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Mara Scanlon's essay "Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier" was recently published in The Journal of Modern Literature. The article focuses on the frequently overlooked narrator of West's novel, set on the home front in the First World War.

Scanlon Publishes Essay on Modernist Writer Rebecca West

UMW’s 2014 Grellet C. Simpson Award

Phi Beta Kappa 

   Emily Dickinson International Society

  H. D. International Society  

Modernist Studies Association   

 Northeast Modern Language Association     

Modern Language Association

Ethics and the Lyric: Form, Dialogue, Answerability

Mother land, mother tongue: Reconfiguring relationship in Suleri's meatless days

Main content area "In the Mouths of the Tribe": Omeros and the Heteroglossic Nation

The Divine Body in Grace Nichols's "The Fat Black Woman's Poems"

Although common conceptions of poetry assume a voice that is solitary, personal, or authoritative - a monologue that readers can only overhear and accede to - this volume presupposes that poetry may be dialogic. The essays posit various foundations, gradations, and practices of poetic dialogism; theorize a diverse scope and purpose of dialogic poetry, from secluded prayer to political activism; and examine subgenres of poetry as well as discourses from the Bible to Amos 'n' Andy. In doing so, they contribute to the field of ethics and literature as well, insisting that poetry may be even profoundly oriented toward an Other, whether that dialogism is traceable in speech acts; in differentiated consciousnesses, ideologies, discourses, languages, or allusions; in the rhythm, intonation, or formal devices that encode such exchange; or in the production or reception of the poem. What does dialogic poetry look like - or is it the poetry we've known all along?

Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over

206 – Global Issues in Literature (3)

251 – Issues in Literature (3)

457 – Studies in American Literature, 1900–Present (3)

Mara Scanlon, Professor of English, received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. Her teaching and research interests include poetry and poetics, Modernism, women’s literature, ethics and literature, Asian American literature, and digital humanities.

Dr. Scanlon is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and winner of UMW’s 2014 Grellet C. Simpson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

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