Mary Poovey

Mary Louise Poovey is an American cultural historian and literary critic whose work focuses on the Victorian Era. She is Samuel Rudin University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at New York University, with her recent retirement from the position, and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge. Poovey has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Swarthmore College, and Yale University.

Education Poovey gained her PhD from the University of Virginia in 1976.

Feminist readings Poovey has been recognised as important in the work that she has done in feminist reading. She has looked at how the growth of women writing was a device for seeing their voices emerge.

Poovey conducted a public re-evaluation in 1999 at the British Women Writers Conference as a theoretical exercise of a writer's work. Poovey re-read the works of Ellen Pickering and decided that they were not worth reviving. This novelist's works had been popular in the 19th century but she considered the books to be over-complicated and lacking in innovation. She concluded that the only reason to re-read works like this was to confirm that the books that we had chosen to remember, like Jane Eyre and Mary Barton, are the best of their type.

Honors On January 30, 2015 Poovey received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Works

PhD Thesis

Her books include:

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