Research - Dr. Claire Grogan
Dr. Claire Grognan
Department of English
Elizabeth Hamilton: Female Historiographer
Dr. Grogan’s current research project considers how Elizabeth Hamilton, an influential middle-class British woman writer during the Revolutionary Period (1789-1818), negotiates social prescriptions about appropriate feminine and masculine activities, genres and intellectual pursuits by merging what are traditionally deemed “masculine” genres (Orientalism, political satire, historiography, reviews) with the more acceptable “feminine” genres (novel and education treatise). Dr. Grogan will show how Hamilton’s innovative use of genre opens up new subject areas and writing styles for later women writers and thus constitutes part of the revolutionary call for women’s rights. Furthermore, it will demonstrate how Hamilton’s use of familiar genres in unfamiliar ways challenges female readers to think carefully on a range of topics not normally brought to their attention and forces male readers to acknowledge her competence.
This study will use historicist and feminist critical approaches and while primarily a literary study will require a consideration of Hamilton’s non literary writings, newspapers, journals, and miscellanies of the period. It will complement the current reevaluation of the history of women’s writing and broaden our understanding as to how women carved new roles in society.
Caricatures, Cartoon, and Coins:
The Cultural Responses to Thomas Paine’s "Rights of Man"
Dr. Grogan is currently researching Thomas Paine’s controversial political pamphlet Rights of Man. Paine is most recognizable to students and scholars of politics, economics, history and communication as a revolutionary journalist and pamphleteer, a social and political agitator, who changed the shape of modern political discourse. When Rights of Man was published in 1791, in support of the French revolution and in opposition to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the revolution in France it became an immediate cultural phenomenon. . Paine was very critical of monarchies and European social institutions and as a result his pamphlet prompted an enormous response. Many readers were amazed and excited by the suggestion of social revolution while others were appalled. The popularity of his work was perceived as a threat to the British government who in response started a campaign to discredit Paine, his person and his work. However, once Paine’s words were out in the open there was no silencing or erasing the public debate that ensued. Dr. Grogan’s primary objective is to collect and examine material that documents Paine’s Rights of Man as a cultural phenomenon in the decade immediately following publication. She will use a wide selection of the early responses in the form of written pamphlets, caricatures and cartoons, as well as in cultural artifacts such as coins, cloth and posters of the ritual burnings of Paine’s effigy. Her interest lies not in what and how Paine wrote but rather the transformative quality of his text and its enormous reach and implications at the time. She will explore how the text was received, rebutted, reworked, revered or rejected and employ a critical analysis of the responses collected under the three topics of nationality, language and class.
