Erin Penner | Asbury University (original) (raw)

Dr. Erin Penner specializes in British and American modernism, though other areas of interest include African-American literature, literature of mourning, and literature of the American South. Her first book is Character and Mourning: Woolf, Faulkner, and the Novel Elegy of the First World War, from the University of Virginia Press.

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Books by Erin Penner

University of Virginia Press, 2019

In response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and American authors wrote about gr... more In response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and American authors wrote about grief. The need to articulate loss inspired moving novels by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Woolf criticized the role of Britain in the "war to end all wars," and Faulkner recognized in postwar France a devastation of land and people he found familiar from his life in a Mississippi still recovering from the American Civil War. In Character and Mourning, Erin Penner shows how these two modernist novelists took on the challenge of rewriting the literature of mourning for a new and difficult era.

Papers by Erin Penner

Twentieth-Century Literature, 2015

In The Waves, the 1931 novel she called a “playpoem,” Virginia Woolf enacts a drama of modern ele... more In The Waves, the 1931 novel she called a “playpoem,” Virginia Woolf enacts a drama of modern elegy, using multiple elegists and elegiac subjects to challenge the terms by which speakers and subjects worthy of poetic mourning are defined. In doing so, Woolf frees the genre from the monumentalizing tendencies that dogged it after the First World War and suggests a broader purpose for what might strike many as an antiquated poetic genre. Woolf’s critique of elegy is political, ethical, and generic, as she rewrites the terms of the genre to make visible the mourners and subjects that traditional elegy erases. This essay begins by reconsidering familiar ground—the Bloomsbury Group and the Cambridge Apostles—in order to place Woolf’s work squarely in the middle of what might otherwise seem an old boys’ club of elegiac inheritance.

Journal of American Studies, 2015

Scholars of literary mourning find themselves in an odd position, often taking part in elegy even... more Scholars of literary mourning find themselves in an odd position, often taking part in elegy even as they critique it. In her new book Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy, Diana Fuss fully embraces both roles. She offers readers the opportunity to see elegy in action – she notes, “The book itself is as performative as it is purposeful, perhaps comprising its own distinctive form of elegy” (3) – even as she raises new questions about the role of an ancient poetic form in an era of mass media that is, of course, written in prose.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2014

pursued, and where "Rhys shows melancholia to be economic, not simply personal" by expo... more pursued, and where "Rhys shows melancholia to be economic, not simply personal" by exposing the "tension between a newly prevalent culture of cheap shopping and its fantasies of plentitude, on the one hand, and capitalism's imbalances of exchange and distribution, on the other" (182). Rhys's economic melancholia is convincingly demonstrated in readings that implicate her heroine's emotional and social dispossession with her attempts to fill such losses through ever-deeper investments in the very consumer culture by which she is alienated. Ultimately, Mickalites positions Rhys's novel as a late modernist rejection of experimental attempts to change or manipulate market fantasy (194). As such, Rhys makes a fitting conclusion to this study, which treats a range of responses to a number of capital's institutional and formal manifestations in a way that recognizes their collective prevalence without specifically differentiating between their histories and effects. Mickalites's contribution consists not only in his many sharp and detailed readings but also his conveyance of the aforementioned cumulative effect of market saturation. In many ways, then, Modernism and Market Fantasy evidences one of the primary challenges of executing economically oriented criticism, which is the difficulty of unraveling capitalism's mutually supporting "fantasies" in the first place.

Virginia Woolf and the Natural World

... By entering the garden Sasha can make use of the images of nature not to escape civilization—... more ... By entering the garden Sasha can make use of the images of nature not to escape civilization—if this were a Forster book we might expect half the ... Woolf shows us nature where the modern Briton is most likely to find it: not in the sprawling parks of the country estates but ...

Mississippi Quarterly, 2020

... Issue Date: 31-Jan-2012. Abstract: This dissertation examines the work of William Faulkner an... more ... Issue Date: 31-Jan-2012. Abstract: This dissertation examines the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf through a formal lens that allows us to look beyond their differences in culture and nationality to what I argue is their shared fascination with the elegy. ...

