Dr Jenny DiPlacidi's research in the long eighteenth century and Romantic period is driven by her interest in the marginalised: those genres, forms and writers who existed on the periphery of their contemporary society and their subversive disruptions of heteronormativity.
She focuses on representations of gender, sexuality, violence and transgression and their relationship to concerns central to eighteenth-century society, such as the legal position of women, kinship, primogeniture and autonomy. She is interested in exploring these topics in areas often neglected by traditional scholarship: anonymous works, the Gothic genre, periodical fiction and women’s writing. Her first book, Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression (forthcoming, MUP), analyses the complexities of the incest thematic in Gothic novels, manuscripts and plays from 1764-1848.
Her second book (in progress) examines the vast but largely neglected archive of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era magazine fiction and its relationship with the period’s popular – and canonical – literature. This books draws on her research as a postdoctoral associate on the 2014-16 Leverhulme project “The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre”. She co-authors a blog on the Lady’s Magazine in which she writes about her interests in material culture, the “ephemeral” content of periodicals and magazine’s breadth of innovative Gothic fiction.
Jenny focuses most intently on representations of gender and transgressive sexuality in the literature of the long eighteenth century and Romantic period, particularly within anonymous and neglected novels and manuscripts, women’s writing, the Gothic genre and periodical fiction, such as that of the Lady’s Magazine or the Lady’s Monthly Museum. Her work is interdisciplinary; in her monograph Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression (forthcoming, MUP) she drew on insights from fields such as law, anthropology, genetics and sociology to examine the range of concerns central to eighteenth-century society explored by Gothic writers through the incest thematic.
She has recently completed a chapter on magazine fiction entitled “’Full of pretty stories’: Influential Fiction in the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832)” for Jennie Batchelor and Manushag Powell’s (eds.) Edinburgh Companion to Women and Print Media, 1690s to 1820s (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). I have also co-edited (with Karl Leydecker) a collection, After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth Century (Palgrave, 2017), for which she has also written the “Introduction” and a chapter, “Rearticulating the Economics of Exchange: Incest and After Marriage in the Gothic.”
Loading publications...
Showing of total publications in the Kent Academic Repository. View all publications
