovered on Orlando, I will look for direct dialogues between women writers, and I will explore how their ideas circulate within more complex or indirect networks of influence.
Contexts: Using Orlando as a starting point, I will investigate the larger biographical, historical, medical, and social contexts within which the women writers were producing their ideas. I hope this will enable an analysis of hysteria’s multiple discourses.
|scope = These practices would be broadly applicable to those working in the fields of literature and medicine, and eighteenth-century women's writing.
|when = Eighteenth Century
|keywords = aggregate; consider; discover; archive/preserve; share; historicize; Orlando
|related-stories = Legal Advice to Women in the Eighteenth Century; Making 'em Laugh: Images of Law in Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture; Female Healers and Diagnosticians in the Eighteenth Century
|related-tools = ECCO, MLA Bibliography
}}