Journal of American Studies, 2015

University of Virginia Press, 2019

In response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and American authors wrote about gr... more In response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and American authors wrote about grief. The need to articulate loss inspired moving novels by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Woolf criticized the role of Britain in the "war to end all wars," and Faulkner recognized in postwar France a devastation of land and people he found familiar from his life in a Mississippi still recovering from the American Civil War. In Character and Mourning, Erin Penner shows how these two modernist novelists took on the challenge of rewriting the literature of mourning for a new and difficult era.

Twentieth-Century Literature, 2015

In The Waves, the 1931 novel she called a “playpoem,” Virginia Woolf enacts a drama of modern ele... more In The Waves, the 1931 novel she called a “playpoem,” Virginia Woolf enacts a drama of modern elegy, using multiple elegists and elegiac subjects to challenge the terms by which speakers and subjects worthy of poetic mourning are defined. In doing so, Woolf frees the genre from the monumentalizing tendencies that dogged it after the First World War and suggests a broader purpose for what might strike many as an antiquated poetic genre. Woolf’s critique of elegy is political, ethical, and generic, as she rewrites the terms of the genre to make visible the mourners and subjects that traditional elegy erases. This essay begins by reconsidering familiar ground—the Bloomsbury Group and the Cambridge Apostles—in order to place Woolf’s work squarely in the middle of what might otherwise seem an old boys’ club of elegiac inheritance.

Journal of American Studies, 2015

Scholars of literary mourning find themselves in an odd position, often taking part in elegy even... more Scholars of literary mourning find themselves in an odd position, often taking part in elegy even as they critique it. In her new book Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy, Diana Fuss fully embraces both roles. She offers readers the opportunity to see elegy in action – she notes, “The book itself is as performative as it is purposeful, perhaps comprising its own distinctive form of elegy” (3) – even as she raises new questions about the role of an ancient poetic form in an era of mass media that is, of course, written in prose.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2014

pursued, and where "Rhys shows melancholia to be economic, not simply personal" by expo... more pursued, and where "Rhys shows melancholia to be economic, not simply personal" by exposing the "tension between a newly prevalent culture of cheap shopping and its fantasies of plentitude, on the one hand, and capitalism's imbalances of exchange and distribution, on the other" (182). Rhys's economic melancholia is convincingly demonstrated in readings that implicate her heroine's emotional and social dispossession with her attempts to fill such losses through ever-deeper investments in the very consumer culture by which she is alienated. Ultimately, Mickalites positions Rhys's novel as a late modernist rejection of experimental attempts to change or manipulate market fantasy (194). As such, Rhys makes a fitting conclusion to this study, which treats a range of responses to a number of capital's institutional and formal manifestations in a way that recognizes their collective prevalence without specifically differentiating between their histories and effects. Mickalites's contribution consists not only in his many sharp and detailed readings but also his conveyance of the aforementioned cumulative effect of market saturation. In many ways, then, Modernism and Market Fantasy evidences one of the primary challenges of executing economically oriented criticism, which is the difficulty of unraveling capitalism's mutually supporting "fantasies" in the first place.

Virginia Woolf and the Natural World

... By entering the garden Sasha can make use of the images of nature not to escape civilization—... more ... By entering the garden Sasha can make use of the images of nature not to escape civilization—if this were a Forster book we might expect half the ... Woolf shows us nature where the modern Briton is most likely to find it: not in the sprawling parks of the country estates but ...

Mississippi Quarterly, 2020

... Issue Date: 31-Jan-2012. Abstract: This dissertation examines the work of William Faulkner an... more ... Issue Date: 31-Jan-2012. Abstract: This dissertation examines the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf through a formal lens that allows us to look beyond their differences in culture and nationality to what I argue is their shared fascination with the elegy. ...

Journal of American Studies, 2015

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