“Enchanted Wood: Women Artists, Rural Britain, and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival." Forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

Amidst the austerities of Depression-era publishing in Britain, urban editors and women artists advanced a publishing phenomenon when they recognized a unique opportunity to make and sell popular books illustrated with wood engravings. Enchanted Wood: Rural Britain, Women Artists, and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival recovers the work, lives, and literary and cultural significance of four of these pioneering women, the wood engravers, book designers, and writers Gwen Raverat (English), Agnes Miller Parker (Scottish), Clare Leighton (English and American), and Joan Hassall (English). Enchanted Wood assumes that these women artists’ stories are more powerful, more meaningful, once joined together and told as one, as it is in this arrangement that we can see patterns emerging around gender, age, marriage, and motherhood that might otherwise appear ancillary to the wood engravers’ efforts to make beautiful images for quiet books in times of deprivation, darkness, and death. As book illustrators who cared about the whole process of book making and book reading, Raverat, Miller Parker, Leighton, and Hassall emerge in Enchanted Wood as important literary characters fully engaged with their modern worlds, representing larger social and cultural movements to redraw the boundaries of women’s living. It is the challenge of Enchanted Wood to reveal how and why wood engraving facilitated this transformation in female living in rural and urban places, and why woman wood engravers who took up the materials and techniques used by Thomas Bewick and his male descendants were able to achieve professional stature, public affirmation, and personal independence.

Selected Articles (Refereed)

“The Arcade in Arcadia: Thomas Bewick, Children’s Books and Rural Reading.” The Lion and the Unicorn. Submitted and under consideration. 

“Regions, Maps, Readers: Theorizing Middlebrow Geography.” Belphegor, Littératures populaires et culture médiatique. Special topics issue on “European Middlebrow.” Ed. Diana Holmes and Matthieu Letourneux. 15.2. 12 Dec. 2017. <http://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/948>. 

“Feminist inter/Modernist Studies.” Co-authored with Phyllis Lassner. Feminist Modernist Studies.  Inaugural special double issue: “Towards Feminist Modernisms.” Ed. Cassandra Laity. 1.1-2 (2018): 22-35. Taylor and Francis Online. 14 Nov. 2017. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24692921.2017.1380777

 “The Saltire Chapbooks, Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving, and ‘A Vast New Public of Readers.’” Chapbooks. Ed. Sandro Jung. Spec. issue of Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographic Society 10 (2015): 158-82.

 “Rural Modernity and the Wood Engraving Revival in Interwar England.” Modernist Cultures 9.2 (2014): 233-59.

 “Joan Hassall and the Saltire Society Chapbooks: Work in Progress.” The Ephemera Journal 16.3 (2014): 21-23. 

“‘A Happy Heritage’: Children’s Poetry Books and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival.” The Lion and the Unicorn 37.3 (2013): 207-37.

Selected Book Chapters (Refereed)

“Animals at the Hearth:  E.H. Shepard and Illustrated Fantasies of Rural Living.” The 1920s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. Eds. Leigh Wilson, Nick Hubble, and Philip Tew. The Decades Series. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022/23. Submission January 2024. 

"Beatrix Potter, Metropolitan Modernism, and Rural Modernity." Women’s Writing, 1900-1920. Eds. Meredith Miller and Joanne Ella Parsons. Studies in Global Women's Writing series. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Under consideration.

 “Rural Modernity in Britain: Landscape, Literature, and Nostalgia.” New Lives, New Landscapes: Rural Modernism in Twentieth-Century Britain. Eds. Matthew Kelly et al. Oxford: Oxford UP. Forthcoming. 

“Introduction: Rural Modernity in Britain.” Co-authored with Michael McCluskey. Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention. Ed. Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. 1-16.

“Windmills and Woodblocks: Agnes Miller Parker, Wood Engraving, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain.” Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention. Ed. Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. 84-102.