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Welcome! » Faculty & Staff » Professorial Faculty » Misty G. Anderson


Misty G. Anderson

Professor Anderson's current project, Enthusiastic Bodies: Religious Transformation, Sexual Danger, and Methodism in Eighteenth-Century England, extends her interest in the evolution of modern sexuality in eighteenth-century England to religious studies. Enthusiastic Bodies proposes that Methodism’s “spiritual materialism” competed with the models of modern agency and consciousness taking shape in the literary sphere. The surrender of the self to a higher power, a fundamental component of most religions, posed a fresh crisis in eighteenth-century Britain in light of the psychological and political implications of Locke’s thought. Critics read the Methodist notions of the “warming of the heart,” regeneration, and the “new birth” as misrecognized or hypocritical sexuality that threatened the rational and self-possessed models of modern agency.  But as it grew in popularity, Methodism provided its own evidence of the powerful appeal of modern evangelical discourse of transformation, intimacy, and presence, which used the empirical and material methodologies of modernity. Portions of this study have appeared in the AMS press volume Launching Fanny Hill and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 33.  Professor Anderson’s first book, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Marriage on the London Stage, came out from Palgrave in 2002. During the 2008-2009 academic year, she is on a research leave at Yale, where she is a fellow in the Lewis Walpole and Beinecke Libraries.

Professor Anderson teaches courses in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature as well as some courses in critical theory. Recent courses include surveys of Early and Late Eighteenth-Century Literature (411 and 412), Eighteenth-century Women Writers (422), Historicizing Sexuality, 1660-1800 (499/530), Faith and Reason in the Eighteenth-Century (640), the Bible as Literature (389), the Colloquium in Literature (376), Critical Approaches to Race, Class, and Gender (486/University Studies 420), Feminist Theory (590), and The History of Aesthetics (479).

Selected Publications:

Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (Palgrave-St. Martin’s Global, 2002).

Representative articles

  • “Female Dramatists of the Eighteenth Century.” Cambridge Guide to British Theatre, 1730-1830. Ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.
  • Baby Talk; or, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Exit.” ADE Bulletin, 138-139, Fall 2005-Spring 2006
  • “’Our Purpose is the Same’: Whitefield, Foote, and the Crisis of Methodist Theatricality” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 34, 2005
  • "Living in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish's The Covent of Pleasure," in Senses of Touch: Discourse of Tactility, ed. Elizabeth Harvey and H.L. Meakin, introduction and afterward by Lynn Enterline, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002
  • "Mr. Barvile's Enthusiasm: Habit, Discipline, and Methodism in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination," in Launching Fanny Hill: Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Fowler, AMS Press, 2002
  • "Tactile Places: Materializing Desire in Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker," Textual Practice, Vol.13 (2), (1999), 329-352
  • "Frances Burney," Reader's Guide to Literature in English, ed. Mark Hawkins-Dady (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1996)
  • "Justify My Desire: Madonna and the Representation of Visual Pleasure," Gender in Popular Culture: Images of Men and Women in Literature, Visual Media, and Material Culture, ed. Susan Rollins (Cleveland: Ridgemont Press, 1995), 7-24
  • "'The Different Sorts of Friendship': Desire in Mansfield Park," Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, ed. Devoney Looser (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995)
  • "Rehearsing the Eighteenth Century: The (Re) Production of Professional Knowledge," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 35 (1994): 86-95.

Book reviews

  • Review of Toni Bowers' The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760, Prose Studies (1998)
  • Review of Terry Castle's The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1997).

Honors

  • Co-Editor, Restoration
  • Delegate to the MLA Assembly, Later Eighteenth Century
  • Arts and Sciences Junior Faculty Teaching Award, 2000
  • John C. Hodges Excellence in Teaching Award, 1997.

Misty G. Anderson

Contact Information

Misty G. Anderson
Associate Professor and
Department of English
411A McClung Tower
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430

Office: (865) 974-6967
Fax: (865) 974-6926
E-mail: manderson@utk.edu

Education

B.A., Yale University
M.A., Ph.D., Vanderbilt University

Research

The Eighteenth Century, Critical Theory, Feminist Theory and Gender Studies